and carrot sticks.
“These are their favorite treats,” he said. “Go ahead. Everybody grab some and feed it to your horse to make friends. That way we can start our journey on good faith and it will be a much more pleasant time.”
Everybody took pieces of the apple and carrot out of the bowl and started feeding their horses. Sawyer put the bowl in front of me, and I looked at it incredulously, but he didn’t budge until I’d taken my share. I set the chunks on my palm the way he showed us and held it toward the horse for it to gobble up. I shivered a little.
I was loathing every second of this. But while I was miserable, my father and uncle looked like they were having a blast. Even Rubin had gotten over his hesitation about the horse and the two of them looked like it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I was still watching them when Sawyer startled me by coming around from the other side of the horse.
“How are you doing over here?” he asked.
“I think I’m fine,” I said.
He eyed me suspiciously and checked the horse over, his thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his jeans. He tightened the saddled, adjusted the reins, then gave the horse a good pat on the side of her neck.
“You’re a good girl,” he said, earning a slight head toss and a nudge. His attention suddenly dropped and Sawyer stared pointedly as my shoes.
“We’re going to have to get you something better than those skyscrapers,” he said, pointing out my heels. “You don’t want spikes on the bottoms of your feet to go out on the ranch.”
“I don’t do flats,” I said firmly. “Unless I’m working out in tennis shoes, I draw my line at heels.”
“Harder to draw lines here than it is in California,” he said, sauntering over to another storage room on the other side of the barn. He walked back out with two pairs of old, worn cowboy boots. “There’s a lot less sand.”
My sister and I both looked at the boots for a long few seconds, then reluctantly accepted them. My pair had large clods of dirt clinging to the soles. My face scrunched and my stomach turned a little.
“Great,” I said.
Chapter 11
Sawyer
We’d barely left the farm before the girls started whining. More specifically, they were struggling with everything and each other as they veered off course and stopped dead in their tracks on more than one occasion. I turned my horse, Smoke, around to watch them, and Colt did the same, letting the men get a little ways up ahead of us.
“They had no idea what they were in for, did they?” Colt said, leaning over the horn of his saddle.
“I don’t believe so,” I said. “Their father mentioned he tried to get them some riding lessons when they were younger.” I watched as Cecelia lost her grip and nearly fell completely off. “I would have asked for my money back if I were him.”
“I don’t think money is a problem for them,” Colt said.
I nodded. Even though technically our family was extraordinarily wealthy, we never thought of it that way. Our money was tied to our work, and our work was hard. We were salt of the earth. We just happened to have a bunch of zeroes in an account. But spending lavishly on things or just in general acting like a rich kid were foreign concepts to us. Jesse had gone off to war, and Colt had become a famous rodeo cowboy, but both still worked at the ranch. Garrett had disappeared for a year to go live it up in Vegas, but even he came back. We were cowboys and ranchers, not pampered rich kids.
These girls, on the other hand, were the poster children for pampered rich kids.
“Might want to focus on staying on the horse rather than taking a picture,” I said as Cecelia passed by.
She made an exasperated sound that made me feel like an old man being told off by a teenager. “Well, how else is anyone supposed to know what I am doing?”
“Why does it matter?” I asked.
“I’m on a fucking horse,” she said. “Trust me, it matters.”
Colt seemed taken aback by her brashness and I shook my head, smiling. Jane, for her part, seemed to be a little more functional and at least didn’t have her phone in her hand. But even she seemed like she was as far away from her comfort zone