But now she’d been at it for seven years, which was a long time to be at something she’d started out of necessity and barely liked to begin with. The money was enough to quit bartending from May to September, buy back some of the horses she’d had to sell, and pay Nicole, but she was still just treading water. Lily’s truck and horse trailer were ancient, and Bonnie wasn’t getting any younger. Frankly, neither was Lily. She loved this wild country, but she wanted a real house with kids and land for horses to run. She wanted to put down roots, but growing roots wasn’t easy in the desert.
“How’s the new group?” Lily asked.
Nicole picked up a bucket and filled it with weed-free pellets. At the sound, hooves pounded through the dirt as a black-and-white paint trotted happily toward them, head thrown back as he shook his mane. It would be cliché to say horses were like their owners, but look at either Snoopy or Nicole the wrong way and they would knock you on your ass with a convenient tree branch and not think twice about it.
“Nothing we haven’t seen before.” Nicole ignored Snoopy nibbling on her shirt before he ducked his head to help himself to the bucket. “There’s a loud one, a sweet potato, a creep, and a—”
Lily stopped, comb in hand. “Creep?” She and Nicole could handle themselves, but once they got out on the trail, they would be well and truly alone. “He wasn’t a problem, was he?”
“Nah.” Nic pulled out a handful of barley and offered it to Bonnie. “Just annoying. There’s also a quiet one, and he’s real cute.”
Lily lifted a brow, making Nicole bark out a laugh. “I like the occasional quiet one,” she said, “but he looked a little too tame for me. Spent most of the ride here gazing at the sky out the window.”
Before she could stop it, a memory filled Lily’s head: of a sweet, sweaty, lovesick city boy moving with purpose above her, a blanket-covered pile of hay beneath her back, the stars visible through a crack in the old barn roof. Leo whispered for her to be quiet, but he didn’t stop. If anything, he went harder, swallowing her sounds and biting back his own. “Quiet doesn’t necessarily mean tame.”
It was Nicole’s turn to look scandalized. “Story time? I haven’t heard this one before.”
“Yes, you have,” Lily said, and tossed Bonnie’s comb into her tack box.
“Which of them was quiet and not tame?” Nic tapped her lips with a finger, her hands already covered in dirt.
“None you’re thinking about.”
“The accountant from Quebec?” She held up a hand. “Wait. That architect from Oregon.”
Lily shook her head, shoving the images away. “Sun’s coming up, and we’ve got breakfast to make.”
Nicole paused as awareness landed. “Oh, you mean him.”
“Yeah.”
With conversation temporarily stalled, they both wordlessly moved to the cooking fire. The birds were still mostly silent, more cold than hungry in the breaking dawn, but the song of a canyon wren filled the air.
They poured themselves some coffee, got cleaned up again, and started on breakfast prep, knowing the smell of bacon would be enough to rouse the sleepy campers from their tents even if it wasn’t quite enough to lure the sun over the mountaintops.
“So, what’s the plan if we stop doing this?” Nicole asked, redirecting—but not necessarily in a direction Lily preferred. She knew money and the prospect of a future without any weighed heavily on Nicole’s mind; frankly, it was all Lily could think about, too.
“Don’t know yet. We can always work at Archie’s until we figure it out.”
A pat of butter hissed as it hit the hot griddle.
“What about the rodeo?” Nicole asked. “For the ranch. I used to make more barrel racing than a week working at Archie’s. I could enter, just to try?”
“I don’t know if Snoopy has it in him anymore,” Lily told her with a wince. “But I love you for thinking of it.”
Nicole growled, taking her frustrations out on the potatoes in front of her. “This is why people in movies do stupid shit for money. Maybe Cassidy had it right, and we should just rob a bank.”
“Didn’t work out so well for him,” Lily reminded her.
“Because he wasn’t a woman. Men are idiots.”
Lily laughed, dropping a handful of chopped onions into the hot cast-iron skillet. “Even if we have to pour beers and swindle every wannabe cowboy who walks in the place, we’ll figure it out. It’s you and me, remember?” Nicole nodded. “Let’s just get through this week and we’ll go from there.”
The rustle of canvas tent flaps cut through the sound of Nicole humming over the camp stove. When Lily glanced up, her gaze snagged on the shape of a man stepping through time.
The breath was knocked clear out of her.