Maisey Yates – A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas (страница 17)
“Shall we go get lunch?” she asked.
“That would be good,” he responded.
The two of them turned away from the arena and walked the rest of the way toward the mess hall. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “I think you’re a good babysitter.”
“Thanks,” he said, giving her a slight grin. Friendly expressions from that man were worth their weight in gold, and as she was a woman short on gold, she would take those smiles. She wasn’t sure why it mattered. Maybe because she couldn’t remember the last time she had made another person smile. She’d been in a particular kind of poverty for most of her life. But it was the poverty of connections that was starting to get to her. Living without things she could endure. But this little bit of time she’d spent with Grant—with the entire Dodge family—made her realize how starved she was for the rest.
“So,” she said. “Riding lessons, huh?”
“If you’re up for it.”
“I think I might be.”
She had no idea if she was or not. But what she knew was that she desperately wanted to spend more time with him. Whatever that might mean.
“Tomorrow after work, then,” he said.
“Tomorrow after work.”
MCKENNA COULD BARELY concentrate on the tasks at hand the entire day. Thankfully, the act of cleaning toilets was a relatively mindless one, and it gave her the opportunity to worry and look forward to the horse-riding endeavors she’d agreed to with Grant. She didn’t know anything about horses, except that of course she had gone through a phase when she was younger and had read books almost exclusively about kids who had them.
But much like anything else, she learned early on that fantasy wasn’t reality, and it never would be.
She’d read
McKenna was happy to take that one on the chin.
No one in that house needed to read that book.
It was filled with things that would never, ever happen. She couldn’t believe it. Not for one moment. No nice couple was going to show up at a train station and see a skinny, redheaded orphan girl they didn’t actually want, then take her back home and love her like a daughter. It wasn’t fair. Reading it had made her chest feel swollen, had made her cheeks feel prickly.
She had hated her. Anne with an E, who had unusual red hair and adoptive parents who loved her, and
The horse books, she had decided, were a safer read. Because she didn’t harbor fantasies about living on a ranch or finding a beautiful, wild steed to ride. It had nothing to do with her life. It hadn’t even been anything she wanted. It had just been an escape. Something so different from the life she lived, being shifted between suburban neighborhoods.
A life riding horses over rolling hills with golden sun filtering through the trees. There was a lot of dappling sun in those books. And in McKenna’s mind, dappling sun was one of the most romantic images, to this day.
But it was a fantasy that didn’t get its claws into her soul, because it seemed impossible. Not like having a family someday, which seemed both impossible and like it should be as possible for her as anyone else.
It seemed surreal she was coming closer to actually having the horse fantasy than ever having the loving family fantasy. But who knew. Maybe the Daltons would fold her into their loving embrace.
The thought sent a sharp pang through her chest. Like she’d been run through with a shard of glass.
She stopped walking for a moment and stood, looking out at the mountains that surrounded the ranch. Maybe she had internalized that Anne stuff a lot more than she had realized. Because obviously part of her believed in it, even as she railed against it. Oh, that bright light of optimism that seemed to burn inside of her no matter what.
“Maybe I’ll fall off the horse and break my neck,” she said cheerfully, taking a step forward and kicking a pinecone out of the way. “Maybe the horse will hate me, and Grant will take it as a sign of my bad character and tell Wyatt to send me packing. Maybe this is all just a dream and I’m still sleeping in a hollowed-out cabin in the freezing cold.”
“Or maybe, you’re just about to have an uneventful riding lesson.” She looked up sharply, and saw Grant move onto the path.
“Good Lord, Grant,” she said. “Are you part puma? You scared the hell out of me.”
“Are you nervous?”
She flattened her mouth into a line. “I’m not the most Zen.”
“The horse I got for you could safely ride in circles at a kid’s birthday party.”
“Well. Now I feel condescended to.”
“Would you rather be condescended to, or did you want to get bucked off a horse today?”
“Condescension, please,” she said.
“Your horse is completely safe, and nothing is going to happen.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“Have I
“No,” she said, puzzling. “That’s the weird thing about you. You’re not too nice, but you’re not mean, either.”
“Is that weird?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s really weird. My experience is that when you have the kind of life I had, people either look at you like you’re a very sad little puppy that they pity deeply, or they want to lecture you about how something you’ve done has put you in this position. You haven’t done either thing.”
“Well, it sounds like you’ve had some things go down.”
“Understatement.”
“People end up in weird situations, McKenna. Situations they didn’t plan on. All the damned time. And anyone who doesn’t think that? They’re just scared. They can’t stand the idea that they might find themselves homeless, trying to find a cabin to sleep in on someone else’s property. If they don’t blame some kind of moral failing in you, then what’s to keep them from suffering something that puts them in the exact same place? It’s the same with a lot of life’s crap. Sickness. People always want to know what
McKenna blinked. “My mother abandoned me.”
“I’m sorry about that.” His face stayed that same shade of beautiful neutral it almost always was.
“But you don’t feel sorry for me.”
“If I did, would it change anything?”
She frowned. “It might... Affirm my feelings.”
His brown eyes were unreadable. “You don’t need your feelings affirmed. You just have to decide what you’re going to do.”
“Well, I’m here, so obviously I’ve made some decisions.”
She didn’t like the fact that he had now graduated to lecturing her. In fact, she preferred a little mindless pity over this.
“I speak from experience when I say that people feeling sorry for you doesn’t help you do a damn thing. Especially if they are sorry without offering help.”
“I guess you’re offering help.”
“That’s Wyatt and Lindy. I’m offering to teach you how to ride a horse.”
They approached the barn—one she hadn’t been in before—and walked inside slowly.
It smelled sweet. Dense and dusty, but not entirely unpleasant. She looked around and saw stacks of hay, and could just barely see the tops of a few horses’ heads in the stall.
“What’s the smell?”
“Everything,” he said.
“What does
“Shavings. Hay. Dirt.” He paused and looked back at her, his expression partly shaded by the brim of his cowboy hat. “Horse urine.”
“Well.” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a bit... Earthy.”
“Horses are. It’s not a bad smell, though.”
She inhaled, letting it kind of roll over her. “No. I guess it isn’t.”
“You’ve really never been around horses?”
“No. I mostly lived in the suburbs. In around different places in Oregon. Predominantly the Portland area. I guess we went to...pumpkin patches and things? And did hayrides? But it seemed like everything was...cleaner.”
“Probably because it wasn’t a working ranch.”