She turned her gaze back to Madison, who was riding in their direction now, beaming. The pup had fallen into step with Ruffles—Leviticus watched from the shade of the barn—and they sure made a picture, all of them, an image straight off the front of a Western greeting card.
When Kendra spoke, she jarred him a little. “How do we get past this, Hutch?” she asked very softly.
“This what?” Hutch asked just as quietly.
Her shoulders moved in a semblance of a shrug. “The awkwardness, I guess,” she said, and there was the smallest quaver in her voice. She paused, shook her head slightly, as if to clear her brain. “I can’t pretend that nothing happened between us,” she went on as Madison and Ruffles and the dogs drew nearer. “But I keep trying to do just that and it makes me crazy.”
Hutch chuckled. “Well, then,” he reasoned, “why don’t you stop trying and just let things be what they are? It’s not as if any of us have much of a choice in the matter, anyhow.”
She sighed and kept her eyes on Madison, but she seemed a little less edgy than before. “You’re right,” she said. “Much as we might want to change the past, we can’t.”
He wanted to ask what she would change, if she could, but Opal’s station wagon pulled through the gate just then and came barreling up the driveway.
“Look!” Madison called, as Opal got out of her car. “I’m riding a horse!”
“You sure enough are,” Opal agreed, her smile wide. Her gaze swept over Hutch and Kendra, and the two other horses waiting to be ridden. “You about done with riding now?” she asked the child. “Because I’ve got supper to start and I could sure use a hand with the job.”
Madison, Hutch suspected, could have stayed right there on Ruffles’ back for days on end, given the opportunity, but she turned out to be the helpful sort.
“I guess I’m done,” she said. “For right now, anyway.”
Hutch approached and lifted her down off Ruffles’s back. “You go on ahead with Opal,” he told the little girl when she looked up at him in concern. He could guess what she was thinking. “I’ll tend to Ruffles, and show you how to do that another time.”
Madison nodded solemnly and patted the pony’s nose. “I wish you were my very own,” she told Ruffles. Then she smiled up at Kendra, waiting for a nod.
Kendra did nod, a little reluctantly, Hutch thought.
Opal put out a hand to Madison, Madison took it without hesitation, and they headed toward the house, chatting amicably, the dogs ambling along behind them.
“That was slick,” Kendra observed with wry amusement, watching as the four disappeared through the kitchen doorway.
Hutch took Ruffles’s reins and led the pony toward the barn door. “I didn’t put Opal up to anything, if that’s what you mean,” he said, grinning back at her. “Make sure those horses don’t take off. I’ll be right back.”
I’ll be right back.
Kendra sighed. Now she’d have to go riding—alone with Hutch Carmody, no less—and she had nobody to blame but herself. She’d put herself in this position, sealed her own fate.
She was crazy.
Gingerly, she gathered the reins of the two horses and waited for Hutch to unsaddle Ruffles and tuck her away in a stall. And she waited.
She recognized the big gelding as Remington, Hutch’s favorite mount, but the long-legged mare was a stranger.
“I have a child to raise and a business to run,” she told the mare in a hurried undertone. “I cannot afford to break any bones, so don’t try anything fancy.”
The mare nickered companionably, as if promising to behave herself.
Hutch came back before Kendra was ready for him to, taking Remington’s reins from her hands. “That’s Coco,” he said, nodding at the mare. “She’s a roper, so she’s lively and fast, but she’s fairly kindhearted, too.”
“Fairly?” Kendra echoed, waiting for muscle memory to kick in so she could mount up without making an even bigger fool of herself than she already had.
Hutch laughed, steadied the mare for her by taking a light hold on the bridle strap. “This isn’t a dude ranch,” he pointed out, clearly enjoying her trepidation. “Except for Ruffles, all these horses earn their keep, one way or another.”
Having nothing to say to that—nothing civil, that is—Kendra reached up, gripped the saddle horn with damp palms, shoved her left foot in the stirrup and hoisted.
Hutch gave her a startling boost by splaying one hand across her backside and pushing.