"When did she call?"
"Around two."
For the first time, he noticed that there was a moving van parked outside the house and boxes were being carted out into it. He turned away from the useless realtor and headed for the man who seemed to be in charge of the move. "Where is all of this stuff going?" he asked.
The man, who was no slouch, himself, in the height or weight department, sized him up and said, "Storage."
Damn. No lead there.
But if she thought she could just disappear from his life—and take his heart with her—she had another thing coming. He'd find her, if it was the last thing he did in this life.
Ally closed the stall door behind her and heard the mare she'd just left whickering behind her, impatient for the sweet mash she was just about to give her. She rubbed the sweat off her forehead and onto the t-shirt that covered her arm, not wanting to touch her dirty hands to her face, although she knew that was a lost cause. It was just inevitable that she started out each day clean as a whistle but ended it covered in muck and mud.
Good thing she wasn't paying the water bill on the small house she was living in on the Circle L Ranch. She chuckled. It could barely be called a house. Her bedroom in her parents' house—while she was growing up—was probably bigger than the entire thing. It was about six hundred feet square, with a tiny galley kitchen, a bathroom and a living/dining/bedroom combination. But it suited her just fine. She didn't need or want anything fancy. She just wanted to work with the horses.
That was essentially what she'd said to J.D. Landers when she'd applied to work on his ranch.
He'd called her on her lack of experience in taking care of them. They'd boarded hers, of course; there wasn't room at home or at the lake for a horse, but she'd managed to convince him that she knew what to do—and she did, reassuring him and earning points at the same time—by telling him that she would never have endangered a horse by saying she knew how to care for them when she didn't.
She'd liked J.D. from the start. His operation wasn't nearly as big as some she'd applied to, but he had the small house to offer rent free, even though he wasn't paying quite as well as the big guys. And he loved horses at least as much as she did. They were his bread and butter, although he did run a small herd of cattle, mostly as supplemental income.
He'd told her she was on probation for three months, told her what he expected her to do that first day, and then let her at it. He wasn't one to hang around and micromanage. He had too much crap to get done himself.
She'd gotten that stuff done and much more on top of it. She did such a good job that he took her off probation after her first week and gave her more valuable horses to take care of.
Like the ones she was grooming and feeding now. One down, seven to go.
She entered Sundance's stall with a peppermint in hand, knowing that was the price of passage. He was a big palomino stallion with an unusually sweet disposition, though. And he had a distinct preference for women, so J.D. had been only too happy to have her caring for him. He'd gotten enough bruises from the brute.
Except for the sounds of horses contentedly munching the hay she'd given them all first to keep them occupied, it was wonderfully quiet in the barn, and although most hated it, she just loved the earthy smell of barns, and she always had.
"Ally?"
It was so quiet that she barely heard it, but then she couldn't have missed it, either. That was the voice that haunted her nightmares every night and her daydreams every day. She froze, and Sundance began to fret and dance about at her sudden tension, which wasn't a good thing.
"Ally?" again, this time louder and getting closer.
There was nothing for it; there was no place to go. He'd found her, and she was well and truly trapped in a place she'd thought—hoped—would be safe from him. All she'd wanted in this world was to be as far away from him and the awful things that had happened—her failure in two important areas of her life—business and, well, pleasure or relationships or whatever the hell it was that they'd had.
But she should have known he wouldn't give up looking for her until he'd found her.
The third time he said her name, he was right there, looking at her through the door of the stall in all of her horse shit covered glory. "Allegra." He instilled a wealth of emotion into just that one word, staring at her like a wolf stares at a limping rabbit.
Chapter 9
And Sundance, of course, just had to get his two cents in, taking an immediate dislike to this big new man standing so close to him. Ally was just another obstacle to bump into and, inevitably, step on, of course.
"Son of a bitch!" Ally screamed. "Move over, you glorified hunk of meat!" She reached around and grabbed his halter, using it to guide him away from her, where she'd be safe from having sixteen hundred pounds of beast take out her other foot. She made it out the stall door, limping badly, but she didn't let that hinder her in the least. She got right up into Enzo's face and screamed, "Are you dense? Couldn't you see that he was agitated—and he fucking stepped on me—because of you? Are you that oblivious?"
Enzo didn't pay any mind to what she was saying. He simply bent down and gathered her up into his arms to get her off her foot, stalking over to where
