“Excuse me,” Sam said. “I’m right here in the room with you and I assure you, I can ride. I can ride really, really well,” she punctuated. “No blisters would be sprouting on this bottom.” She smiled.
He ignored it. “Oh, yeah? Should we just take your word for that?”
“Of course not,” she said. “You have horses here, right? Test me. Right now, if you like.”
“Excellent idea,” Gigi said, standing. “Let’s go.”
“Gigi,” Clint said, “this is crazy.”
“It’s not crazy,” his grandmother said. “At least no more crazier than anything you’ve done in recent days, Mr. Ranch Manager. I want to do this.” She glanced in Samantha Davies’s direction. “For her.”
Clinton didn’t have a choice. “Hell’s fires,” he muttered. This day just got better and better.
Chapter Four
Clinton stormed out of the house, so upset he nearly slammed the door.
“Damn, foolish women.”
Gigi had insisted Samantha go and change, which meant Clint had been left with the task of fetching her suitcase. “Of all the stupid, ridiculous ideas. Probably wants me to go saddle up a horse, too,” he grumbled under his breath.
As it turned out, that’s exactly what his grandmother asked him to do.
“Please,” Gigi added with a smile. Clint stared between his grandmother and his “guest” and envisioned a cartoon character of himself—one with an angry red light shooting up his face like a thermometer.
“Sure,” he said sarcastically, having to resist the urge to slam the door a second time.
The rainstorm had passed—gone as quickly as it’d come. He paused for a second in the barn’s aisle. He wanted to saddle up the rankest bronc he could find, but as much as he was tempted, he wouldn’t do that. He didn’t want to kill the woman, no matter that she’d seriously pissed him off by batting her big green eyes at his grandmother. It didn’t matter that he owned the ranch, either, and that he had every right to tell Samantha Davies to get lost. He wouldn’t do that, either, because the plain and simple truth was, he loved his grandmother. He would do anything for her. She knew it, too. Gigi Baer had been a rock in his life and if she wanted Miss Samantha Davies to go along on the spring gathering, he’d let her go along.
If she could ride.
He wouldn’t compromise her safety, the safety of his men and the safety of his livestock just because some city slicker had a wild hair up her you-know-what.
“Oh!” he heard his grandmother say when less than ten minutes later, the two of them, Samantha and his grandmother, entered the barn, their footfalls clearly audible on the packed dirt. “You’ve saddled Red.”
Clint was tightening the girth—Red on cross ties in the middle of the aisle—the smooth leather strap Clint held gliding through the metal ring. Samantha now wore jeans, he saw, and a light green shirt.
“She said she could ride.” Red was at least sixteen hands, and about as wide as he was tall, too. Lots of power.
When he glanced up, Samantha was staring at him. Horses chomped on the midafternoon snack he’d given them, their softly muffled snorts breaking the silence, and he thought to himself that she didn’t seem afraid of Red at all. She came right up to him, offering the palm of her hand for the horse to sniff.
“Hey there, Red,” she said softly.
The horse started to nibble at her palm—as if trying to eat an invisible treat.
“Do you happen to have an English saddle?” she asked, green eyes shifting in his direction.
“Excuse me?” he asked, leather girth forgotten.
She was backlit, her short brown hair blond around the edges. “I usually ride English,” she said with a wide I-know-that-might-sound-strange smile. “The truth is, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve ridden western.”
He dropped the strap, rested his arm on the chestnut horse’s withers and met his grandmother’s gaze. “You hear that, Gigi? The woman wants to ride in an English saddle.”
His grandmother just shook her head. It was cool inside the barn, a gentle breeze blowing up the aisle. Gigi had tossed a tan jacket over her white blouse and jeans.
“Just finish saddling that horse, Clint. If she’s been riding English, a western saddle ought to be a piece of cake.”
Clint shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, and went back to girthing up the horse, wrapping the strap in and out of the metal loop before giving it a final tug. He’d hung the left stirrup over the saddle horn to keep it out of his way while he worked, but he released it quickly—too quickly—the thing slapping against Red’s wide body. The horse pinned his ears.
“Maybe I can send for my own saddle if things work out,” she told his grandmother, smiling sheepishly.
Only if she managed to control the horse beneath this saddle. But he found himself snorting nonetheless. The ranch hands would laugh themselves silly if they caught sight of someone riding one of his cow ponies in an English saddle.
Over his dead body.
“Excuse me,” he said, eyeing the tack room behind her. “I need to get Red’s bridle.”
“Oh,” she said, taking a step back.
But it wasn’t enough.
He brushed past her, Samantha’s gaze darting to his body like a foam bullet from a Nerf gun. “Sorry,” she said.
He paused for a heartbeat. Their arms had touched. That was all. It wasn’t as if his crotch had accidentally crossed one of her no-fly zones. Yet it felt as if that’s exactly what happened. Worse, he felt a familiar buzz in that same region.
Crap.
He didn’t look at her, but he couldn’t deny that he fought the urge to glance back as he stepped into the tack room. The smell of leather filled his nostrils, it was such a familiar scent that it instantly soothed him.
“Just been without a woman too long,” he muttered to himself. “Nothing to it.”
He grabbed the bridle from the rack, turned.
Gigi stood there.
“What was that you were saying?” she asked. The look on her face was the same one he recognized from years of stepping in cow patties—and then entering her house afterward.
“I said it’s been too long since I’ve cleaned this bridle.”
That’s not what you said, his grandmother silently told him.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it, he told her right back on his way out.
The snaffle bit was the only piece of English tack he owned. Thing was, old Red wasn’t very responsive to the jointed piece of metal. But if she knew how to ride…
Red stood still as he slipped the leather halter off his head, the big horse opening his mouth obediently. The metal mouthpiece clinked against his teeth, but it didn’t bug the sorrel gelding. They were used to that kind of thing, just as they were used to the leather headstall being tugged over their ears. Once he buckled the throatlatch, he stepped back.
“He’s all yours,” he said with a smile as false as their ancient ranch hand Elliot’s fake teeth.
“Thanks,” she said, reaching for the reins. She stepped up to Red’s left side, the correct