All the King's Horses by Lauren Gallagher Read Free Book Online

know.” I shifted my gaze back to the ring between my fingers. “I’m thinking about it, to be honest.”
    “Then do it,” she said. “Baby, this is your home. We all miss you.”
    “I miss you too,” I whispered. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Go ahead.”
    I chewed my lip, unsure exactly how to word it and if my sister would think I was an idiot no matter how I phrased the question. Finally, I said, “Do you still, like, connect with the horses?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know, like do you have a bond with the ones you work with?”
    She was quiet for a moment. “Well, not with every horse, no. It’s kind of hard to get that when you’re only working with one for ninety days.”
    “True. But what about your own horses?”
    “Yeah, I suppose I do. Probably not like I did when I was a kid and only working with two horses at a time, but…yeah.” She paused. “What about you?”
    “No,” I whispered. “Not at all.”
    “Really?”
    I swallowed, my mind wandering back to the babies visiting Dustin and me at the fence yesterday, which made me that much more aware of that numb void deep in my chest. “I look at them now, and I feel…nothing.”
    “You’re probably just burned out, sweetie,” she said. “Riding every hour of every day, what do you expect?”
    Sighing, I shoved my ring under my shirt. “I don’t know. I have no idea what I expected. But…it wasn’t this.”
    Mariah fell silent again. Then, “Maybe this really is what you need. What you’re doing right now. Some time away until you get your feet under you again. You’re burned out, you’re grieving.” She paused. “You take as much time as you need, sweetie.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Definitely. I’ve got things under control on this end. Just do whatever you need to do to get yourself together.”
    I closed my eyes. “I owe you so big.”
    “We’ll settle it up later,” she said with a playful grin in her voice. “Just take it easy and don’t stay out there forever, okay?”
    “I will,” I said. “And I won’t be here forever.”
    “Promise?”
    “Promise.”

Chapter Four
    Dustin
    I’d known Amy for all of twenty-four hours, and already something about her didn’t sit right. Like the tour of the property had been the polite beginning of some kind of utter disaster.
    By the time we’d been over everything from feeding schedules to the quirks and idiosyncrasies of some of the horses—like Snow’s Houdini-like efforts at escaping enclosures or Mesa’s preference for grazing instead of walking—I was less certain of Amy than I was of Blue’s future. I didn’t get her. At all.
    She insisted she knew what she was doing, but something about her still didn’t add up. It wasn’t that I expected farmhands to be well-versed in all things horses, or have a deep understanding of equine psychology, but people like her unnerved me. There was something inherently unsettling about someone who didn’t have the vaguest interest in one horse or another, especially when they expected to work around horses. People like her fell into the same category as those who could walk past a puppy without at least looking at it and smiling. There was something missing, and the void it left made me deeply uncomfortable.
    It was getting on to feeding time, and Amy was bringing in horses around the same time I returned to the barn. Naturally, as they always were this time of day, the horses already in their stalls were extra interested in anyone coming down the aisle. Any one of us could come bearing food, as far as they were concerned. Even if we didn’t, most of the horses were fairly friendly and curious. And they were probably more than a little curious about why this person they didn’t recognize barely acknowledged them. If they weren’t, I sure was.
    There was one horse who didn’t come to his door to see who the newcomer was, and I’d expected that. He cowered at the back of his stall