bad she had a feeling it wouldn’t be that easy.
“She’s an odd one, isn’t she?”
Cowboy peered up at him intently.
And you’re getting desperate, buddy, if you’re talking to your dog.
A cute oddball, he amended, watching her walk away, but an oddball just the same.
Desperate straits call for desperate measures.
The words had become his mantra recently. If Bugsy hadn’t pulled up lame... He shook his head in disgust and disappointment. Now he was dead in the water and a fully trained replacement horse would cost a fortune, which was why he’d traveled to Red Bluff this weekend to look at prospects. The equine equivalent to a Hail Mary pass. He had to find a horse that could nudge him over the half-million-dollar mark in earnings. Pronto. If he didn’t... Well, he couldn’t even think about that.
“Come on,” he said to Cowboy.
Two hours later she stood right where she’d said she’d be, out in front of the two-story brown building that served as a horse arena. She wasn’t alone. A woman with blond hair and blue eyes stood next to her.
“Wes,” Jillian said, barely making eye contact. “This is Natalie.”
He glanced at Natalie, offering a “Nice to meet you” before looking back at Jillian and puzzling through why she seemed so cold all of a sudden.
“Wow,” he heard Natalie say. “You weren’t kidding when you said he was good-looking.”
He had a front-row seat to Jillian’s reaction. She flinched, turned on her friend and sharply whispered, “Natalie!”
Now, that was more like it. At least she had some color back in her cheeks.
She thought he was good-looking?
For some reason that made him stand up a little straighter.
“And who’s this cutie?” Natalie said.
“This is Cowboy,” Wes said.
Natalie squatted down to meet his dog. “Hey there, boy. Gonna watch some horses work with us?”
Cowboy barely shot Natalie a glance. His dog only had eyes for Jillian. The canine stared at her as if she held the keys to a room filled with bones.
“We better get in there before the seats all fill up,” Jillian said.
She still wouldn’t look at him. It’d grown colder since that morning. Overcast. Both women wore jackets, Natalie’s made of leather and Jillian’s a black knitted cardigan that hung past her hips to midthigh. It hugged her petite body but didn’t look all that warm, and he knew it would be even colder inside.
“Are you excited?” Natalie asked Wes.
“I’m curious,” he replied. “The horse Jillian chose for me isn’t exactly what I was looking for.”
Natalie nodded. “I know how you feel. She narrowed the field down to three for me, and not a one of them is what I would have picked for myself. But I’ve learned over the years to listen to her. You’ll learn the same thing, too.”
Great, he thought as they headed inside. Two crazy women.
The building had been built in the ’50s. A beige stucco facade on the outside and a concrete floor that seemed to radiate the chill. They were a little late to be finding a seat, most of the grandstands already filled, but they wedged themselves into a spot near the top. Cowboy settled at Wes’s feet. It looked like a sea of cowboy hats from where they sat, as if you could hop from brim to brim and never touch the ground.
“I’m so excited,” he heard Natalie say. She wore her long blond hair in a braid, a brown ball cap on her head, one with rhinestones in the shape of a horseshoe catching the light. The glimmer of the stones nearly matched the blue in her eyes. “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this.”
“Me neither,” Jillian said, and Wes noticed she’d made sure Natalie sat next to him and that Jillian sat on the other side of Natalie—as far away as possible. “I have no idea how you’re going to wedge in learning to ride a reining horse and continue with your show jumping career, too.”
“Who’s your reining trainer?” Wes asked.
“I don’t have one.”
Wes pulled his gaze away from a horse just entering the arena, an average-looking bay gelding with big ears and a bushy black tail, and shot her a look of surprise. “You’re buying a reining horse and you don’t have a trainer?”
“I am a trainer,” Natalie said.
“You ride English.”
“Yeah, which means I know how to ride.” He tried to keep a straight face; clearly he failed. “You try and ride a horse over a five-foot fence.”
“No, thanks, I prefer to keep my feet on the ground, but I know someone who would take up your challenge.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“A friend of mine. A rodeo performer. I’ll have to introduce the two of you.”
“Rodeo?” Natalie’s look said it all. Yuck. “Can’t imagine anyone involved with the world of rodeo knowing anything about reining horses.”
“You might be surprised.”
In fact, he’d make a point of introducing the two. In the arena a black horse worked—unimpressively, he thought—over so-called trail obstacles that were nothing more than wood poles, tires and plastic bags filled with aluminum cans. The gelding was slow on the uptake, so much so he almost dumped his rider when the man picked up one of the bags.
“That was scary,” he heard Jillian say.
The main arena had been sectioned off into three different pens. The first was meant to showcase the animal’s horse sense—in this case, none. The second was for showing off the animal’s maneuverability. The third was where they would work a cow. The middle ring was the one that Natalie would pay close attention to because that was where the horse would circle, stop and back...along with a few other tasks, all moves that would be necessary at a reining competition.
Less than a minute later a horn sounded, signaling it was time to move. Alas, the black horse didn’t appear to be any better at reining than he was at trail. Meanwhile, a new horse had entered the first ring. There would always be a horse working in one of the pens, something that made watching interesting.
“Here we go,” Jillian said. “This is one of the horses we’re interested in.”
Curiosity made him study the dark bay gelding. Like the horse Jillian had picked out for him, the gelding hardly seemed impressive. No flashy white on his face. No tiny dish head. No thick neck and round butt.
