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“Did you check the other mares?”
A muscle along his jaw jumped in anger. “If they’ve had that much grain, too, we’ve got a disaster on our hands! I’ll check them as soon as you’re done with Lupita.”
“We could be here all night.” Natalie finished flushing Lupita’s stomach and gave her a dose of mineral oil to soothe her digestive tract. The mare was already responding. The bloating had lessened, easing her distress. “Good girl,” Natalie murmured, her free hand stroking the mare as she pulled out the tube. “Such a good girl.”
Beau moved off to check the other mares. Minutes later he was back. “They’re fine. Nothing but hay in their feeders.”
“So why would this mare have been given grain instead of hay?”
Beau’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know. But when I find out, there’ll be hell to pay.”
The foal was pushing against the stall gate, making frantic little whimpering sounds. The mare lifted her head and nickered an urgent reply. “We can take her back now,” Natalie said. “But we need to stay and watch her at least until that mineral oil works its magic.”
While Beau led the mare back to her stall, Natalie began cleaning up, bagging the used tubing, rinsing the buckets, and stripping off her gloves.
“Does Slade know where you are?” Beau came out of the mare’s stall, leaving the gate ajar.
“He’s on the road.” And he won’t be back till tomorrow night. She bit back the last words, fearing that Beau might read more into them than she meant.
“He hasn’t given you any trouble, has he?”
She made a show of fitting the siphon pump neatly inside one of the rinsed buckets so she wouldn’t have to meet the probe of his gaze.
“No, he hasn’t. Not that it’s any of your business.”
His hand gripped her arm, pulling her around to face him. “He made it my business when he warned me to stay away from you and threatened to beat you to a pulp if I didn’t.” He issued the words in a low growl, all the while his gaze searching for any sign of bruising, old or new.
Shaken a bit by the news, Natalie worked to make sure it didn’t show. “Slade tends to talk a lot. And it’s usually just that. Talk.”
“Usually,” he mocked her with her own choice of words.
Rather than meet his gaze, she stared at the front of his shirt, remembering the feel of those broad muscles beneath it. God help her, she wanted to feel them again.
“Why did you have to come back for the funeral?” She hurled the question at him, anger and frustration all mingling together. “Why didn’t you leave the next day like you said you would? Why did you have to stay?”
His fingers loosened their grip on her arm but didn’t release her entirely. “I know what I told myself at the time,” he said quietly. “Now I’m wondering if it wasn’t some subconscious desire to see you again. Maybe I wanted to see for myself that you were happily married. You’re not.”
“Every marriage goes through rough patches.” There was no way she was going to admit that hers was more than a rough patch, that divorce seemed inevitable.
“I’ve seen the way he treats you, Natalie. He’s no good for you.”
“And you’re better, I suppose.” Pushed by a surge of bravado, she made the mistake of meeting his gaze.
“You’re damned right I am,” he murmured, and bent his head, feathering a kiss across her lips.
“Don’t.” She drew back. “I can’t do this again, Beau. You broke my heart once, and that was enough. The worst of it was, I never understood why.”
“Maybe I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said.
“You can tell me now,” she challenged him.
He shook his head. “Even now it’s not that easy to talk about Iraq. You can’t imagine what it was like over there, seeing what I saw, doing what I had to do. I learned not to make friends after seeing so many of them die. And the people I had to kill as a sniper—Lord, so many, and not all of them soldiers. I didn’t even try to keep count. By the time my tour was finished, the boy who’d kissed you good-bye was gone. The man who’d replaced him was somebody you wouldn’t even want to know. The memories, the nightmares—and the worst of it, having to pretend everything was all right. You deserved a whole man, a clean man, something I would never be again.”
She gazed up at him, her eyes tracing the lines of shadow below his eyes. Such kind eyes. And they’d seen so much suffering. “So that’s why you didn’t write?” Her voice was a whisper of emotion.
“I wanted to. But I didn’t know what to say. It was easier to disappear and hope you’d forget me.”
“I never forgot you.” Her hand slid up his cheek as he bent to brush her mouth with his.
