Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

H enry had not come to the East barn to kiss Angel. However, he wasn’t going to complain about kissing Angel. She kissed him back, just like she had last February, but this time was so much better.

Oh, so much better, as she actually wanted him to kiss her, she’d known it was coming, and the passion between them felt like hot lava exploding out of Mount Vesuvius.

Henry told himself to stop, that he was kissing her for too long, but he couldn’t make himself do it. Her lips tasted like apples and cool water at the same time, and the way her fingers moved into his hair, dislodging his cowboy hat, made his skin prickle with pleasure.

He finally got control of himself enough to duck his head, breaking their kiss. He leaned his forehead against hers and took ragged breath after ragged breath. She did the same, and Henry didn’t want to open his eyes and break the moment.

“I guess we’re doing this then,” he whispered, and it wasn’t a question.

“I guess so,” Angel whispered back. She moved, causing Henry to lift his head and open his eyes. Reality rushed back.

Oh, he wanted to sink into that fantasy of kissing Angel over and over. Now that he’d done it, and it was real, he had such a better experience to relive than he’d had before.

He reached for his cowboy hat, which had fallen to the ground, dusted it against his chest, and settled it back on his head as he cleared his throat. He sat back in his chair the proper way and took her hand in his again.

“I didn’t come here to do that, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’m real happy you talked to your momma and daddy,” he said. “I’m real glad there’s going to be some changes around here for you.”

“Thank you, Henry.”

He took a deep breath, wondering what to do next. With any other woman, he would ask her to dinner and do some reconnaissance to figure out her favorite place, so he could provide the perfect first date for her.

Henry excelled at the perfect first date. He excelled at dating in general. But this was something different. This didn’t feel like real dating, though in his heart and mind, it absolutely was.

Then Angel did something awful. She voiced Henry’s worst question. “What next?”

He released the breath in his lungs, wondering how to answer. “Indeed,” he said. “What do you think we should do next?”

“What would you normally do next?” she asked.

“I’d ask you to dinner,” he said. “Take you out somewhere real nice. Have a good time. Try to kiss you again.”

She shook her head but grinned too. “I don’t think you’d have to try very hard, Henry.”

“Well, that’s good to know.” He looked out over the fields in front of them and said, “I would like to go out with you. A real date. Not a fake weekend together.”

“I’d like that too,” she said. “I’m not sure when it will happen, though.”

“I can be patient,” he said.

“Can you?” she teased. “Is that one of your strong suits?”

He burst out laughing because no, patience was definitely not one of his strong suits. “Not if you ask my daddy,” he said with a chuckle.

Angel grinned at him too, and he leaned over and brushed his lips across her cheek. “I have to go, sweetheart. I told Levi I’d help him with the four o’clock delivery. And I’ve still got another horse to shoe after that.”

“Okay,” Angel said, her voice sounding small and far away.

“I’ll text you,” Henry said. “Maybe I’ll call you or something. We’ll keep in touch a lot more than we did before.”

“You better,” she said.

“We’ll find a time we can go out,” he said. “Where it’s not a big deal, where there won’t have to be major explanations.”

“Okay.”

She nodded, and he took her face in his hand again, this time with fingers on one side of her chin and his thumb on the other. “We’ll find a time, Angel,” he said. “I promise.”

“Okay,” she said again.

Henry leaned down and matched his lips to hers one more time. He didn’t hold on, didn’t stroke for all he was worth, didn’t try to get every last ounce of Angel the way he had last time. He simply gave her a kiss, glad when she received it.

“I’ll talk to you later.” And with that, Henry pulled himself away from Angel and escaped the shade of the barn. Heat filled his body, and not just from the sun that now touched his skin, but from all that had happened in those ten minutes in the shade.

His mind buzzed with thoughts. She was hiring new people, creating new positions, and he wondered if he would be one of them. He wondered what the other men would say if they knew he’d been kissing her in the shade and then got promoted.

A sick feeling descended into his gut. Surely she won’t promote you if you don’t deserve it , he thought. He didn’t want to move up the ranks like that. He wanted to move up because Angel thought he was worthy of moving up, of being a captain. He didn’t want to do it because she liked him.

Pushing those thoughts aside, Henry went to do his job. He helped Levi bring in the last horse for the day, and then he went and found Tesla to shoe. When he got back to the cabin, Levi had just opened the microwave to pull out some reheated meals.

“Your mom’s lasagna,” he called as the door closed behind Henry.

“Bless you,” Henry said. “I’m going to shower first.”

“Yep, I’ll heat it up for you while you get dressed.” Levi settled at the table with one bowl in front of him and one waiting on the counter to be heated up for Henry.

“Thanks, Levi,” he said, and he really meant it. He loved Levi and loved living with him, and he loved that they took care of each other. He wanted to tell Levi about the upcoming restructuring, but he knew he shouldn’t. So he kept his mouth shut. He showered, then ate, and then he pulled out his folder on 3D printing.

Levi settled in front of the TV, and Henry joined him, bringing his lap desk with him as he often did. If he didn’t have a project he was working on, he’d journal through his thoughts at night while they watched game shows and sitcoms.

Tonight, while Levi blurted out answers every now and then during Jeopardy , Henry went through his notes on 3D printing from college a few years ago. He never thought he’d use that education in industrial engineering as a farrier, but he’d been wrong. He had a few phone calls he needed to make, and he made notes of those. He wrote down the materials he wanted to ask about, and about the time Levi started yawning, Henry closed his folder.

“What you working on?” Levi asked.

“3D horseshoeing,” Henry said.

“3D what?” Levi asked.

Henry grinned at him. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I’m tired.”

“Yeah, you’ve had a busy few days.” Levi pinned him with his gaze. “How was going home? You never did say.”

“I said,” Henry said. “It was great. My mom took great care of us. We had a really relaxing weekend.”

“I’m glad,” Levi said. “It was a little wild Angel not doing roll call today, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Henry agreed, because it was. “I’m glad she’s letting Trevor step up, though. He’s a good guy.”

“True,” Levi said. “He knows a lot about horses. Not much about farriers, though.”

“No,” Henry said. “But he’s right. And they want Lone Star to have a certain culture. He can definitely deliver that, so Angel doesn’t have to do it.”

“I liked that email he read.”

“Yeah,” Henry said with a laugh. “Because you took care of Central Park. So it was like a direct compliment just for you.”

Levi laughed and said, “So what? Everyone needs a direct compliment every now and then.”

Henry nodded, suddenly sober. “You’re so right about that, Levi. Everyone does need a direct compliment about them, about what they’ve done, about who they are, every now and then.”

Henry wondered when the last time was that he’d paid a compliment like that to someone around him. He told Jake that he’d done a great job welcoming Gentry to the ranch, but was it a direct compliment about what the man could do and his abilities, or was it just a good job? Henry wasn’t sure. He reached for the journal he kept underneath the coffee table and pulled it out.

“I’m going to bed,” Levi said.

“I’m right behind you,” Henry said. The TV switched off, and Levi padded down the hall, leaving Henry in the living room with the kitchen lights shining behind him. He quickly wrote down his ideas about compliments, and he made a list of all the people he saw on a daily basis.

He could definitely start to do more in building their morale and helping them know and understand that their contributions to Lone Star were seen, if not by Angel, Bard, and Trevor, then by him.

He snapped his journal closed and headed down the hall to his bedroom. Henry wasn’t the type to always kneel down at his bedside and pray. Most of the time, he was so tired he collapsed in bed, got his covers exactly how he wanted them, and then remembered that he needed to thank the Lord for the day he’d had.

So then he’d pray in bed, his eyes closed, his thoughts grateful, and he believed that God counted those prayers. But tonight, Henry stepped out of his usual routine.

He knelt down, folded his arms on his bed in front of him, and closed his eyes. This type of formal prayer wasn’t his favorite thing to do, and he had no idea what to even say. He’d had a pastor once who’d said, “God wants to be talked to right out loud,” and Henry hardly ever did that. Only over meals, probably.

Most of his prayers stemmed from his heart, murmured through his mind, or got uttered quickly in a state of emergency. They weren’t heartfelt, out-loud conversations with God, hardly ever.

“Dear Lord,” he said. “Help me to know how to pray.” He figured he might as well start there. His momma and daddy had taught him as a little kid, but again, Henry had been out of practice for a while. Everything in the room seemed to come to a standstill, and Henry felt the presence of the Lord more powerfully in that moment than he ever had in his life.

“I’m really grateful for a good weekend,” he said. “Really grateful for good parents and a momma who takes care of me and all those around me by sending food. I’m grateful Angel and I had a chance to get away, and I’m real grateful that something started there. I don’t know how to navigate this ground. I’m going to need a lot of help. I don’t really want it to be a secret, but I can understand why it needs to be for now.”

He rolled his neck from side to side, feeling it pull in an almost uncomfortable way. “To be honest, Lord, this thing feels a little bit forbidden.” He sighed, almost angry with himself. “Fine, it feels exciting too. Okay? I’m excited about it. I like this woman. I think she likes me. I feel more settled now. I don’t feel as wild and as young. And yeah, it’s exciting to be in a secret relationship that no one else knows about.”

He felt himself settle out of that wildness he’d just spoken of. “But I don’t want to be a liar. I want to work hard. I want to do good. I want my life and my work to matter. So if there’s anything that I need to do, if there are different things I need to say or different paths I need to go down or something I need to study, I ask for Thy help in guiding and directing me to those things.”

Henry ran out of words, something that rarely happened to him. So he closed simply with, “Bless my momma and daddy. Bless Paul, John, and Rich. Bless everyone here at Lone Star. Amen.”

There was no resounding “Amen” to come behind it from the congregation or his family at mealtime. Henry held very still and tried to listen for choirs of angels who would add their seal of approval to his prayer. He didn’t hear them so much as he felt them, especially in the presence of his granddaddy, who had passed away more than fifteen years ago. He didn’t carry the Ackerman name, but he was an Ackerman, and he wanted to do good. He wanted to make his momma and daddy proud, and his grandma and grandpa proud, and Three Rivers proud.

Henry finally climbed into bed, snapped off the light, where he finally got to relive his amazing outdoor kiss with Angel as he drifted off to sleep.

The following day, Henry paced in front of his standing desk, his phone pressed to his ear. “Yeah, all right, Charles,” he said. “I understand.”

“I know it’s not what you want to hear,” Charles said.

“No,” Henry said. “It’s not, but I understand. I get the limitations of things. It’s not like it’s your fault. I’m just a little frustrated.”

And frustrated he was. It streamed through him like white river rapids racing down a hill toward their final destination of a waterfall, where he would be drowned at the bottom. “Thank you for your time, Charles. If you think of anything or anyone else I can talk to, give me a call.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said. “Always good to talk to you, Henry.”

His frustration eased a little bit, and he said, “You too, Charles. Have a good day.” The call ended, and Henry used his willpower to keep from throwing his phone against his desk and then stomping away like an angry badger.

Instead, he gently set his phone on his desk, sighed, and took his head in his hands, running them through his hair as he looked down at the jumble of notes on his desk.

None of it had to do with a horse that needed to be shod. All of it had to do with 3D printing and the limitations they had with the materials they could use. It turned out some of the lighter metals that he wanted to try simply broke under 3D printing. There weren’t printers advanced enough to do that, and the layering techniques that the metal had to go through with blacksmithing caused the shoes to be brittle and hard. They still wouldn’t work for Gilligan, and Henry felt like he was back to square one, trying to shoe horses in the Dark Ages.

“Shoes would only last five days,” he muttered to himself, circling the big number five he’d scrawled on the notebook in front of him. There was no way he could take a proposal to Bard and Angel about having to get 3D printed horseshoes every five days.

It would take that long just to cut them all and weld them all together. So they would need a full-time person making shoes just for Gilligan, and that so wasn’t reasonable or feasible.

“No way,” he muttered again, and he slammed closed the folder of his notes. Various pages stuck out the sides in a jumbled mess, and he carefully tucked them all in and arranged them so they were all standing up straight like soldiers.

He put the folder on the shelf under his desk and looked at the brown one there. That meant he had a horse to work on. He always had plenty of work to do around the ranch, but part of their commitment to excellence was to find a way for every horse to be cared for individually, to have their personal needs met, and for their owners to know that Lone Star was the only place that was going to provide the quality service that their horse deserved. And that included shoes for Gilligan.

Failure streamed through Henry now as strongly as the frustration had just a moment ago. In times like these, he wanted to call his momma and be reassured. Talk to his daddy about what he should do next. So Henry picked up his phone, picked up his head, and tried to pick up his spirits as he texted his father.

Need some advice , he said. Working with a horse named Gilligan, and I can’t find a pair of shoes that he likes . He spelled out the trouble the horse had with his back frog and how he needed something really light and really soft. He sent that text and quickly followed up with, I’ve been exploring 3D-printing options and nothing that I’ve found so far will work. Do you have any contacts or anyone I can talk to about shoes for a horse like Gilligan? Let me know.

Henry navigated over to his text thread with Bard as he told him that he would like to set up an appointment sometime this week. It was already Wednesday. He started a new text thread with both Angel and Bard in it, and said, I’ve hit a roadblock with the 3D printing for shoes for Gilligan, so I don’t need to meet with you quite yet. I’m still working on some possibilities and exploring some other options. Let me know if you want me to bring in what I’ve got, but it’s not much. It’s not a solution that we can do, and I don’t have another option for Gilligan at this time.

Henry hated sending that text, but he did it anyway because it was his job. Then he picked up the two folders he had to work on that afternoon, and he headed out of the stable, where the desks were, to get his next horse. That horse also deserved excellent care, and he could hold secrets just as well as Gilligan or any other horse.

So Henry set aside his cares and troubles over the 3D printing, and the fact that he and Angel had no plans to meet up again that day or the next day or ever again, and he focused all of his attention on making sure that Cocoa-Mocha felt like the king of all equines.

When he finished, he texted Angel privately to find out if he could see her that night, and if they could have another clandestine meeting somewhere here at Lone Star.

Then he prayed she’d say yes, because he really needed something to look forward to.