She crossed the floor to look at the table beside the stocks. It was laid out with surgical implements—latex gloves, cotton balls, gauze pads, Betadine, bandages, and scalpels. Quickly, she took a picture with her cell phone.
Sweat ran off the mare, and when Billie touched her the horse trembled, her heart slamming against her chest. Billie didn’t know what was going to happen in there, but she was almost as scared as the horse. If she got caught… The whole setup gave her the creeps.
As she wondered if she could lead the horse out, the door to the room opened.
“What are you doing in here?” Eudora asked, her tone guarded.
“Just looking around.”
“Not in here you don’t.”
“I wanted to familiarize myself with—”
“Private. Get back to work.” She stood with her back to the door, holding it open for Billie to leave.
With a firm click, Eudora shut the door as Billie pushed her way back through the curtains, fighting a moment of claustrophobic panic.
Billie grabbed the muck cart handle and a manure fork and headed for the next stall. To calm herself as she worked, she hummed a song she sang to her own horses when she cleaned their stalls.
“Tom Paxton?”
She spun around.
Richard Collier stood in the middle of the aisle, grinning. “I saw your truck outside. Eudora says you’re working here?”
“As of about an hour ago. Mucking.”
“That’s honest work.”
Billie wondered what he would think if he knew her motive for getting this job.
I have got to get myself to quit grinning, she thought. Pleasure had erased her fear, and Richard was grinning back at her, making her grin more. He had nice teeth, she noticed, even and not too white.
“My kids take lessons here,” he said.
Billie tried to stop smiling, but the effort made her blush. He held her eyes as she colored. I might as well take off my clothes and lie on my back right here, she thought. That thought gave the blush an extra dimension. She ripped her gaze away from his face, but she glanced at his belt buckle, at the way his shirt tucked into the tops of his pants.
“How about dinner?” he asked.
“Now?”
“I think it’s a little early, don’t you?”
Oh, God, she thought, just kill me dead.
“How about tomorrow evening? Around seven at my place, after we get the horses fed?”
She nodded. “I’ll need directions though.”
Richard pulled a pad from his hip pocket and propped it against the lid of a wooden grooming box. Using a pencil pulled from the same pocket, he leaned forward to write. The muscles along his outer thigh tensed. When he handed the paper to her, he caught her looking and grinned. “See you at seven then.”
He walked past her, headed toward the office. Billie pushed the almost full cart down the aisle, out the door, and bounced it over to the manure pile where she dumped it. When she returned, she spotted him standing beside the office door, talking on his cell phone.
She was humming the Tom Paxton song when she heard the heavy thud of hooves approaching.
Through the far arch, Eudora’s husband Dale led a blue roan stallion that towered over him. White lather coated the horse’s neck. Foam sprayed from the corners of his mouth, dripped down the long shanks of a wicked-looking bit, and dotted his chest. Each foreleg was circled in chains, and he wore stacks on his hooves like the ones she had seen at the show. With each stride, he placed one hind foot directly in front of the other, as if walking a tight rope.
Dale saw her and stopped. The horse tucked his hind feet tightly under his belly and rocked back on his haunches.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I just started work here,” Billie said.
Dale glanced past her toward the office, as if hoping Eudora would appear to explain why she had been hired.
“What’s wrong with your horse?” she asked him.
“I take it you don’t know anything about these animals. Dom!” he called.
A groom appeared from the barn opposite the one Billie had been mucking, rags stuffed in his pockets. Dale handed him the reins. Dom pulled. The horse lifted one massive, burdened hoof, swung it outward, dropped it to the ground with a shudder that ran all the way up his shoulder, and then lifted the other leg.
“More juice,” Dale Thornton said. “Comprende?”
“Sure, Boss.”
Dale stepped toward Billie, forcing her to step backward. Heat from the wall burned through her shirt. She smelled cigarettes, cologne, and sweat. “Get back to work,” he said.
He followed the groom and horse into the opposite barn.
Billie leaned against the hot wall, her heart as jittery as a trapped lizard. From the driveway she heard truck and car doors, people laughing and calling to each other. She licked her dust-coated lips, waited. Her T-shirt chafed her neck. Her scalp felt singed. She pushed off from the wall and followed him.
The barn she entered was darker than the one she had been cleaning. The windows to the outside were closed, like the ones she’d seen at the show. Two commercial floor fans roared at either end of the aisle, moving the air. She paused to let her eyes adjust. Movement at the far end drew her attention, and she walked toward it, squelching the inner voice that ordered her to turn around and get out of there fast.
Stalls gave way to open areas where horses stood tied from either side in cross ties so they couldn’t move. Dom bent forward, using an eyedropper to drizzle something on the stallion’s lower legs. Then he wrapped plastic around and around in quick expert gestures before adding fleece wraps on top of that. The horse tried to rear but the cross ties held him in place. He sank onto his haunches as far as he could, lifting one front foot then the other, then the first
