It seemed to Sarah that Lindsey had been waiting most of her life for a chance to live a normal existence, instead of one that was spent having one medical procedure after another, being in and out of the hospital, and never getting to be the little girl that she deserved a chance to be. Sarah knew life didn’t always work the way it was planned. Her own life was proof of that, but she had to believe that Lindsey would someday have the life that she deserved. She just needed to hang in there until a heart could be found for her. Until then all they could do was wait.
Sarah watched as David once again tangled the reins as he tried to apply the bridle. She held back a laugh when Fancy turned and gave him one of her haughty looks that plainly said she wasn’t impressed. David had arrived with a new air of confidence until Sarah had told him that he would be tacking his own horse that day. It might have been that distraction that had made him agree for Jack to take Davey up to the house to see one of the smaller ponies; though it hadn’t been enough for him to not insist that they come back as soon as they finished. She had expected her father-in-law to balk at that instruction, but Jack seemed to understand that David wasn’t trying to be rude. He just felt the need to watch over his son a little more than the normal parent.
“It looked so easy in the book. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong,” he said as he let go of the tangled reins and moved away from the horse.
Jumping down from the gate she had been sitting on, Sarah reached out and took the bridle from him and once more showed him how to make sure that it didn’t tangle with the other straps. Taking pity on all three of them, she finished putting on the bridle. With the bit safely in Fancy’s mouth, she handed the reins to David and mounted Sugar.
“Come on, let’s go have some fun,” Sarah said as she made a clicking sound with her tongue and started across to where she’d opened the gate to a large pasture. After a minute of a very one-sided conversation, Fancy decided she’d let David follow behind Sarah.
“Remember feet all the way in the stirrup, turned in like you’re hugging Fancy with your legs,” she said as she rode up to him then reached over and placed her hands on his lower back and abdomen.
“Shoulders back and back straight,” she said as felt his abdomen tighten under her hand. She ran her other hand up his back to his shoulders.
“There. That’s perfect,” she said, then cleared her throat as she moved her hands away from him. Why did this have to be so awkward? She was just trying to teach him the correct way to sit. There was no reason for it to feel so intimate every time they touched. She whipped Sugar around so that he couldn’t see her face and waited for him and Fancy to catch up with her.
For a minute there was only silence between the two of them.
“This is beautiful,” he said as they reached the end of the pasture then turned around to face the stretch of green they had just ridden across and the white stables beyond that. “You must love living here.”
There had been a time when the answer to that would have come easily. She had grown up not far south of Houston on a much smaller farm where her father and brother raised cattle, so she’d felt right at home after she had married Kolton and they’d moved to the farm to live with Jack. It had been a busy time in their life with Kolton starting his first job after he had graduated with an architect degree and her starting her first job as a nurse. They’d both come home exhausted but excited about their new lives together. They’d been married a year when Jack had given them the land to build their own home, declaring that the house was just too small for the three of them though they both had known Jack was trying to push them out the door so that they could start a family.
After Kolton and Cody were gone she’d known that she could never live in the house that had been so full of promises. She’d planned to move back to the city until Jack had invited her to move back in with him. She couldn’t have said no to the man who she had come to love as a second father who was hurting as much as she was.
“It is beautiful,” she said, thinking of the house that lay just over the next hill.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think,” David said as he began rubbing a hand down Fancy’s neck. “You lived here with your husband and son?”
“Yes,” she said as she climbed down and looked back away from the pasture to where the woods hid the home the three of them had shared. “We made a life here together. It was all we ever wanted. Kolton was just as horse crazy as I am and we couldn’t think of a better place to raise our family. But that part of my life is gone now.”
David dismounted, being careful to hold Fancy’s reins as Sarah had taught him so that he could still control her. He could tell that Sarah needed to talk to someone about the loss she’d suffered. She was still holding so much pain inside of her that it couldn’t be good for her.
“I don’t talk about my ex-wife or my divorce either. Not that I’m comparing the two. But sometimes I do wish I could talk about it. It’s like by
