“When she’s a little bigger I’ll put her out with the using horses.”
“She needs something her own size. So she can see when her companion’s getting ready to kick or bite. So she can learn the body language that she’ll need to read her whole life.”
He rolled his eyes. “Anything else, professor?”
“Yes. So she’ll be more athletic, quicker, more prepared to get out of danger or avoid it. Older, bigger horses tend to be too indulgent with a foal. Even stud horses.”
He started pulling up the latigo on his saddle.
“When you do put her out, don’t put her with a whole herd all at once. Just do it one horse at a time.”
“Sounds like you know everything there is to know about this deal,” he said dryly.
She shrugged. “You just have to let them learn to be real horses. They’re social animals.”
He could not talk to her. He would ignore her. As long as he talked to her, she’d stay here aggravating him.
But curiosity got the best of him. All this confidence and knowledge was such a contradiction to the way she looked and acted about everything else.
“How’d you come to know so much about orphans?”
“I’ve raised three of them since I was a kid,” she said, leaning back against the stall wall and crossing her arms beneath her gorgeous breasts as if settling in to tell him her life’s story. “The first one I did all wrong, but the other two turned out great.”
So maybe she wasn’t a total incompetent, after all.
But he didn’t want her getting all wrapped up in this foal and coming over here all the time to tell him what to do with it. Or asking him how to start her life over in new places. He did not need somebody else driving him crazy and sucking his energy.
Not when he was just getting over Victoria. This woman was probably divorced, too. Had to be, since she wasn’t used to being free and on her own.
He finished cinching the saddle and slipped the bridle on.
The old guys would be here in a minute with the feed and then Clea would be their problem. From now on he would be keeping to himself.
He buckled the bridle and led Sugar out into the aisle. He moved past Clea with a backward glance at her feet, which had shavings clinging to her high heels. “A barn’s no place for those shoes.”
She snapped back, “I happened to be on my way to town when I saw the snake. Which seems like a hundred years ago instead of an hour.”
He could tell by the sound of her voice that she was following him.
He threw an answer back over his shoulder. “Maybe that’s because we coulda gone to Canada in the time it took you to back out to the road.”
Silence. He led Sugar on out of the barn and stopped to get on her.
Clea walked out into the sunlight. It turned her hair into a halo.
“Why’d you let me do that?” she asked. “Any other man would’ve tried harder to make me get out of the driver’s seat. Why didn’t you?” He looped the reins into place in front of the saddle and stepped back to mount. But before he stuck his toe in the stirrup, he looked her in the eye.
Any other man. Yeah. She probably had a dozen of them after her all the time. Somehow that thought irritated him even more.
“It’s not up to me to let you do anything. Or to try to make you do anything. I’m not in charge of you. I’ve already got way more on my plate right now than I ever wanted, and I sure as hell don’t want to be responsible for one more living, breathing thing.”
Her blue eyes sparked with temper. “You really think a lot of yourself, don’t you, Jake Hawthorne? Well, you can rest easy. I’m not trying to attach myself to you—all I came in here for was to see the wild-horse baby. I can take care of myself.”
“No, you can’t. You’re a woman alone looking at wintering in Montana and you don’t have a clue how to survive.”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m your closest neighbor under the age of seventy.”
“So what?”
“I would never refuse to help a neighbor. Or a woman. Or anybody weaker than I am. But I’ve got a job. I don’t have time to take you to raise.”
“Nobody’s asking you to. Nobody will ever ask you to take care of me. You’re jumping to the conclusion that I’m helpless based on nothing except the fact that I’m not very good at backing a trailer. Is that stupid, or what?”
“And based on the fact that you’re used to having a man take care of you and buy you fox-fur vests and fully loaded trucks and trailers. Hired hands, too, to wash your dishes and build your fires and carry out your trash, and horse psychologists to teach you about your orphan foals.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I knew that much the minute I saw you. A minute after that I knew you can’t shoot well enough to save yourself from a snake, much less a bear.”
“Bear?” Buck yelled from a stone’s throw away.
Jake looked up. He hadn’t even seen—or heard—the old guys coming.
“Somebody seen a bear? Least you could do would be to warn us ‘fore we come outside with a bucketful of milk.”
Buck and Teddy were laughing as they came, silly as kids.
“Are there really bears around here?” Clea asked.
“Well, we ain’t seen none right here,” Teddy said, pointing at the ground. “But yes, ma’am, there’s black bear and grizzly, too, all over this country.”
Jake thought her face lost a little of its color. Good. Maybe she’d go back home to Texas or Oklahoma or wherever it was she’d come from.
CHAPTER FIVE
BEARS? That was all Clea could think about as she drove away. Real life, with bears in it.
Evidently, pickup truckloads of eccentric—not to mention prickly and insulting—trespassers and wrong houses and hours of moving and packing and unpacking and constant barn chores and kicks in the thigh from orphan foals weren’t enough for her orientation into real life.
Bears. Her breath caught. She’d better put Ariel in the barn every night for sure. But what about daytime? And what about all those stories about bears tearing their way into cabins? Maybe she should go sleep in the barn with the shotgun if there was word of bears around. But how would she ever hear those rumors? Her neighbor, Jake, certainly wouldn’t want to be responsible for keeping her informed.
The old guys would come see about her, though. She would bet on it. She’d had a terrible time just convincing them to stay home and let her move by herself.
But she wouldn’t let them, not now. Now she had to prove to Jake—in addition to Daddy and Brock—that she could take care of herself.
They weren’t her major focus, though. Mainly she had to prove it to herself. This whole morning had been pretty unsettling.
But she would think positive. Dealing with the foal had grounded her some and reminded her that she wasn’t a complete incompetent.
She would keep herself positive and learn how to be self-sufficient instead of worrying. She had a million things to do before the snow flew. Practice shooting, for one. Right now, if she shot at a bear, she’d probably hit Ariel. At least a bear would be a bigger target than a snake but it