you think?”
Brooks hesitated a second, finishing a sip of wine while contemplating how to answer the innocent question. He couldn’t give too much away. He couldn’t say that Ruby was the most amazing woman he’d ever met, or that her talent and skill and patience had inspired him. That would be too telling, wouldn’t it? “What I know about horses, I’m afraid to say, can fit in this wineglass. But watching Ruby at work and hearing her thoughts on training gave me a whole new perspective. It’s eye-opening. It seems Ruby has just the right touch.”
Toby nodded. “She does. We’ve all had a hand in horse training growing up, and all of our techniques are different, but the honest truth is, when we’d come up against a stubborn one that gave us trouble, we turned to Ruby and she’d find a way. Now she pretty much runs the show.”
Brooks looked at Ruby, giving her a smile. “I see that she pretty much runs the show around here, too.”
Beau chuckled. “Didn’t take you long to figure that out.”
“There’s an advantage to being the only female in the family,” Malcolm said.
“I can speak for myself, Mal,” she chimed in. “There’s an advantage to being the only female in the family.”
Everyone laughed.
Ruby’s eyes twinkled, and in that moment, Brooks felt like one of them. A Preston, through and through.
* * *
The next morning, Beau suggested that they spend the day with Ruby. There was more she could teach Brooks, and if he really wanted to get a sense of how the operation was run, he needed to get his hands dirty.
“Ruby will put you in touch with your inner wrangler,” Beau joked.
Well, she’d already put him in touch with something: namely, rock-solid lust. The woman turned him inside out, and there was no help for it.
Before Brooks had even met Ruby, he’d asked for this training, and Beau was more than happy to accommodate his request. But now it meant that Brooks and Ruby would get to spend more time together at the Look Away. Yet Brooks wanted to learn. He needed to catch up on the history of the ranch and the day-to-day operation of running it. It would give him a chance to meet Beau and his half brothers on equal ground. He’d have more in common with each one of them if he could grasp at least a basic knowledge of horses, training and all that went with them.
So they’d walked over to one of the corrals and stood by the fence, watching Ruby securing a saddle on an unruly stallion.
The air was brisk this morning, the sun shadowed by gray clouds. He huddled up in his own wool-lined jacket and noted that Ruby, too, was dressed in a dark quilted vest over a flannel shirt. Only Ruby Lopez could make regular cowgirl gear look sexy. “Morning,” she said, greeting both of them.
“Morning,” he replied. But she had already turned away, busy with the horse, restraining his jerky movements with a firm hand on his bridle.
“This is Spirit,” Beau said. “He’s got a lot to learn, doesn’t he, Ruby?”
“He sure does. He’s not taken kindly to wearing a saddle. He’s going to hate it even more once I ride him. But that’s not happening today.”
The horse snorted and shuffled his feet, pulling back and away from her. “Hold steady, boy,” Ruby said, her voice smooth as fine silk. “You’re not gonna like any of this, are you now?”
The horse bucked, and Brooks made a move to lunge over the fence to help Ruby. Beau restrained him with a hand to the chest. “Hang on. Ruby’s a pro. She won’t put herself in danger.”
Brooks wasn’t too sure about that. The tall stallion dwarfed Ruby in size and weight. Watching her outmaneuver the animal made Brooks’s heart stop for a moment. Hell, she could be crushed. She slid him a sideways glance, her beautiful eyes telling him she’d just seen what he’d done. What was it she called him? Galahad. Hell, he was no knight in shining armor. To most of the people who knew him in Chicago, that label would be laughable. But today, right in this moment, he didn’t give a crap about what anyone called him. But he did care about Ruby, and it surprised him how much. He didn’t want to see her get trampled. “Are you sure? That horse looks dangerous.”
“He could be, but Ruby knows her limitations. She’s got a way about her that outranks his stature. She’s gaining his trust right now. Though it doesn’t look like it, she’s giving him some leeway to put up a fuss. This is his second day wearing a saddle. He’s got to get used to it, is all.”
“It takes a lot of patience, I see.”
“Yep,” Beau said. “For the trainer and the animal.”
For the next hour, Brooks watched Ruby put the horse through his paces. Every now and then, she’d inform him what she was doing and how the horse should respond. Nine times out of ten, the horse didn’t make a liar out of her.
Beau had excused himself a short time ago. He had a meeting with his accountant, and though he invited Brooks to join in, he’d also warned that it would bore him out of his wits. Brooks had opted to stay and watch Ruby work with the stallion. He could watch that woman for hours without being bored, but he didn’t tell his father that.
When Ruby was done, she unsaddled Spirit carefully, speaking to the horse lovingly and stroking him softly on the withers. Then she set him free, and he took off running along the perimeter of the large oval corral, his charcoal mane flying in the breeze.
Ruby closed the gate behind her and walked over to Brooks, removing her leather gloves and pocketing them.
“Impressive,” he said.
“Thanks. Spirit will come around. He’s a Thoroughbred, and they tend to be high-strung.”
“Is that so?” Brooks met her gaze. “Sort of reminds me of someone I know.”
Her index finger pressed into her chest. “Me?”
“Yeah, you.” Her finger rested in the hollow between her breasts. If only he didn’t remember how damn intoxicating it’d been when he’d touched her there. How soft she’d felt, how incredibly beautiful and full her breasts were. The thought of never touching Ruby like that again grated on him.
“Well, you’re half-right,” she said. “Both my parents were Mexican, so I’m a purebred.”
“What about the other half?”
“I’m not high-strung or high-maintenance. I’m strong-willed, determined. Some have called me feisty.”
“And they lived to tell about it?”
She snapped her head up and saw his grin. “You’re teasing me, Galahad.”
What he was doing was flirting. He couldn’t help it. Ruby, being Ruby, was an aphrodisiac he couldn’t combat. And he was beginning to like her nickname for him. “Yeah, I am.”
She smiled back for a second, her eyes latching onto his. Then his gaze dropped to her perfectly sweet mouth. Suddenly all the things he’d done to that mouth came crashing into his mind. And all the things she’d done to him with that
