T.C. eased Monte’s leg down, stretched out the kink in her back and tried to prevent her gaze straying to the other end of the barn. What were they laughing about this time? They’d been at it for more than an hour, chatting easily, laughing with nerve-grating regularity, Jason obviously reveling in his role as teacher to Nick’s student. Their rapport shouldn’t rankle. Nick could spread his charm from here to the back of beyond, but as long as he didn’t try it on her, what should she care?
With a last disgruntled glance in their direction, she stooped down, took Monte’s leg again and eased it between her knees, determined to refocus on rasping a level surface for the horseshoe. She managed to concentrate for all of three minutes before she heard the slow tread of approaching boots, then the scrape of a drum against concrete. Looking back beneath her arm, she saw the outstretched length of denim-clad legs as he took a seat.
Ignore him, she warned her body, but to no avail. Already her muscles had tightened in unconscious response to his proximity, to the notion of him watching her. So okay, she told herself, the man unnerves you, but he’s right there, not six feet away, and it’s about time you started on that list of questions. But as she shifted the words about in her mind, forcing them into some sort of logical order, her tension must have transmitted itself to Monte and he shifted his weight, almost overbalancing her.
By the time she righted herself and calmed Monte, she had decided this was neither the time nor the place for this conversation. Much too important for casual asides between hammer blows, she justified, attacking Monte’s hoof with renewed fervor because she wanted the job finished—quickly. She could practically feel the touch of that warm blue gaze on her backside every time she bent into her task, but she clenched her jaw firmly, determined not to show how much he disconcerted her.
“What are you doing?” Nick asked after she had steadfastly ignored him for several minutes.
“Rasping.”
“I can see that much.”
“Glad your eyesight’s not a problem,” she mumbled.
“Nothing wrong with my eyesight…fortunately.”
She let the horse’s leg down and tsked with disgust as she strode to the anvil seated on a nearby workbench and started bashing at the horseshoe. “Haven’t you anything better to do than ogle my backside?” Bash. Bash. Bash.
“You think I was ogling?”
She stopped hammering long enough to cast him a long-suffering look.
“I hardly ever ogle a woman with a hammer in her hand. Too dangerous.”
She almost smiled at that. Almost. Nick wondered why she fought the urge, wondered what it would take to hear her laugh out loud. He had a feeling he would enjoy seeing her emotive eyes brimming with laughter even more than he enjoyed them sparking with irritation.
“I hope it doesn’t bother you, me sitting here, watching you.”
“Actually it does.” Tossing the hammer aside, she turned around to face him. “I’m not used to having anyone watch me work.”
“Joe didn’t?”
“He…he didn’t make me feel uncomfortable.” And Nick did. He could see the uneasiness in her gaze, in the restless way she shifted her weight from one hip to the other, in the way she scuffed the toe of one boot against the ground.
“You must have gotten along pretty well with Joe,” he said before she could turn away again. He didn’t mind if her discomfort was due to her awareness of him, but he did want her comfortable enough to talk with him. Joe seemed like the place to start.
“Because he left me so much?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
One corner of her mouth curled cynically. “No?”
“No. You say you weren’t lovers, but obviously you were closer than the usual boss-employee.”
Their eyes met and held, and he saw a flicker of something—maybe surprise, maybe relief, maybe some kind of yielding—before she looked away. He saw her swallow, then take a deep breath, before she spoke in a slow, measured voice.
“Joe gave me this job at a time when I really needed it, and he did so against everyone’s advice. I knew horses, but I’d never managed a stable this size. I was young and inexperienced, plus I was female. But he went with his gut instinct, and he gave me the job.” A ghost of a smile curved her lips and touched Nick somewhere deep inside, somewhere he didn’t even want to identify. “I made sure he never regretted that decision, and he appreciated the extra effort I put in. We weren’t lovers, but we built a bond.”
“Of mutual respect?”
She looked up then, and the intensity in her eyes smacked him hard, midchest. “I don’t know about the mutual, but I do know how much I respected Joe. I admired him, I loved him, I wished he was my father.” The last phrase came out in a breathy rush. Then, as if she regretted letting on so much, she turned her head and looked away.
“You said Joe gave you a job at a time when you really needed it. You were broke?”
“In more ways than you can imagine.”
Silently Nick willed her to go on, to tell him something of the past that shadowed her voice.
“I won’t bore you with the long story. Suffice it to say my esteem had taken a pounding and this job was exactly what I needed. I’m not talking about finding employment or the money—it was the responsibility and the trust. It was his belief in me.”
She turned abruptly and stomped back to the horse, leaving Nick standing there weighed down by the intensity of her words and his own memories. He had experienced that same aching need. Hell, he’d spent the first eight years of his life with no one caring for him, let alone believing in him, so it had taken him a long time to recognize those gifts as the most precious Joe had given him when he took him into his family and called him his second son.
“Yeah,” he muttered hoarsely to himself. “I wish he’d been my father, too.”
He found her back at work, nailing the shoe with businesslike efficiency, as if she had already shed the emotion that still knotted Nick’s gut. That irritated him almost as much as how she had walked away. He watched her swat a fly from the horse’s belly, and with half an eye noticed the animal had worked its lead undone. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere—in fact, it looked like it had fallen asleep. What was it with her animals and sleep?
“Why don’t you get a farrier to do that?” he asked.
“Pay someone to do something I can do? I don’t think so.”
“Why do something so tough and painstaking when you can pay someone to do it?” he countered.
She looked up, her eyes sharp with disdain. “That’s not my way of doing things.”
Trying to prove her toughness, Nick guessed. Not because she was young and inexperienced, but because she was female. There was a story here, a history he suddenly needed to know. “What is your way, Tamara?”
No answer. Okay. He would try a different tack.
“How did you learn to farrier?”
“My father taught me.”
“Your father’s a horseman?”
“He was.”
That was it. No further explanation, and, dammit, her reticence intrigued him as much as it irritated him. “So you followed the family tradition into horse training?”
In one smooth movement she turned, drew the horse’s leg forward and rested the hoof on her thigh. “I chose this profession because I love it. Tradition had nothing to do with it.”
Nick inspected her closely drawn brows, the flare of her nostrils,