She set Louie’s pad on his back, getting ready to saddle him for a ride and watched the boy attempting to muck out a stall. He’d stalked past her a few minutes earlier without the slightest acknowledgment of her presence and went into the first stall with an empty wheelbarrow and a shovel.
“How you doing, Grace?” Arlo said, his tall, bony frame ambling by her. Other than the fact that his short beard was much more gray than she remembered, he’d barely changed all these years.
“I’m fine. You, Arlo?”
“Good.” He grinned. “I’m always good. You should know that.”
Arlo went into the massive livery barn, took two of his Percherons—a matching pair of dappled grays—out of their stalls and brought them outside. Then he started prepping one to be hitched to a shuttle carriage that took groups of passengers around the island, most often from the Rock Pointe Lodge or Mirabelle Island Inn into town, or vice versa.
“Need some help?” she asked.
“If you’re offering.” He cocked his head toward one of the horses. “I got Pat here, if you can take Mike.”
“Sure.” Holding off on saddling Louie for the moment, she led him into the stall Austin had already mucked out. Then she came out to the yard, patted Mike’s neck and whispered a few words to him as she attached his bridle and collar. Spreading the leather traces along his back, she was careful not to entangle them. It was a good thing she was tall. They were big horses.
“I want to thank you for sticking your neck out with Sean and agreeing to board Louie,” she said as she adjusted the crouper. It’d been so long since someone had her back that she’d almost forgotten what it felt like, but Arlo had always been that way. Ready to stick up for her at a moment’s notice.
“Ah. No worries,” he said. “Sean might seem a bit gruff, but he’s all bark and no bite.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?”
“And the boy,” she said softly. “Sean’s son?”
“Ayep.”
“Came to work here for the summer, but he doesn’t know a thing about horses?”
“That so surprising?” Arlo considered the boy as he straightened Pat’s traces. “I seem to recall a certain young gal who once upon a time didn’t know her bits from her reins.”
She chuckled. “Too true.”
She and Arlo hitched Mike and Pat to the carriage, and he climbed into the driver’s seat. They both glanced at Austin. He’d dumped his first load into the spreader and was working on his second. The way he tried to keep from stepping in anything was like a poorly written comedy sketch. Either he had no clue what he was doing or he had an extreme aversion to horse manure, possibly both.
“The way I see it, somebody around here oughta take that boy under his—or her—wing,” Arlo said. “Lord knows I don’t have the time.”
“Subtle, Arlo.” She smiled. “Real subtle.”
“Whatever you’re going to do, do it quick, huh?” He made a clicking noise and tapped the reins, setting Pat and Mike off and out of the yard.
Grace glanced at Austin. He was sidestepping the manure as if it were acid. She couldn’t help laughing.
The kid glanced at her and scowled. “Oh, that’s real mature.”
“It’s just horse shit. It’s not going to jump up and bite you.”
“Easy for you to say. You like horses.”
“What are you doing here, then, if you don’t like horses?”
“Like I had a choice.”
Man, did he look like a younger version of his dad. “My name’s Grace.”
“Austin.”
“So, Austin, you’ve never mucked out a stall before, have you?”
“No.” He looked angry, frustrated and in need of a friend.
Funny, that’s exactly the way she felt these days.
Before thinking better of it, she opened the stall door. “Well, first off you need to change shoes.” She pointed to a pair of rubber boots by the barn door. “Wear a pair of those and then you don’t need to worry about stepping in anything.”
He glanced toward the door. “Whose are those?”
“Probably Arlo’s, but he won’t mind.”
Grudgingly, Austin pulled on the barn boots.
“While you’re over there grab those gloves.” She indicated the pair on the shelf above the boots. “So you don’t get blisters.”
He came toward her, looking at least a little bit better prepared.
“Now you’re ready to get to work.”
She showed him a better way to hold the shovel and before she knew what she was getting herself into she’d changed out of her riding boots and into her Wellingtons and was helping him take another load out to the spreader. In no time, they’d finished mucking out all the stalls in the livery stable and she’d shown him how to use the spreader in the back pasture.
On their way to the barn, she said, “So you really don’t know anything about horses?”
“Nope.”
“Bet your dad took that real well.”
“He’s not my dad.” Austin frowned. “Technically, I guess he is my dad, but I didn’t know it until a couple weeks ago. I thought my mom’s husband was my real dad. Turns out he’s not.”
Unbelievable. “So Griffin deserted you and your mom?”
“No. He never knew she was pregnant. She’s got all kinds of excuses for keeping that a secret. They were splitting, and he never wanted to have kids. I guess she thought she was doing them both a favor.”
“So Griffin just now found out you’re his son?”
“Yeah. Weird, huh?”
“What are you doing here now?”
He looked away. “My mom and…Glen are getting divorced. She’s got enough on her hands with my younger brother and sister.”
“She sent you here?” To get rid of him. That had to have hurt.
“Yeah. For the summer. Just for the summer.” He sounded as if he was making excuses for her. “So now Sean’s mad at me. Sent me in here to muck out the stalls.”
Some small part of her took perverse pleasure in this upset to Sean’s life. Why, she had no clue. The man simply drove her crazy. Then there was the fact that she felt a kind of affinity toward the kid, an outsider, like her. “How ’bout I teach you to ride?” Grace offered.
“Can you?”
“I can try. I grew up here on Mirabelle. Used to work for Arlo. I can teach you how to saddle a horse, how to feed them, brush them. You name it.”
“Why do you want to help me?”
“Because I have a feeling it’ll bug your dad,” she said, grinning. Any enemy of Sean’s was a friend of Grace’s. “Time to teach you everything you never wanted to know about horses.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“THIS IS RIDICULOUS,” GRACE muttered to herself as she flipped off the bedcovers. First hot, then cold, then hot again. To the bathroom. To the kitchen for a drink of water. Night after night after night. She’d been on Mirabelle for more than a week and