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“No surprise,” she retorted. “Whenever I see shows with horses, I always feel bad for them, constantly being burdened with riders who know nothing.” That had come out a littletoo close to her old prejudices, so she quickly added, “Present company excepted.”
He shrugged, but she thought she caught a tiny smile at her words. “We got along, Buck and I.”
“One-man horse, eh?” Dad said, and he was smiling widely.
Jackson’s mouth quirked at one corner in that way she’d come to like seeing.Face it, you just like his mouth...
“I guess,” he said, looking both pleased and worried.
“So you’re going to buy him too?” she asked.
“He’d probably be okay. He just needs a rider with more experience, but...”
“Probably isn’t good enough,” she said, staring at this man she’d so misjudged.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed.
“Assuming you’re going to be staying awhile, you could bring him here,” Dad said. Jackson looked startled. “Your other one too. You could keep them in the little barn up at your place.”
Your place.
“You’d... be okay with that?” Jackson asked her father, sounding almost as startled as he’d looked.
“You wouldn’t be the first ranch hand to bring their own horse,” Dad said easily. “And son, you’ve been working like one.”
And suddenly, in Nic’s mind, the dreams she’d had about someday making that house on the hill hers collided with him already living there, and she was thinking of what it would be like if both those things came together.
She almost laughed out loud at herself, at the crazy way her brain had put that together.
She wasn’t laughing at all at the way her heart responded to it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Thanks for this,”Jackson said to the man beside him as they watched the two boys deep in conversation while brushing the tri-colored dog, who stood for the ministering patiently.
“Don’t thank me,” Keller Rafferty said. “Like Lucas said, it was my mother’s idea, and he agreed immediately. He remembers how awful it was for him, and he was over twice Jeremy’s age when his parents were killed.”
Jackson watched Jeremy’s expression, which alternated between brow-furrowed seriousness to smiling delight, when the Aussie-Border collie mix swiped a doggie kiss over his cheek.
On his other side, Nic laughed in almost equal delight. “I’m thinking he needs a dog to take care of.”
Jackson looked at the woman who had driven them over to the Rafferty ranch, saying she hadn’t had a chance to talk to Maggie Rafferty in a while. She was smiling so widely as she watched his son, anyone would have thought Jeremy was hers.
His breath jammed in his throat at his own thought. It felt like a bit of a betrayal of Leah, liking it so much, but how could he not when she looked at his lost little boy that way?
You’re the problem, not her.
“I agree,” Maggie Rafferty said as she came up beside them, carrying a tray holding a half-dozen mugs of hot chocolate. “And it so happens Chance has a prime candidate. You’ll have to come back and meet him, when Chance gets back.”
Nic looked at the older woman with some surprise. “A dog that would work for a little boy?”
Maggie nodded. “This one’s different. It’s a golden retriever he took in from a friend, not because he made the list.”
Jackson had known only what Lucas had said that day they’d first met, that Chance Rafferty was former military himself, but now rehabbed military dogs. It was Nic who had told them, on the way here, that his organization,They Also Serve, took on the dogs the military had given up on. The ones who made the euthanasia list.
“They’d be put down if he didn’t take them. He brings them here and works nothing short of miracles with them. And any who simply can’t be brought back to normal life, who are too traumatized—which for Chance has been exactly two the entire time he’s been doing this—he keeps. They live out their days on the ranch.”
When she’d smiled, it had been one of admiration. And since it was a more than admirable cause, there was no reason for it to make him a little grumpy. After all, he greatly respected Chance, both for his service and for what he was doing now, so it made no sense.
