Pamela Britton - Rancher and Protector

Oh, yeah. That was right. She’d been told that by Jarrod, the man who was supposed to mentor her through the process. He’d shown her how to halter a horse yesterday. Obviously, she hadn’t been paying attention too well. She flipped the thing around.

“Not that way,” Colton said with a small shake of his handsome head. She hated overly attractive men. They always made her feel so … so uncomfortable.

“The hole goes over the nose,” he added. “The long strap buckles behind the horse’s ears.”

“Right …” she murmured.

“Here.” The stall gate, which was on rollers, whooshed open like supermarket doors. “I’ll do it for you.”

“No, no,” she said quickly, her feet bogged down in wood chips once again. He was tall. That was another thing she didn’t like. Tall men intimidated the hell out of her. Jarrod, the registered hippotherapist she was working with, was short and blond. She could deal with short and blond.

She could deal with this, too. “I can do it.”

She heard the stall door close with a bang just the same, and the sound startled Flash.

What followed was not Amber’s proudest moment.

She shrieked; the horse turned away from her. The back end of the animal bashed into the wall with a boom, sending dust and debris down from the rafters. Her feet became entangled in the wood chips again. She started to fall….

He kept her from going down with a hand against her shoulder.

“Sorry about that,” he told her. “I didn’t think it would close so easily.”

You idiot, she wanted to say. But he wasn’t paying attention to her, anyway. Flash was now dancing around the stall as if Amber was a monster.

“Don’t move,” Colton told her. “Easy there.”

Easy? There was nothing easy about this horse. The iron-shod animal had to be at least six feet tall.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I don’t mean to sound panicked, but shouldn’t we get out of here while the getting’s good?”

He appeared to be sizing her up. “We’ll be fine,” he said, stepping toward the horse.

Over her shoulder, she could see that the brown beast was back to eyeing her nervously. Its swishing tail sounded like a jump rope in motion.

“No offense,” she said, “but are you sure you’re qualified to give direction to nonhorsey people?” After all, it was his fault the animal was acting up.

She saw Colton’s eyebrows rise. They were a little too thick for her taste. “I’ve spent a lot of time on ranches.”

“And I’ve spent a lot of time in a city. Doesn’t mean I know how to teach people to drive.”

One side of his mouth lifted in a cowboy smile—which was more of a smirk. “Point taken. I’ve ridden horses my entire life. I’m comfortable sharing what I know.”

“In that case,” she said. “I’m really glad to meet you, Colton. I’m Amber Brooks.”

“Colt,” he quickly corrected. “And I know. You’re an intern here. You’re learning to become a hippotherapist.”

“I’m actually one of the camp’s speech therapists, too. Hippotherapy is just something I’m hoping to study while I’m here.”

He was giving her that look again. The one that made her want to wiggle like a worm on a hook. “Don’t take this wrong, but you sure you want to work with horses?”

“No.”

“No?”

She turned toward Flash, releasing a sigh. How to explain her life? How to explain about Dee, the nephew she loved so much? How to explain the situation with Dee’s dad? That Sharron was dead, and that Dee’s father was in jail … because he’d killed her sister. Not intentionally, but just about.

“It’s complicated,” she said.

And she shouldn’t explain, anyway. The fact was Dee had been enrolled in Camp Cowboy this season, and the only one who knew that was the camp director, Gil. Amber planned to keep it that way, too.

“Try me,” he said.

She shook her head. “No, seriously, it’s not worth getting into. I just want to learn about horses. Hippotherapy intrigues me.”

And there he went, staring at her again. It was the oddest sort of look. As if he was trying to peel back the rind of a pomegranate, to get to the ruby-red seeds beneath. “You don’t look like any kind of therapist,” he mused.

“That’s because I left my thick-framed glasses in my room.”

He smirked again. “So you mind me asking why someone who doesn’t know a thing about horses, and who doesn’t want to become a hippotherapist, is trying to put a halter on one?”

She had to turn away.

“I’m an equine intern. That means I’ll be lending a hand with the kids throughout the next few weeks. That means working with horses, obviously, so I need to get used to them. The horses, I mean.”

She sneezed before she could stop herself. The horse’s head popped up, and she braced herself for impact.

Nothing happened.

Flash returned to nuzzling the ground, apparently intrigued with something it found there. Ah. Food.

“Should I bother it while it’s eating?”

“Nope. Horses are always looking for something to munch. If you wait for him to stop, you’ll be standing there all day.”

Damn, but his accent was really Southern. “If you say so.” She gave Flash the same look she used when dealing with a petulant child. “Horse, prepare to be haltered.”

COLT ALMOST LAUGHED.

Almost.

He hadn’t laughed in years, or so it seemed. Not since … well, a lifetime ago.

“Easy there,” said the woman he’d been told was the most dishonest piece of work this side of the Mississippi.

Standing in a beam of sunlight, she looked like an angel. One of those made-in-Taiwan Christmas tree toppers, the kind with masses and masses of fake blond ringlets. Except her hair was real. He took in the bloom of color across her cheeks. Her tipped up nose. Plump lower lip.

Gorgeous.

“Shit.”

“What?” she asked, turning toward him. “Am I doing something wrong?”

“No,” he said. Get a grip, Colt. You’ve seen beautiful women before. “Just walk on up to him. Trust me, he knows what you want to do.”

She didn’t look like a criminal.

But Logan, his best friend, swore up and down that she’d stolen his son. Hidden the boy—her nephew—away in some kind of boarding school, and she wouldn’t tell Logan where he was. Didn’t have to tell him because she had full custody of the child, thanks to Logan’s brush with the law and her sister’s death. From what Colt knew of her, she was a deceitful city dweller with the morals of a snake. And so Colt had built up an idea of what Amber Brooks would look like—and this wasn’t it.

She was just about to put the halter on the horse when she sneezed again. The gelding started; Amber darted away. “Okay, that does it,” she said. “I’ll never make it as an intern if this keeps up.”

“You can’t back off now,” he said. “The horse will think he’s won.”

It might have been a few years since he’d worked his father’s ranch, and he might have been young back then, but when you were dealing with animals, you wanted to be in control.

“I’m scared,” she admitted. “Seriously, I think I should wait for Jarrod. He’s the person I’m interning with, and when he helped me out yesterday, I wasn’t half as scared.”

“That’s because he was standing right behind you,” Colt said, moving up next to her and urging her forward with his hand. “And I can, too.”

She was short, no more than five-three, with enough curves to fill a road map. But his buddy had warned him that Amber Brooks was a real piece of work. He’d known Logan since high school and was inclined to believe his friend. She might look heaven sent, but she was no angel.