Ride 'Em (A Giddyup Novel) Read Free Page B

loops, a study in nonchalance. The late sun made a ridiculously bright halo of her hair.
    Perhaps he’d wowed her after all. Stunned her into speechlessness with his brilliant comedic performance. Acting—yet another skill he hadn’t realized he’d need in order to take over the family business.
    “Charley Horse?” Mindy cocked her head. “Really?”
    Not speechless, apparently.
    “I didn’t name him myself,” Logan defended, as he patted the animal in question and fed him a hunk of carrot.
    “Did you steal him from a circus or something?” Mindy came forward and let Charley snuffle her hand, then reached up to scratch behind one of his expressive ears.
    Logan shook his head. “More like rescued him. My brother, Ethan, did, actually. You remember Ethan, right? I think he graduated the same year as you. He’s a large animal vet now. Charley was in a traveling carnival, and one of the handlers called Ethan out to stitch up a cut on a different horse. He saw Charley there in the next stall, with one of the worst cases of navicular syndrome he’d ever seen. They were actually getting ready to ask Ethan what he’d charge to put the poor critter down, because his hooves just couldn’t take all the hard surfaces and riding in the trailer anymore. He was lame all the time, and hurting. So Ethan called me, I staked him some cash, and we sprang Charley from that joint.”
    “Wow. He looks great now.”
    “It took us a good year to get his hooves back in shape and get the inflammation under control. But now it’s all soft pastures and trails, and gentle physical therapy rides.”
    “And entertaining the customers.”
    “That, too,” Logan agreed. “He seems to enjoy it. I think he missed performing during his hiatus.”
    “Well, who can blame him? He’s a born showman, obviously. Lucky you had this place here to keep him.”
    Logan chuckled. “Well, he seems to be getting used to it. But no, for most of that time he was outside Houston, where I lived until a few months ago. Not too much work for engineers in Bolero.”
    “Oh. You . . . got out? I guess I just assumed—”
    “I never left? No, I couldn’t wait to leave. Four years at UT, then I went to work in Houston, bought a house there and everything. And I was probably a fool to come back. They say you can never go home again, but . . . well, here I am.”
    “Huh. Yeah, here we both are.”
    She propped one foot on the lowest fence rail, drawing Logan’s eyes down to her legs and the skillfully distressed jeans that hugged her curves like a glove. He wished she was facing away from him— it hadn’t escaped his attention that her ass had somehow only grown more shapely and spankable since high school.
    Do not think about spanking the asses of paying customers, either .
    “So . . . now that I’m not sopping wet, showing people to cabins or helping Charley entertain the customers, I finally have time to ask. What brings you back to town, Mindy? I wouldn’t have figured you for a dude ranch kinda girl.”
    * * *
    Mindy leaned into the fence and hooked her boot heel more firmly over the bottom rail. How to answer?
    The right answer, the only true answer, was that his ranch was sitting on a figurative gold mine, and she wanted to exploit that fact to further her own career. To put the land to its best use, according to the tenets of the oil and gas industry. To make them all money. “ Drill, baby, drill ” and all that. Time to get things out on the table.
    But Logan was smiling at her, a real knee-melter of a smile. He was sticking around to make conversation as if he didn’t have a million other things to do—but not like he was fawning over a popular girl, hoping to catch her eye. Like a friend. A very calm, in-charge kind of friend. It was throwing her off.
    He was an engineer. And he did a comedy routine with his horse.
    She didn’t want the moment to end. She liked life so much better when she could please all of the people, all of the time.