LITMIR.BIZ

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      After her daughter was settled in the SUV, Jenny turned to him and to Cole.

      “What time shall I come back?” she asked.

      He thought of his schedule for the day. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be running into town about four. We should be done by then so I’ll bring him back and save you a trip. Just take care of Morgan.”

      “All right. Thank you.” She looked at her son as if she wanted to say something more, but she only let out a long breath, slid into her vehicle and drove away.

      “So are we going to work on the car or what?” Cole finally addressed him after the SUV pulled away.

      If Seth hadn’t noticed how concerned the boy had looked during those first few moments of the flare-up, he would probably find him more trouble than he was worth.

      “Oh, eventually,” he said with a smile that bordered on evil. “First, you’ve got some stalls to muck. I hope you brought good thick gloves because you’re going to need ’em.”

      Chapter Three

      Fourteen was a miserable bitch of an age.

      Though more than half his life had passed since that notable year, it felt just as fresh and painful now as Seth watched Cole Boyer shovel manure out of a stall.

      Though the kid wasn’t tall by any stretch of the imagination, he was gangly and awkward, as if his muscles were still too short to keep up with his longer bones.

      Seth remembered those days. He’d been small for his age, too, six inches shorter than most of the other guys in his class, and with asthma to boot. His father’s death had been just a few years earlier. And while he hadn’t been exactly paralyzed by grief over the bastard, he had struggled to figure out his place in the world now that he wasn’t Hank Dalton’s sickly, sissy-boy youngest son.

      He’d been a little prick, too, full of anger and attitude. He had brothers to pound on to help vent some of it, but since fights usually ended with them beating the tar out of him, he tended to shy away from that activity. Eventually, he’d turned some of his excess energy to horses.

      He trained his first horse that year, he remembered, a sweet little chestnut mare he’d ridden in the Idaho state high school rodeo finals a few years later.

      Yeah, fourteen had been miserable, for the most part. But the next year everything started to come together. Between his fourteenth and fifteenth years, he hit a major growth spurt, the asthma all but disappeared and he gained six inches of height and thirty pounds of muscle, almost as if his body had just been biding its time.

      Girls who’d ignored him all his life suddenly sat up and took notice—and he noticed them right back. After that, adolescence became a hell of a lot more fun, though he doubted Jenny Boyer would appreciate him sharing that particular walk down memory lane with her son, no matter how miserable he looked about life right now.

      He should be miserable, Seth thought. Though he was tempted to turn soft and tell Cole he’d done enough for the day, he only had to think about the damage to his GTO to stiffen his resolve.

      A little misery never hurt a kid.

      “Can you hurry it up here?” Seth leaned indolently on the stall railing, mostly because he knew it would piss the kid off.

      Sure enough, all he earned for his trouble was a heated glare.

      “This isn’t exactly easy.”

      “It’s not supposed to be,” Seth said.

      After three hours, the kid had only mucked out four stalls, with two more to go. The more he shoveled, the grimmer his mood turned, until Seth was pretty sure he was ready to implode.

      Tempted as he was to wait for the explosion, he finally took pity on him and reached for another shovel.

      Cole gave him a surprised look when Seth joined him in the stall. “I thought I was supposed to be doing this.”

      “You are. But since I’d like to take a look at the car you trashed sometime today, I figure the only way that’s going to happen is if I lend a hand.”

      “I’m going as fast as I can,” Cole muttered.

      “I know. If I thought you were slacking, you can bet I’d still be out there watching.”

      Surprise flickered in eyes the same green as his mother’s, but he said nothing. They worked in silence for a few moments, the only sounds the scrape of shovels on concrete, the whickers of the horses around them and Lucy’s curious yips as she followed them.

      Only after they’d moved onto the last stall did the boy speak. “Why don’t you have a real job or something?” he asked, his tone more baffled than hostile.

      Seth raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think this is real work?”

      “Sure. But what kind of loser signs up to shovel horse crap all day?”

      Seth laughed. “If this was the only thing I did around here all day, I’d have to agree with you. But I usually leave the grunt work to the hired help while I get to do the fun stuff.”

      “Like what?”

      “Working with the horses. Breeding them, training them.”

      “Whatever.”

      “Not a real horse fan?”

      “They’re big and dumb. How hard could it be to train them?”

      “You might be surprised.” He scraped another shovel full of sunshine. “I can tell you there’s nothing so satisfying as taking a green-broke horse—that means an untrained one—and working with him until he obeys anything you tell him to do without question.”

      “Whatever,” Cole said again, his voice dripping with scorn.

      To his surprise, Seth found he was more amused by the kid’s attitude than he’d been by anything in a long time. “Come on. I’ll show you. Drop your shovel.”

      Cole didn’t need a second invitation. He dropped it with a clatter and followed Seth toward a stall at the end of the row, where his big buckskin Stella waited.

      In moments, he had her saddled, then led her outside to one of the corrals where he kept a dozen or so cattle to help with the training.

      “Okay, now pick a steer.”

      “Why?”

      He had to laugh at the boy’s horrified expression. “I’m not going to make you ride the thing, I promise. Remember how I was telling Morgan about cutting? Stella’s going to cut whatever steer you pick out of the herd for you. Just tell me which one you want her to go after.”

      “How the hell should I know? They all look the same!”

      “You’ve got a lot to learn, city boy. How about the one in the middle there, with the white face?”

      At least the kid had lost his belligerence, though he was looking at Seth like he’d been kicked by a horse one too many times.

      “Sure. Get that one.”

      He gave the commands to Stella then sat back in the saddle and let her do her thing. She was brilliant, as usual. In minutes, she had the white-faced Hereford just where Seth wanted him, away from the herd and heading for the fence where Cole had perched to watch the demonstration.

      “There you go. He’s all yours,” Seth called over the cattle’s lowing.

      The boy jumped down faster than a bullet at the sight of a half-ton animal heading toward him.

      Seth pulled Stella off and let the steer return to the rest of the herd, then led the horse back through the gate.

      “So what do you think? She’s brilliant, isn’t she?”

      “You told her what to do.”

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