Her Four Cowboys

“Yep,” I said, turning away from her.

I successfully managed to help Mom unload the rest of the groceries without a mishap and was able to extricate myself from her company with the excuse of ranch chores that were going undone. Her wry smile told me that I hadn’t gotten anything past her, but thankfully she didn’t say anything.

Heading outside, I breathed in the biting cold of the bracing December air, allowing my breath to form a cloud in front of me as I shrugged off the tension I’d felt in the space with my mom. As much as I loved her, I’d practically heard the wheels in her mind turning, and I didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to keep the questions in if I stayed in there with her.

A hammering from the nearby barn caught my attention, and I made my way over to the building, sighing in relief at the warmth I felt as soon as I walked inside. The light from the overhead pendulum lamp glanced off Andy’s dark blonde hair as he knelt next to one of the stall doors, which he’d taken off of its hinge and was tweaking.

“Hey bro,” I said, walking over to him. Andy paused in his steady, practiced motions, looking over at me with one of those smiles that seemed to dig into the very roots of your soul.

“Hey yourself,” he said. “You get out of the market alive?”

“Barely,” I said, leaning against the table that he’d moved into the middle of the barn to hold his tools. “You’re doing the shopping next year.”

“No promises,” he said.

I snorted, but just ran my hand through my hair as I looked around the barn, taking in the horses in the barn and the ones that were missing. “How are Storm and Phoenix doing?”

Andy looked over at the two stalls in the corner, holding the sister mares that our parents had gotten when I was fifteen and Andy was sixteen. The two of them had been great foalers over the years, giving us a lot of healthy horses that we’d gone on to sell, and they were due to drop their newest babies soon enough.

“They’re pretty good, as far as I can tell,” said Andy. “They’ve been a little fidgety, but nothing out of the ordinary for how far along they are. Austin’s going to look them over later, but he put the rest out to pasture so that I could get some stuff done in the barn. Ellie, Daisy, and Gwen are all chilling in their stalls. I think they’re napping.”

“Huh,” I said, going over to the pail of crab apples and pulling some out as I clicked my tongue to get them to come over to me. They did, taking the treats from my hand and sticking around for a few nuzzles. “Maybe we should get someone a little more experienced to come out and take a look at them.”

“Like Lucy?” he asked, continuing to hammer away at the stall doors that he had in front of him.

“You read my mind,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice low and casual as I brought her up. “You know, I actually ran into her at the market.”

He was quiet for a few seconds as his hammer continued to smack against the wooden door, and I wondered for a second whether or not he’d even heard what I told him. “Did you guys talk?”

“Yeah. We ended up doing our shopping together,” I said, grinning to myself as I ran my hand over Phoenix’s velvety neck. “We chatted about a lot.”

“That sounds nice,” he said, continuing to hammer on the door.

“It was,” I said. “She told me that Mom invited her and her parents over for Christmas Eve.”

I thought I might’ve heard the hammer slip a little bit, and I turned to look at him. He had set the tool down and was examining the door closely as he avoided my gaze. “This Christmas Eve?”

“No, five years from now,” I said sarcastically.

He looked at me for a moment without saying anything.

“I gotta get back to work,” he mumbled, reaching over and pulling out a couple of tools to keep fixing the doors. “It’ll be good to see Lucy and her parents when they come over.”

“Yeah, it will,” I said, giving Storm and Phoenix a last pat before I turned and walked out of the barn.

8

ANDY

I should’ve known better than to be holding the hammer when thinking about Lucy. Although, considering the fact that she’d been on my mind since we’d seen her at Spurs more than a week before, that would make it almost impossible for me to do my work otherwise. I’d straight-up almost smashed my thumb when Adam had told me that she and her parents were coming over for Christmas Eve dinner and had to set the hammer down on the ground until my hand stopped shaking.