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“Why don’t you have a man, McKenna?”
“Too much trouble,” McKenna said.
“Sure,” Ruby had replied. “But they don’t have to be. If you know what you’re getting into.”
“That’s the problem,” McKenna responded. “Part of me always hopes that I’m getting into something else.”
Ruby had laughed and blown a smoke ring into the cold, early-morning air. “Oh, I quit hoping a long time ago, honey.”
“Something in me always does.”
“Give it ten years. Give it ten years and you won’t hope anymore. You’ll just be glad for a place to sleep.”
Part of McKenna had envied that. That grim resignation.
Another part of her had been afraid of it.
She wasn’t sure she wanted a life without hope. And she supposed that coming to Gold Valley, and holding out hope there was a right way to tell Hank Dalton that she was probably his daughter, was a testament to that fact. That she wanted hope. That she carried it somewhere inside of her.
But then, if there wasn’t hope at all, she didn’t see the point in walking on.
If what she had so far was representative of what she would have in the future...
Well, she might as well go lie down on that arena dirt next to Jamie Dodge’s next barrel and let her horse trample her to death.
But McKenna didn’t want to be trampled.
She wanted to live for better.
“That would be nice,” she said.
“Yeah, she’s the best, too. She’s starting a job at the Dalton ranch soon, training horses that used to be in the rodeo. The Daltons are, like, rodeo royalty.”
McKenna’s breath felt like it had been sucked from her body.
All that air had been replaced by hunger. A hunger to know more. These details about her family were something she’d had no idea she’d been desperate for.
But she was.
“Oh, yeah?” she asked, trying to sound casual. “Rodeo royalty, huh? What does, um...what does that look like?”
“I’m not totally sure. I don’t know them that well. Wyatt knows them better. He used to ride with the brothers in the rodeo. Hank, though, the father, he’s as famous as a cowboy gets.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Grant said. “Back in the eighties he did some big campaign for cigarettes or something. Famous advertising.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. But I hear he settled down in recent years. I guess you have to eventually.”
“Why is that?”
“He has a reputation. Of course, so do his sons. They’re cowboys and smoke jumpers. So, you can imagine.”
“They get a lot of play? Is that what you’re saying?”
“By all accounts, yes.”
“I mean, firefighting cowboys are pretty compelling, even I have to admit.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“That even you have to admit they’re compelling.”
“I’m not easily compelled by men,” she said.
He gave her a strange look. Like he didn’t know quite what to do with her. Or like she was an alien life form that had dropped down from another planet.
“Shall we go get lunch?” she asked.
“That would be good,” he responded.
The two of them turned away from the arena and walked the rest of the way toward the mess hall. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “I think you’re a good babysitter.”
“Thanks,” he said, giving her a slight grin. Friendly expressions from that man were worth their weight in gold, and as she was a woman short on gold, she would take those smiles. She wasn’t sure why it mattered. Maybe because she couldn’t remember the last time she had made another person smile. She’d been in a particular kind of poverty for most of her life. But it was the poverty of connections that was starting to get to her. Living without things she could endure. But this little bit of time she’d spent with Grant—with the entire Dodge family—made her realize how starved she was for the rest.
“So,” she said. “Riding lessons, huh?”
“If you’re up for it.”
“I think I might be.”
She had no idea if she was or not. But what she knew was that she desperately wanted to spend more time with him. Whatever that might mean.
“Tomorrow after work, then,” he said.
“Tomorrow after work.”
CHAPTER FIVE (#u22deb780-f134-5093-9308-9c6dc72d2054)
MCKENNA COULD BARELY concentrate on the tasks at hand the entire day. Thankfully, the act of cleaning toilets was a relatively mindless one, and it gave her the opportunity to worry and look forward to the horse-riding endeavors she’d agreed to with Grant. She didn’t know anything about horses, except that of course she had gone through a phase when she was younger and had read books almost exclusively about kids who had them. Black Beauty. The White Stallion. My Friend Flicka. If there had been a horse and a scrappy kid, she had read it and fantasized about putting herself in that position.
But much like anything else, she learned early on that fantasy wasn’t reality, and it never would be.
She’d read Anne of Green Gables in one of her foster homes. Well, half of it. It had made her so angry she’d shoved it in a small space between the couch and the wall. When the foster mother had asked about it, McKenna had denied any knowledge of it, and had gotten a lecture on being more responsible with personal property.
McKenna was happy to take that one on the chin.
No one in that house needed to read that book.
It was filled with things that would never, ever happen. She couldn’t believe it. Not for one moment. No nice couple was going to show up at a train station and see a skinny, redheaded orphan girl they didn’t actually want, then take her back home and love her like a daughter. It wasn’t fair. Reading it had made her chest feel swollen, had made her cheeks feel prickly.
She had hated her. Anne with an E, who had unusual red hair and adoptive parents who loved her, and still complained about her life and her looks.
The horse books, she had decided, were a safer read. Because she didn’t harbor fantasies about living on a ranch or finding a beautiful, wild steed to ride. It had nothing to do with her life. It hadn’t even been anything she wanted. It had just been an escape. Something so different from the life she lived, being shifted between suburban neighborhoods.
A life riding horses over rolling hills with golden sun filtering through the trees. There was a lot of dappling sun in those books. And in McKenna’s mind, dappling sun was one of the most romantic images, to this day.
But it was a fantasy that didn’t get its claws into her soul, because it seemed impossible. Not like having a family someday, which seemed both impossible and like it should be as possible for her as anyone else.
It seemed surreal she was coming closer to actually having the horse fantasy than ever having the loving family fantasy. But who knew. Maybe the Daltons would fold her into their loving embrace.
The thought sent a sharp pang through her chest. Like she’d been run through with a shard of glass.
She stopped walking for a moment and stood, looking out at the mountains that surrounded the ranch. Maybe she had internalized that Anne stuff a lot more than she had realized. Because obviously part of her believed in it, even as she railed against it. Oh, that bright light of optimism that seemed to burn inside of her no matter what.
“Maybe I’ll fall off the horse and break my neck,” she said cheerfully, taking a step forward and kicking a pinecone out of the way. “Maybe the horse will hate me, and Grant will take it as a sign of my bad character and tell Wyatt to send me packing. Maybe this is all just a dream and I’m still sleeping in a hollowed-out cabin in the freezing cold.”
“Or maybe, you’re just about to have an uneventful riding lesson.” She looked up sharply, and saw Grant move onto the path.
“Good Lord, Grant,” she said. “Are you part puma? You scared the hell out of me.”
“Are you nervous?”
She flattened her mouth into a line. “I’m not the most Zen.”
“The horse I got for you could safely ride in circles at a kid’s birthday party.”
“Well. Now I feel condescended to.”
“Would you rather be condescended to, or did you want to get bucked off a horse today?”
“Condescension, please,” she said.
“Your horse is completely safe, and nothing is going to happen.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“Have I ever tried to make you feel better?”
“No,” she said, puzzling. “That’s the weird thing about you. You’re not too nice, but you’re not mean, either.”
“Is that weird?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s really weird. My experience is that when you have the kind of life I had, people either look at you like you’re a very sad little puppy that they pity deeply, or they want to lecture you about how something you’ve done has put you in this position. You haven’t done either thing.”
“Well, it sounds like you’ve had some things go down.”
“Understatement.”
“People end up in weird situations, McKenna. Situations they didn’t plan on. All the damned time. And anyone who doesn’t think that? They’re just scared. They can’t stand the idea that they might find themselves homeless, trying to find a cabin to sleep in on someone else’s property. If they don’t blame some kind of moral failing in you, then what’s to keep them from suffering something that puts them in the exact same place? It’s the same with a lot of life’s crap. Sickness. People always want to know what you did. If you prayed hard enough. If your body was alkaline, or you ate enough kale. They want to believe that in the end they would have been able to do something. And most of all, they want to believe that somehow you deserve something they don’t. Fact of the matter is I’m not sure any of us deserves to have good or bad things that happen to us. They just happen. So I don’t judge you. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t have a whole lot of reasons to pity you, either.”
McKenna blinked. “My mother abandoned me.”
“I’m sorry about that.” His face stayed that same shade of beautiful neutral it almost always was.
“But you don’t feel sorry for me.”
“If I did, would it change anything?”
She frowned. “It might... Affirm my feelings.”
His brown eyes were unreadable. “You don’t need your feelings affirmed. You just have to decide what you’re going to do.”
“Well, I’m here, so obviously I’ve made some decisions.”
She didn’t like the fact that he had now graduated to lecturing her. In fact, she preferred a little mindless pity over this.
“I speak from experience when I say that people feeling sorry for you doesn’t help you do a damn thing. Especially if they are sorry without offering help.”
“I guess you’re offering help.”
“That’s Wyatt and Lindy. I’m offering to teach you how to ride a horse.”
They approached the barn—one she hadn’t been in before—and walked inside slowly.
It smelled sweet. Dense and dusty, but not entirely unpleasant. She looked around and saw stacks of hay, and could just barely see the tops of a few horses’ heads in the stall.
“What’s the smell?”
“Everything,” he said.
“What does everything mean?”
“Shavings. Hay. Dirt.” He paused and looked back at her, his expression partly shaded by the brim of his cowboy hat. “Horse urine.”
“Well.” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a bit... Earthy.”
“Horses are. It’s not a bad smell, though.”
She inhaled, letting it kind of roll over her. “No. I guess it isn’t.”
“You’ve really never been around horses?”
“No. I mostly lived in the suburbs. In around different places in Oregon. Predominantly the Portland area. I guess we went to...pumpkin patches and things? And did hayrides? But it seemed like everything was...cleaner.”
