All the King's Horses Read Free Page A

said, “This is Ransom. King’s Ransom. He’s Dustin’s foundation stud. Ain’t ya, buddy?” He patted the stallion’s neck as Ransom put his head over the fence.
    Ransom had a lovely quarter horse profile. In fact, he was a beautiful stud all around. Dark bay, almost the same color as the boards penning him in, without a speck of white on his face. Fit and stocky, with good solid legs and big, well-proportioned hooves instead of the little teacup feet a lot of quarter horses had these days.
    He was friendly too. When I held out my hand, Ransom searched my palm for treats, brushing his prickly chin whiskers across my skin.
    “He’s gorgeous,” I said, wondering if my voice sounded as flat to John as it did to me.
    If it did, he didn’t notice. He just patted Ransom’s neck again and said, “He is and he knows it. Throws foals that look just like him too. Three of his babies are headed to the world championships this year. One’s defending a title there.”
    “Impressive.” And he was, but as I watched Ransom examine my hand like a curious puppy, I wondered when simple things like this had stopped making me smile and swoon. There was a time when I couldn’t interact with a horse without feeling some kind of warm, fuzzy connection. Now? I felt nothing. I knew enough to draw my hand back before lips became teeth, and I knew how to reach up and mechanically stroke his neck without startling him, but…that was it.
    Maybe, I’d told myself when I’d sent the e-mail inquiring about this job, I could find that connection again. Every horseman in my family would be horrified knowing I’d gone from a respected trainer to a lowly—in their eyes—farmhand, but my gut feeling, impulsive as it may have been, said this was the way to go. A Hail Mary to bring back a piece of myself that may have been dead already.
    This could work. It had to. And in its own way, this made perfect sense. Now that I wasn’t interacting with the horses as their trainer, I wouldn’t be asking anything of them. They wouldn’t be asking anything of me. Maybe that would clear the way for me to reconnect with them.
    Or maybe it was just a convenient excuse to take off and disappear for a while.
    I winced. My husband’s untimely death was hardly something I should be calling “convenient”. Truth was, I should have left long before that night, and I—
    Enough, Amy. It can’t be changed.
    “Ms. Dover?”
    I shook my head and looked at John. “I’m sorry, what?”
    “I asked if you wanted to have a look at the rest of the property?”
    “Sure. Yeah.”
    He showed me all over the vast acreage, explaining when and where various horses were turned out. There was a schedule in the barn, he assured me, but it was good to know where the gates were and which gates required some jiggling and swearing to get open. New ranch, new routine.
    New ranch, new horses too. Paints, quarter horses, even the odd Appy grazed in the broad, grassy fields. There were some thoroughbreds and I swore I saw an Arab too, so I guessed those were clients’ horses. Boarders, maybe.
    I really was in a different world now. Dover Equestrian may as well have been on another continent instead of two hundred fifty miles and some mountains away. The place even smelled different—dust and grass instead of pine trees and beauty bark—and the air was dry and hot instead of cool and wet like I was used to. I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing here.
    “ That’s not fine, Amy, ” Mariah’s voice whispered in my ear. “ That’s going off the deep end. ”
    “ Well, maybe that’s what I need to do, then. Maybe I need to go off the deep end. ”
    And here I was. If there was a deep end, this was it, and I hoped to God I wasn’t just digging myself into an emotional—and professional—hole I’d never be able to get out of.
    A flicker of sunlight on metal turned my head, and I looked to see a black-and-red pickup with a sleek, matching two-horse trailer