Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve

“ I t was nice.” Angel sat down at the table with her momma and her daddy. “Henry grew up on a really nice ranch in Three Rivers,” she said. “Well, it’s quite far outside of Three Rivers, kind of like we’re outside of Amarillo. If I could get in an airplane and fly there, it’s probably straight east of here. About thirty minutes is all, but we have to go south to the highway, across and into Three Rivers, and then all the way north. So it really took about an hour and a half to get there.”

Neither of her parents said anything, and honestly, Angel wasn’t sure what she thought they might say. “You look good today, Momma,” she said, and she smiled. “Daddy got your pills all weekend?”

“Yes,” her momma said. “He did just fine.” She wasn’t wearing her oxygen today, which was a good sign. She had a problem with her lungs, where they didn’t take enough oxygen from the air she breathed to maintain a high enough oxygen concentration in her lungs and her blood.

So she wore oxygen whenever she moved around too much, and Momma didn’t like sitting and doing nothing. She didn’t leave the house much anymore, though. But Daddy had gotten her a walker with a seat, and she could always be found cooking, canning, sewing, crocheting, or knitting.

Angel didn’t know how many baby blankets she had in the closet down the hall, but she sent one of those and at least two jars of preserves or jams or jellies or grape juice to every woman she heard of having a baby. Everyone getting married got a blanket and preserves too, and sometimes Momma just called the cowboys to her house and started handing out jars of jam.

Angel looked up as her father sat down at the table with a big bowl of cubed watermelon. “Shad went and picked up our groceries yesterday,” he said in his usual gruff manner. “This watermelon is actually pretty decent.”

It had taken a lot for her dad to give over the shopping to the grocery store. He grumbled about how no one could pick out produce or meat the way he could and that he might get something that he actually didn’t want, but then he’d have to take it and pay for it. Angel finally convinced him that it was far easier to put in an order over the phone or on the internet and just let her drive to town to pick it up. She didn’t have time to take him hobbling through the produce section to knock on the end of every watermelon.

“It looks good,” Angel said as she traded her spoon for a fork so she could stab a chunk. She put it in her mouth, the watermelon cold and sweet and juicy, and she moaned as she nodded. “Yeah, this is great, Daddy.” She smiled at him. He flashed a quick grin at her in return, but something seethed just below the surface. Her phone chimed with the sound that she had assigned to Henry, and her pulse went wild.

Surely Daddy and Momma would know that was Henry, and that Angel had a mega-crush on him. Not a crush , she thought. A craving.

Daddy looked at her phone too, and it took every ounce of Angel’s willpower not to reach out and flip the device over. She wasn’t sure what Daddy saw, but Henry’s name flashed before her eyes. His text started with, I hope you’re having , and then it blipped away.

“How was your weekend with Henry?” Daddy asked, every word calculated and measured. He scooped up a forkful of his eggs and ate them.

“She already said it was good, dear,” Momma said. “Weren’t you listening while you cubed the watermelon?”

Daddy was always listening, so Angel wasn’t surprised to find him nodding.

“Yeah, I guess I just wanted more of a report.” His blue eyes bore into hers. “A personal report.”

Angel swallowed, because she knew what her father wanted to hear, but she didn’t want to say it. She glanced over to Momma and reached for her hand. She folded her fingers across her momma’s and tucked them underneath. “If you must know,” she said crisply. “I was so completely overwhelmed with everything that I do around here that when I got Henry’s text about Levi being sick, I went to check on him. I thought I was fine; I really did, Daddy.”

She really wanted him to understand, but Daddy never seemed to be harried or overwhelmed. “But I ended up—” Angel’s voice gave out on her, because she didn’t want her father to hear the emotion climbing its way up her throat.

Her parents loved her; she knew that. Daddy had trusted her with the entirety of Lone Star. She could tell them.

“I broke down in front of him,” she blurted out. “Okay? I carry so much around here, Daddy, and I can’t do it anymore. It was so nice to have two days off, where someone else fed me, and someone else told me what to wear, and I got to sleep as late as I wanted.”

She took a big breath and pulled her hand away from Momma’s. “I needed a break, and Henry saw that, because I sobbed my eyes out in front of him. And he whisked me away. That’s it.”

She wasn’t ready to admit her feelings for Henry, not to her parents. A conversation about changing the rules at Lone Star was one she wasn’t ready or willing to have within twelve hours of returning to the ranch.

“I talked to Trevor last night,” she said. “We both agree that I can’t keep doing what I’ve been doing.” She ducked her head and looked at her cereal, which had gone soggy. She wouldn’t eat it now, and she didn’t care.

“I want to promote someone else to a second foreman,” she said. “I carry too much, and I’m not you, Daddy.” Her voice broke on the last word as shame, regret, and guilt filled her. “I’ve tried to be.” She shook her head, feeling the long ends of her wig brush her shoulders. “But I can’t keep doing it. Trevor can see it; Henry saw it; surely you can see it too.”

She lifted her head, pulled her shoulders back, employed her faith—just the way her parents had taught her—and looked at him as she said, “God told me too. I’m not you, and I don’t have to be you.”

Daddy gave her a soft smile and took her hand. “Of course you don’t need to be me, Angel. I’m sorry if that was the implication that you got—that I expected you to do all I did.”

“Maybe it’s a burden I put on myself,” she said. “No matter what, I need help. So I’m going to have an open promotion period, where anyone can submit an application to move up the ranks.”

“Sounds good,” Daddy said.

“Someone who’s passionate about horses and their care, who understands our culture. I already asked Trevor, but he doesn’t want to do it.” She glanced over to Momma. “We have team leads that I could pick from, but I’m also considering our master farriers.”

“Can’t be a master farrier,” Daddy grumbled. “They’re too important to the farrier team.”

“We have team leads on the horsemanship side too,” she argued back. “Our foreman is a horseman. Copper’s ready to become management, and he could move up. There are others to move into his role.”

Daddy had been retired for a full year now, and she knew more about the day-to-day operations at Long Star than he did.

“So you’re thinkin’ you’re going to take someone from the horseman side?”

Angel thought of Henry quickly. “Either side,” she said. “I think a farrier could be an excellent foreman. In fact, it’s probably what we should do.”

“Why’s that?” Daddy folded his arms, and that wasn’t a good sign.

Angel wasn’t going to back down now. “Because, if I’m running toward what I want, and that’s to maintain what we have built here—without me having to do everything—we already have a foreman from the horseman side.”

She held up one hand, palm out. “He knows the horse care. He organizes all of their care, and I handle all the farriers. But what if I promoted a farrier to foreman too? And we had one from both sides.”

Up came another hand. “And both sides have proper management, which would leave me to manage far less.” She pressed her palms together, her fingers lining up and pointing toward the ceiling. “I might even be able to get back to doing some private horseback riding lessons—you know, stuff I used to really enjoy.”

She looked over to Momma, and found her smiling for all she was worth. “That’s an excellent idea, don’t you think, Bard?”

Daddy looked like he’d eaten lemons for breakfast instead of scrambled eggs. He grunted, which Angel took to mean, Probably a good idea.

He blinked a couple of times and asked, “What are you running toward?”

“I just said it.” She lowered her hands, sure her vision was crystal clear.

“Say it again.”

“I want to maintain what Lone Star is and has,” she said, “But I can’t do it by myself. So, if we want to maintain the excellence in farrier care, and we want to be the most excellent boarding stable there is within a five-hundred-mile radius, then I need more help.

“I need people who can lead the people under them the way I would do it. So, I want to promote from within. I want both sides of Lone Star to have representation—horsemen and farriers.” She used her hands to show both sides, and then she pushed her palms together, her fingers pointing up toward the ceiling. “And then me and Daddy, we’re at the top. We’re the ones going ‘How are the farriers doing? How are the horsemen doing?’ and we get reports,” Angel finished. “But I’m not the one passing out the folders.”

Daddy nodded, his lips pressed together. They twitched, and then turned up into a smile.

“Henry, or Clay, or Levi can pass out the folders.”

“I think this a real good idea, Angel.”

Relief sagged through her, more than she’d even thought it would. “Really, Daddy?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’ll be a different kind of management for everyone.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But we have good men here. And if I’m wrong, then I’ll fix it.”

“I believe in you, Angel,” he said, some of the best words Angel had ever heard.

She squeezed his hand. “Thank you, Daddy.” She got up and cleared away their dishes, leaving Momma and Daddy to talk with her not so close. Of course, they could talk with just their eyes, but Angel kept her back turned to them as she noisily cleaned the dishes and put them in the dishwasher.

When she returned to the table, she found Daddy sitting in her spot next to Momma, and they’d clearly been talking. She took Daddy’s place at the table and said, “So, I’d love some advice on who you would move to foreman and how we would then shift things around. Looks like we might have two promotions that we’re going to be doing.”

“Maybe more,” he said. “Maybe you need more team captains, new team leads. If you had more people in management, that would free up some of what you do as well.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I have been feeling like we need a new scheduler.” She swallowed, not sure she should keep speaking. “In fact, I feel like we need to have our schedulers who schedule the arrival of our horses be the ones who then meet the owners when they come, so they can say, ‘Hi, I’m Justin, and I spoke to you on the phone two days ago about Cloudy White. Welcome to Lone Star.’”

“So you’re gonna have people who make the schedule be the greeters?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Why not?”

“That’s a lot of scheduling,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “So we hire someone to schedule things, and we move our current scheduler to a…a Welcome Greeter.” She made up the title on the spot. “Someone who makes the confirmation phone calls two days before, like we already do, and is also the one who greets that specific owner at the gate.”

“That will require a lot of new training,” he said.

“We already have team leads who know how to do that,” she said. “So maybe they can make a few phone calls on the days before they become greeters.”

“We don’t typically assign greeters until morning-of.”

“So we’ll change that,” she said, firing right back. “Things can be changed, Daddy. We can implement new systems. Our culture is good. We have good people willing to step up. Either we trust them, or we don’t. And I think we should trust them more by giving them more time to prepare than the morning-of for a new board coming in.”

She exhaled angrily. “Heck, Henry has to have a stall, an exercise ring, and his crew ready within ninety minutes of roll call this morning. That’s almost not okay. It’s almost asking too much of those men.”

“Maybe,” Daddy said, which was his way of saying he’d think about it, and maybe Angel was right, and maybe she wasn’t. Daddy could admit when he was wrong. It just took him a while to get there.

“I’m going to start sketching it out,” Angel said. “I had Ford pass out the farrier assignments this morning. That’s another thing I don’t need to be doing. And I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m going to rely on our three master farriers who already know what horses need to be done and when and who knows those horses to make those assignments and drop off those folders.”

Daddy simply looked at her, neither confirming nor denying that he’d even heard her, but she knew he’d heard her.

“Okay. Sketch it all out, Angel. I’d love to see it. And then let’s have a meeting with the new foreman and our master farriers and see if we can figure it out.”

“Okay,” Angel said. “I’m going to make a shortlist of those that I think would be great to move into a foreman position from the farrier side and what the ripple effect of that might be.”

“All right,” Daddy said.

“All right,” Angel parroted back to him, and then she got to her feet. “I’ll be in my office for a bit this morning, working on that.”

“You’ve got your phone,” Daddy said, and that was his way of saying, If I need you, I’ll text you.

Angel forced herself to make it all the way to her office in the blue and white barn that she’d painted herself before she looked at Henry’s text. It said, I hope that you’re feeling good today. Let me know if you need anything.

Of course, she wasn’t going to let him know that she needed anything, because Angel didn’t do that. If she got too close to him, he’d know just by looking at her. But Angel did press her phone to her heartbeat and sigh, because it sure was nice to have someone checking up on her, asking how she was. Surely he’d noticed that she hadn’t done roll call this morning. She’d felt his eyes on hers, and she’d looked his way just as he glanced away from her back to Shad.

She tapped out a quick message to him. Just talked to my momma and daddy about the weekend.

He started typing a response almost instantly. I’d love to know how that went. You want to meet this afternoon?

She stared at his text. “Meet this afternoon?” she asked out loud. “Where would we meet this afternoon?”

Maybe over by the East barn , he suggested. It’s real shady in the afternoon. A couple of cowboys put chairs there. We can just sit and you can catch me up on what your momma and daddy said.

Then Angel did one of the most surprising things she’d ever done. She allowed her fingers to type whatever they wanted. All right. I’ll meet you there at three.

Henry came back with, Sounds good, Angel. See you then. And this time, he put an emoji that made every organ inside Angel’s body melt into a puddle of goo. Sounds good, Angel. See you then. 3

Angel arrived in the shade of the East barn ten minutes before three. Henry wasn’t there, and she paced the length of it, wondering why in the world she’d agreed to come here.

“Why are you even here now?” she asked herself out loud. Four camp chairs stood in a semi-circle right in the middle of the patch of shade of the East barn. Men obviously came here to take a break and chat. She and Henry could be happened upon at any time, and then what would people think? Surely he wouldn’t warn them away in private texts, because that would also alert them to their budding relationship.

“It’s not a relationship,” she muttered to herself. But she wanted it to be, and that was the real problem. She made it to the edge of the shade again, then turned back just as Henry came around the corner.

“Oh, hey,” he said easily, as if meeting a woman in the shade of the East barn at three o’clock was an everyday thing.

That almost made Angel angry. She didn’t respond, and he held up something in his hand.

“I brought you an oatmeal cream pie.”

Everything tight in Angel loosened. “You brought me an oatmeal cream pie?”

He granted her that grin that lifted higher on the left than the right, and it made him look so sexy, so handsome, and so devilish at the same time. She moved toward the middle of the barn as he did, and he handed it to her.

“Yep,” he said. “I just stopped by my house to check on something, and I grabbed a couple. Figured you might want one. I know you like them.”

“You know I like them?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “I mean, when you set out that Thanksgiving Day picnic a few months ago, you emptied box after box of them into a bowl.” He gave a light laugh, and Angel couldn’t look away from him.

He’d watched her empty the oatmeal cream pies into a bowl?

“And then I noticed that you pulled back two or three, tucked them in a box, and hid them behind the bags of napkins. I figured you liked them.”

“I do,” she said, ripping open the package. “If my house is empty of oatmeal cream pies, I go immediately to the store.”

He laughed and said, “I’m like that with red licorice and Doritos.” He grinned full-force at her. “Now you know one of my dirty little secrets: I’m addicted to nacho cheese Doritos.”

She laughed with him, really enjoying the fact that he could give her that release. That this was such an easy, casual place for her to be, on a lazy Tuesday afternoon, after a great weekend and then hard conversations with her parents.

She took a bite of her oatmeal cream pie as they settled into the middle two chairs in the shade of the barn.

Finally, Henry looked over to her. “Well, how’d it go?”

“I didn’t talk to them about us,” she said.

“I didn’t think you would.”

“I told them that things need to change, that I can’t do everything that I’ve been doing. And I spent most of today sketching out different positions, maybe new captains, new team leads, and another foreman. A whole bunch of stuff like that. We’re going to go over it this week and try to figure out some adjustments inside our personnel so that I’m not shouldering so much.”

Henry reached across the arm of the camp chair and took her hand in his. “That’s amazing, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m really glad you’re doing that.”

“Me too.” She took another bite of her oatmeal cream pie, and since they weren’t that big, she could usually eat them in three or four bites. He let her finish, and then he took her trash and tucked it in his pocket.

“Trevor did roll call,” he said.

“Yeah.” She brightened, both in body and spirit. “He did a great job too, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “He sure did.” He chuckled. “I was a little worried about him being up on that stool, but he did all right.”

“Yeah,” Angel said. “I’m going to have Justin build him a platform that has a railing to hold on to when he’s up there.”

“So he’s gonna be doing roll call for a while?” Henry asked.

“I put him in charge of roll call indefinitely,” Angel said. She cut a glance to Henry, noticing that he watched her with an open mouth. “I’m capable of change.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t,” he snapped, closing his mouth. “It’s just…you haven’t changed anything since you took over for your daddy.”

“I know,” she said. “Which is why I’m a complete basket case and have kind of broken down several times in the last year. It’s time for a change. I was too just stubborn to see it until now.”

“Until me?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t give yourself too much credit.” She swatted at his chest as she giggled. As she sobered, she nodded. “Yeah, Henry, until you.”

She looked at him then, and Henry reached across the small space between them to cradle her face. “I don’t mean to be a problem for you, sweetheart.”

“You’re not,” she whispered, her eyes dropping to his mouth. “You have a unique way of helping me see things that are right in front of me.”

“Is that a good thing?” he asked.

She nodded. “It’s not a bad thing.”

“I’m gonna kiss you now,” he whispered. “Unless you stop me.”

Angel closed her eyes instead, and the anticipation of kissing him was almost more than she could bear. Her heartbeat vibrated through her body, and every skin cell heightened to the potential of being touched by him.

It seemed to take forever until his mouth met hers, and then everything ignited, almost like an explosion. Angel kissed him back, receiving his stroke and hoping that he would kiss her, kiss her, and kiss her for a good long while.