Cooper’s breathing was ragged, but Libby couldn’t get the wire loose, much less get him back onto his side so that he could breathe better. She was frantically hacking away when she heard Kade speak behind her.
“Let me.”
Libby backed off, letting him crouch down to use his cutters. He did live nearby, but he must have driven ninety miles an hour to get there that fast.
“Watch it,” he said as he squeezed the handles. After the first wire popped, zinging wildly, he cut the second. The horse heaved, making the ends of a third wire, which was still wrapped around his hind leg, bounce.
“Damn,” Kade murmured as he saw how tightly it was wound, cutting the animal’s flesh.
He snapped the last wire, then started unwrapping it as Libby held the horse’s head steady.
“I did everything I could to make the pastures safe.”
Her parents had never done a damned thing for the small ranch, except let it fall down around them. When Libby had returned to Otto after college, she’d bought the property from them so that they could move to Arizona and continue drinking themselves to death.
The house and barn had been in fairly decent shape, only needing new roofs, which had almost bankrupted her, but the outbuildings were shot and the pastures had lain fallow for years. The fence posts were rotten and barbed wire was strewn everywhere, cropping up out of the ground in unexpected places, where a fence had gone down and had then been overgrown.
Libby had spent most of her free time cleaning wire out of the pastures and refencing them before she turned out her horses to graze. She didn’t want any of her animals injured, and now one of her horses was.
“If you have animals, accidents will happen,” Kade said without looking at her. He glanced up at what was left of the fence. “He must have got caught while rolling.”
“That’s what I thought.” It felt so odd, being there with Kade, agreeing with him, as if there was no bad history between them.
“Do you still ride him?”
“I did.”
“You’ll ride him again.”
Libby swallowed hard as she watched Kade work, stroking the horse’s neck to reassure him that she was there and that they were helping. Kade was probably right, but now Cooper’s hind legs were badly skinned and burned where the wire had cut and rubbed against them. Recovery was going to take time.
“Do you have a clean area where we can treat him?” Kade asked as he carefully unwound the last bit of wire from Cooper’s leg. The other horses were standing a short distance away, edging closer, curious about what was happening to their compadre.
“There’s a stall in the barn,” Libby said. “I’ll have to run the rest of the horses into the next field so they don’t escape.”
“Go do that.”
Libby jogged across the pasture to the gate. The horses, sensing greener grass on the other side of the fence, followed her. Libby opened the gate to let them walk through. By the time she crossed the field again, Kade had Cooper on his feet.
The horse took a tentative step forward and then another. The three of them walked slowly to the barn, Kade on one side of Cooper and Libby on the other, her hand on the gelding’s neck, talking to him in a soothing voice.
“His leg will probably swell like crazy,” Kade said once they had him in the stall. Libby had spread clean straw and then found a big roll of gauze. Together they cleaned and wrapped the damaged areas on Cooper’s hind legs, duct-taping the top and bottom of the bandages to keep them from slipping off.
Kade opened his own first-aid kit and took out a plastic tube of horse analgesic, phenylbutazone, which he shoved into the corner of the horse’s mouth, pushing the plunger all the way down.
“Do you want me to leave it?” he asked, referring to the medication.
She shook her head. “I have bute, too.”
As she walked with Kade to his truck afterward, she felt as if she were waking from a dream, one in which events and actions that had seemed so reasonable at the time became utterly bizarre upon waking. She would never have expected to end the day by having Kade rescue her horse—or by feeling grateful that he’d come to help.
“Do you want me stop by in the morning to check the bandage?” Kade asked as he set his vet kit on the seat of his truck.
“I can handle it.” She shoved her hands into her back pockets and glanced at the barn. “Thank you for coming.”
“I did it for the horse.”
Libby wasn’t sure if he’d intended the comment to comfort or sting. It did both.
CHAPTER FIVE
KADE KNEW THAT LIBBY wanted him to leave now that the emergency was over, knew that she hated owing him. Well, he’d give her a chance to even things out.
“I need a favor, Libby.”
“What?” she asked cautiously.
“Have you ever seen Blue when you’ve been doing your BLM horse stuff?”
He could see relief in her eyes. “A couple of times.”
He forgot himself and smiled. Blue was alive. “I went searching for the herd a few days ago. Couldn’t find it.”
“We relocated it after the fires two years ago.”
That explained a lot.
“How’d he look? How was he doing?”
Libby pressed her lips together. “He was getting a little poor the last time I saw him.” Her expression softened then, the mask dropped, and for a moment she was the old Libby. His friend. His lover. “He is almost twenty, Kade. It’s a rough life out there.”
“I want to find him. See him.”
“Why?”
He didn’t know exactly. Maybe because the horse had been the one positive thing in his youth besides Libby. And he’d messed things up with Lib, so that only left Blue. “I just … need to see him.”
She frowned, but didn’t pursue the matter. “I’ll show you on a topo.”
“Come with me,” Kade said without even knowing why. Maybe it was because of that brief moment of empathy.
Libby actually took a step back. Not a good sign. No more empathy. “I don’t think so.”
He tried a different tack. “It would screw with the odds makers.” A bad attempt at humor.
“As far as I’m concerned, the odds makers can go screw themselves.” She kicked the toe of her boot into the gravel, glanced at the barn again, then met his gaze. “I owe you tonight, Kade. And I’ll be nice to you tonight. I’ll show you where the herd is on a topo map.”
“Never mind,” he said in a clipped tone. “You can show me later.” As if there would be a later. He got into his truck, and after checking to make sure the dogs were close to Libby he shifted into Reverse.
When he glanced in the rearview mirror on the way down the driveway he saw Libby walking back to the barn. Alone. And he was driving home. Alone.
What a waste.
THE NEXT MORNING Menace pulled into Kade’s place with the Chevy on the back of his tow rig. “Where do you want her?” he asked gruffly.
“Behind the barn.”