miracle this time—an unexpected guest, someone with the right know-how or the right resources who will come to his horse’s rescue.”
“Angels unaware,” Beth said.
“Something like that. Night, Beth.”
Beth didn’t want him to go just yet. “Night.”
She lingered at the door while it closed, hoping he might intuit what she didn’t have the courage to say.
When he didn’t, she committed to her original plan. She descended the steps in a quiet rush, wanting to whisk the saddle away before he could object to what he didn’t know. She wanted to be the one who did the good works, who made the incredible rescue. She couldn’t help herself. It was her father’s blood running through her heart.
On the driveway, her smooth-soled boots skimmed the dirt, whispering back to her truck.
“It’s not your right to do it,” Jacob said. Beth gasped and whirled at the sound of his voice, unexpected and loud and straight into her ear, as if he’d been standing on her shoulder. “It’s not your gift to give.”
But the ranch house door was shut tight under the cone of the porch light, and the bright window revealed nothing inside but heavy furniture and cluttered tabletops. At the back of the house, a different door closed heavily. Jacob was headed out to the bunkhouse to check on Wally already.
Beth let her captured breath leave her lungs. She looked around for an explanation, because she didn’t want to accept that the words might have been uttered by a guilty conscience.
At the base of the porch steps, crouching in such darkness that its black center sank into its surroundings, was the form of an unusually large dog. Erect ears, broad head, slender body. A wolf. She had passed that spot so closely seconds ago that she could have reached out and stroked its neck.
She took one step backward. Of course, her mind was dreaming this up because Wally had suggested a wolf to her. If he hadn’t, she might have said the silhouette had the outline of a snowman. An inverted snowman guarding the house from her lies. In May.
Beth stared at it for several seconds, oddly unable to recall the landscape where she’d spent her entire life. She was distressed not to be able to say from this distance and angle whether that was a shrub planted there, or a fence post, or an old piece of equipment that hadn’t made it back into the supply shed. When the shape of its edges seemed to shift and shudder without actually moving at all, she decided that her eyes were being tricked by the darkness.
Convincing herself of this was almost as easy as justifying her saddle theft.
She turned away from the house and hurried onward, looking back only once.
2
The Kandinskys’ horse ranch lay a half hour’s drive from the Blazing B. It seemed to belong in the rolling hills of Kentucky or New York, not to these simple plains. The white fences and ornamental gates were out of place in this land of wood posts and steel rails. The Rolls Royces parked in house-sized garages were entirely impractical, too good to drive down the two-lane highways. But the family members, though a bit standoffish, were nationally respected breeders of Fox Trotters and Morgans. They made good money in this valley acquiring reliable working stock for the ranchers. It seemed reasonable that Mr. Kandinsky’s brother-in-law, a Thoroughbred breeder transferring some of his livelihood to a new ranch in California, would pick this place for a rest stop along the way.
Phil had given Beth directions to the horse breeder’s secondary stables, a barn reserved for the workhorses rather than the studs. She parked near the sliding door that opened onto the stable alley.
Beth kept a first-aid kit for animals behind the driver’s seat. She withdrew it, not sure if the ointments and disinfectants and dressings and poultices would be at all relevant. But the weight of the bag felt good in her hands, like confidence.
She entered the barn. Hay scattered across the ground silenced her footsteps. The entire facility, which boasted twelve stalls, was lined with fresh wheat straw and thick rubber mats and shining pine tongue-and-groove siding. If these quarters were for the lowly workers, the studs must have been housed in a crystal palace. Several of the stalls were occupied, but Phil leaned out of the box at the far end and motioned her to come.
She hoped that the horse’s condition was not as bad as he had made it out to be