He scowled. “I hope you don’t give up on your dreams because some dickwad played you.”
“If I don’t, it’s not because of him.” I ground out.
“Okay. please don’t kick my ass when I ask you this…”
I darted a warning glare at him. “If you have to start it out like that then maybe you shouldn’t ask.”
“Mia… did you fall in love with him?”
“No,” I snapped, folding my arms tightly in front of me. “And even if I had, it wouldn’t matter, okay? He’s the one who walked out on me.”
He looked pissed off. “I see.”
I held up a finger and pushed it at his face. “No more talking about this shit, okay? It’s over. It’s the past. I have a life to get on with. No more bringing it up.”
He stared at me for a long moment before he simply nodded and pulled his attention back to his camera, adjusting the tripod.
After Heath went home, falling into my normal routine again comforted me. And a week later, my mom announced gleefully over lunch, “My first Internet reservations are coming in!”
I was pleasantly surprised. Heath had just rebuilt her website the week before but there hadn’t been much traffic on it.
“Yep, some people coming in for the regular rooms starting next week and the week after next, someone booked the best room in the house—Roy Rogers.” The biggest separate cabin, the “luxury suite” of our ranch. Every room we had was named after a famous cowboy or cowgirl. I’d secretly named my bedroom Annie Oakley because there just weren’t enough awesome cowgirls on our list.
As much as I’d shucked my cowgirl identity when I’d gone off to college, I started to feel the comfort my younger self took in being with our animals. It was a healing experience. I didn’t have to worry about lies or bullshit from animals. I didn’t have to worry about being double-crossed. As long as they got their food and their exercise and the occasional bit of human affection, they were happy.
A week later, Mom and I hurriedly made the finishing touches for our new guests and welcomed them in. We’d gone down to nearby Temecula and shopped at the home stores for new bedding and sheets to match our theme for the cabins.
In the Roy Rogers room, the paint smell had faded, mostly because we kept it open and aired morning and night and dusted daily—because on a ranch, there is no shortage of dust. It wasn’t the penthouse suite of the Amstel Amsterdam, or the VIP suite in the Emerald Sky Luxury resort, but it was something.
Because I’d been helping my mom get our first guests checked out, I didn’t get to work with the horses until mid afternoon. I’d decided to give them the day off because making them work during the sweat of the day—and July in Anza was no joke at all—would have been too cruel. But there was still work to be done. Like poop. Because hot or cold, rain or shine, horses made poop. And I had to clean it.
I was out in the stalls and then in the barn, battling flies and bored horse—Snowball, who was not interested in having poop taken out but was very interested in love from his favorite person. And who was I to resist? But after twenty minutes of this, I was getting impatient, shoving him aside to get at the poop in the sawdust.
I was hot, sweaty, bedraggled, smelling of horse crap and covered with sawdust shavings. So of course this was the moment when Mom decided to pass through the barns with our new suite guest—who had apparently just checked in—on a tour of the facility.
“Snowball, move your fat ass,” I growled at the horse, giving him a good-natured slap on the bum.
“Mia, are you in here?”
“No,” I answered between gritted teeth. What the hell? She had just heard me yelling at the horse.
“Our new guest is here. Come on, I just want to introduce you.”
I sighed. Snowball was going to have to live with the remaining bits of poop for another day. I huffed out of the stall, placing the rake against the door but not removing my giant gardening gloves. I’d make this quick, give him a smile, a few words of welcome and a nod and be about my work. I approached my mom standing beside a tall man. As they were backlit by the afternoon sunlight, I didn’t get a good look until I was too close to turn away.
But when I did finally see his face, my feet grew instant roots into the ground and I almost flopped on my face from the momentum. Because towering over my mom, a subdued smile on his face, stood Adam.
He had on jeans, tennis shoes, a casual button-down shirt and he was as gorgeous as ever. I hadn’t spoken to him in over a month. Since that last heated night in St. Lucia. I’d thought I’d never see him again. Yet here he was, looking down at me with benign eyes that missed nothing. Not even the snowfall of sawdust in my hair.