Authors: Mandy Hubbard
Marshall’s eyes sweep over the horse again, and then he leans over and spits.
My heart beats so loudly I think he must hear it.
“Fine by me,” Marshall drawls, and hope surges in my gut. “But if Mr. Ramsey has a beef with this and it causes trouble for the barn, we’ll be having another talk,” he says. And when he meets my eyes for a final time, his meaning is clear: we can have our fun, but not if it brings him trouble.
Relief swirls through me. “Of course,” I say.
“Okay, then,” he replies, spinning on his heel and ambling off.
“Holy crap, I thought we were toast,” Bailey says as soon as he’s out of earshot.
I laugh. “Me too.”
“You’re right about one thing.” She picks up the red dye again.
“What?”
“The barn is a way cooler place to work. My boss would’ve cited the rule book and written me up or something.”
I squeeze some blue dye into my hand. “Nah, we kinda run in our own circle. Mr. Ramsey tries to pretend he knows all about horses, but he doesn’t. He’s pretty hands-off.”
“He runs a much tighter ship in the spa,” she says. “He pops in every other day, and every time I think I might pee my pants. Do you think he checks up on the maids and, like, bounces quarters off the sheets?”
I snort, not because the idea is ridiculous, but because I could actually see him doing just that. “Anyway … back to the task at hand. Anything else you think I can use on Landon?”
“He seems to like pickled things.”
“Huh?” I say, frowning. “I mean I’ve seen him eat pickles before, but I don’t see how that helps me.”
“No, I mean pickled asparagus and pickled jalapeños and stuff. He uploaded a photo of this giant jar of them and it was almost empty.”
“Who the heck uploads pictures of pickle jars?”
“Your
boyfriend
, apparently. You must be the luckiest girl on the planet.”
I snicker. “Okay. So I talk football and eat pickles. Got it.”
“Yeah. But okay, now here’s where it gets super weird.” “Pickles wasn’t it?”
“No. Anyway, he and his buddy got into this huge debate a few weeks back. We’re talking like a hundred and twenty-two comments back and forth.”
“About what?”
I can’t see her expression, but I
know
she’s grinning from ear to ear, just by the tone in her voice. “Well, he has very strong opinions about Chuck Norris.”
I burst out laughing so hard, Storm startles, tossing his head up. I slap a hand over my mouth. “Chuck Norris?”
“Yeah. Whether he’d beat Batman in a fistfight.”
“And? Which side did he fall on?”
“Landon feels strongly that Batman is just a buff guy with gadgets and that Chuck has more experience in hand-to-hand combat.”
“He seriously argued about this.”
“Yes. The one thing I realized, as I was skimming his page, is that he very much enjoys debate.”
“You mean he likes arguing,” I say. “I noticed that last year, but I never really dug in my heels. Like I thought he’d get annoyed with me, so I was always like,
Oh, you’re totally right. I agree
. Except it killed me to do that.”
She bursts out laughing. “Since when do you admit someone else is right?”
“I know!”
“I can’t believe you did that. Do you remember when I told you you’d argue whether the sky was blue? And you were like,
Well today it’s not really that blue anyway, so
…”
I lean forward to where Bailey is crouched and push her just hard enough that she kinda falls back on her butt and laughs. “You know I’m right,” she says. “So maybe you’ve met your match. I mean, it’s not an argument in his mind—he likes to actually
debate
. He kept using all these Chuck Norris photos and links to YouTube videos and quotes from some fan pages and everything. Supporting his argument. So I think you should pick a few hot-button things and enjoy a little healthy debate with him.”
“You think if I disagree with him, he’s more likely to fall for me.”
“Yes. He’s really competitive about it. The Chuck Norris debate didn’t end until his friend conceded.”
“Huh,” I say, stepping back to admire Landon’s treasured horse, which is starting to resemble our lovely American flag.
“Yeah,” Bailey says, coming around the horse to stand beside me, grinning when she sees the results. “So I suggest you develop some very strong opinions on a variety of subjects.”
When I walk into the barn the next morning, whistling Landon’s beloved national anthem under my breath, my step falters. Six people, Landon among them, are standing near the bulletin board, leaning over one another and peering at a sheet of blue paper. They don’t hear—or choose to ignore—the sound of my steps on the concrete as I approach.
Being short has its advantages, and I slip in between them, pushing my way to the board to see what has their attention.
Summer Barn Schedule
This must be why Marshall came down to the barn last night. I scan over the lists, seeing my name highlighted under
Barrels
and
Pole Bending
for the upcoming rodeo, and then again under …
Cattle Drive
.
I don’t get any further into the schedule before I turn to
Landon, who’s stepped away from the crowd and is waiting for me, leaning against the wall.
“We’re going on the cattle drive again,” I say, walking over and high-fiving him.
“Again?” he asks, quirking a brow.
My heart spasms in my chest. “Uh, I mean, we’re going,” I say, cursing myself for the slip. I stare right at Landon, trying to remember if blinking too much or not at all is the telltale sign of a lie. “The
again
was because … you know, we’re doing the rodeo and the drive. So we’re on two lists.”
“Ohh. Yeah. Cool.”
Instantly, images of him and me on the cattle drive—the one he doesn’t remember—barrel through my mind. Riding side by side down long, dusty trails, falling behind to push the straggling cattle back up to the herd. Swimming at the end of a long, hot day. Sleeping on the open ground, staring up at the stars. Me, a little bit sunburned but completely, blissfully happy.
All of that shattered a few days later.
There has to be a way to mess with him on the cattle drive. I’ll have hours and hours to spend with him. It’s a good thing I have weeks to figure it out. It’s one of the last events of the summer, right before the dance.
“Awesome,” I say.
“Anyway, I need to pick up a couple of things in town tonight. Do you want to go out to dinner?”
I blink. “Dinner? Like a date?”
Ugh. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I’m so constantly reminding myself that we aren’t really dating, that I just totally screwed up.
“Yeah, you know, that thing guys do with their girlfriend? They sit down at these little tables, pick up menus …”
“I know, sorry. I’m being silly. It’s just …” My mind scrambles. “It’s been, like, two weeks since I left the ranch. I guess I forgot a whole world existed out there.”
“Then let me show you. We can head out around six?”
I nod. “Sounds great.”
The two of us walk down the long cement aisle a ways, and my anticipation grows as we get closer to Landon’s horse. I click my tongue at a few of the horses as I pass, causing them to swivel their ears at me, and then we reach the end, where the wheelbarrows are kept. “I’ll take Musa’s side if you take Storm’s side,” I say.
He nods, tossing pitchforks into each wheelbarrow, and then we go to the first stalls. Landon is unlatching the stall door, so I stand in silence behind him, waiting. Finally, the latch pops and he slides the door open, simultaneously looking up.
Silence.
I wish I wasn’t standing behind him, because I can’t see his expression. But then his shoulders move, the tiniest tremble at first, until they shake, and then he leans over and bursts out laughing, a deep throaty laugh that is as sexy as anything I’ve ever heard.
Storm steps forward, as if confused by Landon’s reaction, and when his head swings out the door, I can’t help it. I laugh too.
His forelock, which had been the only white part on his mane, is varying strands of blue and red, and Bailey added polka dots to the blaze running down his face. The rest of him is an alternating
patchwork of red and blue, and in the end he looks like some psychotic clown’s horse.
Landon turns to me, and I can’t help but grin back at him when his gaze meets mine. His eyes sweep over my hair, then back at Storm, taking in the identical colors. “Nice work,” he says, wiping a tear from his eye. “Epic.”
Part of me is annoyed that he loves it, but the more dominating part just grins back at him. And then I curtsy in a ridiculously over-the-top way, pretending I’m some Southern belle. “Why, thank you, kind sir.”
He shakes his head and turns back to the stall. “Oh man, I’m going to be the best-dressed dude at the rodeo,” he says.
I smirk and finally slide my own stall door open, to where a gray Arab stands chewing on breakfast. I push my wheelbarrow into the stall, then reach over and flip on the radio mounted on the wall at this end of the barn. Country music—the only thing allowed in the barns—streams out of the old speakers.
We work in silence for a few minutes, scooping out the used bedding and tossing it into the wheelbarrows with muffled thuds.
“How’s your mom doing, anyway?” he finally calls out.
“My mom?” I ask. She got in a car accident last fall and had to have surgery on her knees, but if he doesn’t remember the last year …
The silence in the barn is louder than the radio, but then he clears his throat. “Yeah, didn’t you say one of her good friends moved away or something?”
That did happen last summer. My mom’s friend from childhood—the one who had bought the house next door a dozen
years ago just so they could stay BFFs forever—moved to the East Coast for a job. I almost forgot about it. “Oh, yeah, I mean, she’s fine. The people who moved into our neighbor’s house are cool, I guess. She’s planning a DC trip in December.”
“Good, good.”
“Mm-hmm. What about your sisters?”
“Just as hellacious as ever,” he says, and across the aisle, through the metal bars on the stall front, I see his grin. “Jenny is fifteen already,” he says.
Sixteen
, I think.
“She brought this date home the other day and I think I terrified him.”
Landon’s dad bailed on the family when he was a kid, and he’s got that whole man-of-the-house thing going on. He probably totally loves harassing his sisters and their dates.
“Somebody’s gotta do it,” I say, pulling some of the cleaner shavings toward the middle of the stall.
“That’s what I said.”
I set my pitchfork down and dig into my pocket, glancing over a bullet-point list I created this morning based on five minutes of Googling things on my phone. Let’s hope the hordes of Internet message board users employ valid arguments.
“So, Bailey and I were talking about 007 this morning,” I say as I shove the list back into my pocket.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. See, I think Pierce Brosnan is the best James Bond of all time, but she’s all about Daniel Craig,” I say.
“You’re both wrong,” he replies. “Sean Connery is the only Bond. The others are just imitators.”
I turn toward the back of the stall to hide my gleeful expression. Man, this is almost too easy.
“No way,” I say, turning back to the bedding. “Brosnan embodies the suave, totally unshakable quality required of a true secret agent.” I try to sound as if I believe everything I’m saying to the core of my being, but it’s hard. I’ve never even seen the Brosnan versions.
“Connery is the
original
. You have to take into account that his movies were filmed in the sixties, when special effects weren’t as great as they are today. He
carried
those films.”
Bailey was right about one thing. He’s enjoying this, spouting facts and trying to prove his point. It’s like I sparked a fire.
“Yeah, but Brosnan took the helm after a six-year hiatus.” I pause and dig the paper back out, scanning my eyes over the facts. “And plus, his films are the first of the series to
not
use plotlines from the novels.”
“Yeah. They could do that because
GoldenEye
had a big budget. Money to hire good writers, create awesome stunts. But when Sean Connery portrayed the character, the entire movie cost, like, a million dollars or something.”
“Yeah, but even Roger Ebert said that Brosnan was the best.”
“Brosnan took the helm of a white-hot Hollywood property and carried it for a while. It’s not that hard to drive a train when it’s already barreling down the tracks.”
“Maybe, but they were big shoes to fill,” I say. “A lesser actor would’ve coasted by on his predecessor’s interpretation of the character. Brosnan brought wit and charm.”
“Connery had an accent. That alone makes him more
charming.” Landon pauses, as if he just realized what he said out loud. “Or so I hear.”
“Pierce Brosnan is Irish! Connery is Scottish. There’s hardly a difference,” I say, looking up from my pitchfork. Landon meets my eyes, and I see that fire practically sparking in them. He is
determined
.
“Maybe, but Texas beats Scottish or Irish any day.”
“I
suppose
,” I say.
“What? You know girls love a Texan drawl. I mean, you do, obviously.”
“But not as much as something European,” I say. “It’s more exotic.”
“How did we go from debating James Bond to accents?”
I toss my pitchfork into the wheelbarrow. “I don’t know, but I’m sure you’re wrong on all accounts.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Landon pulls open the passenger door, motioning into the truck, and I slide onto the leather bench seat, the material hot on the backs of my bare legs.
He didn’t do this for me last year. Didn’t take me on a formal date outside of the ranch. I have no idea what that means. Is my scheming actually working?
I force myself to stop analyzing his actions. Instead I fix my skirt as he slams the door, the solid steel clanging hard. It’s an ancient Chevy, something from the seventies that Landon supposedly fixed himself, back when he was sixteen. It sat, immobile, in the auto shop at our high school for almost a year. I
guess I’m lucky he didn’t fix it last winter after our breakup, or he’d wonder how it had miraculously turned into a flawlessly running machine. Man, I’m not sure how I’d explain that one.