Page 12 of His Texas Claim

He got one arm under my knees and the other across my back, then he set me on Rowan like I weighed nothing. My hands found the pommel. My stitched foot throbbed, but I very intently ignored it.

This…was going to be a problem.

The frogs were more important.

Stetson put his foot in the stirrup, then he was swinging up behind me without a word, the horse shifting. Stetson’s legs bracketed mine on either side of the saddle, his chest filling the space behind my shoulders, solid enough that I stopped worrying about falling even though sitting on a living animal felt strange..

“Hands on the pommel,” Stetson said, his arms coming around to take the reins.

He had…very nice forearms.

Tan and muscled and covered with dark hair and a few little scars⁠—

I got distracted when the horse actually started moving, the packhorse following us without so much as a word. Buck fell in ahead of us, glancing back every so often as we headed toward the treeline.

It was much scarier when we were moving.

“You’re fine,” Stetson said, his breath against my neck. It made goosebumps break out all over me, and I hoped he couldn’t see them erupt along my right arm where I could feel that breath.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”

FIVE

Stetson

I did not like this woman…did I?

I’d found her trespassing on our land. She’d been nothing but uncooperative since the second I’d laid eyes on her. She had no sense of self-preservation, she was feisty as all hell…I should not have liked her.

But I was a man of few words, and it turned out spending time with someone who would not shut up about frogs was actually…kind of nice.

Damn it.

We rode in silence for maybe fifteen minutes before she started peppering me with questions—about the creek, about the property, about my family and how long I lived her and what exactly I did for a living. I gave her one-word answers: the creek was “nice”, property was “home”, family was “complicated.” Eventually, she figured out that I didn’t want to talk, so she started doing it for me.

That meant frog facts.

I didn’t mind frog facts as much as I thought I would.

The Holt Creek Chirping Frog, as she called it, was nearly indistinct from its near-relatives, the Cliff Chirping Frog and the Rio Grande Chirping Frog. The difference, apparently, came down to toe pads. Hers had slightly larger toe pads relative to body size—an adaptation, she said, for gripping wet limestone instead of the drier rock the other two preferred.

“That’s it?” I asked. “Toe pads?”

“That, the call, and they skip the tadpole stage entirely.”

“Skip how?”

“No tadpoles. No pond stage at all. The eggs hatch directly into tiny frogs.” She held one hand up, showing me a tiny length between her thumb and index finger. “Fully formed. Fully adorable.”

“Huh.”

“It’s called direct development. Most frogs need standing water for the larval stage, but these don’t. They never have to leave the rocks.”

Buck cut across the trail ahead of us, nose down, chasing something that only he could smell.

“They only call after rain,” she went on. “Or heavy humidity. Otherwise they go quiet for weeks. You could stand right next to one and never know it existed.”

“Convenient for you.”