Chapter 6

Chapter Six

A ngel heard the back door slam, which meant Henry had just come outside. He moved down the steps and started toward the trampoline where she already lay as dusk encroached on the amazing day she’d had here at Three Rivers Ranch.

“All right,” Henry said as he climbed up onto the trampoline. He kicked off his boots the way she had, and she lay on her back with her hands crossed across her stomach as he crawled toward her, bouncing with every move.

“Sorry.” He chuckled. “Sorry, sorry.” He held something out to her, and Angel looked toward him.

She took the cup of rice pudding. “I’ve never bought this at the grocery store before.”

Henry grinned. “It’s amazing. I know you think it’s not going to be amazing, but it’s amazing. My granny owns a bakery in town, and even she says it’s better than her rice pudding. You’re gonna love it.”

Angel wasn’t so sure, but she managed to rip off the top and pull out the little plastic spoon that had been affixed to it. “All right,” she said. “I guess I’m doing a lot of things today that I wasn’t sure I was gonna enjoy.”

“I guess so,” Henry said as he lay down beside her. He’d suggested they come out to the west side of the farm where the trampoline was. He said he and his brothers would often sleep out here—they’d put up tents, whatever they needed to do just to get out of the house and enjoy the weather and each other after a good, hard day after harvesting or working with horses. It faced west so they could see the sunset, and since there were no mountains obscuring their view, the sun hadn’t quite kissed the horizon yet.

Angel never took time to watch a sunset. She hadn’t been on a trampoline in at least two decades. She hadn’t had rice pudding since the last time she visited her granny in Oklahoma, which was going on a couple of years now. A pang of nostalgia and missing hit her, and she told herself she needed to get up to Oklahoma to see her granny sooner rather than later.

Gramps had died a few years ago, right around the time Trevor had fallen from a horse, so none of them had made the trip up to his funeral. Granny said it was totally fine, no big deal, and they’d all gone to visit once Trevor had gotten out of the hospital. But Angel didn’t have time for more casual visits the way she used to. Not anymore.

You could make time , she thought, though she wasn’t entirely sure that the voice was hers. Sometimes she needed to be chastised by the Lord, and perhaps this was one of those times. Perhaps Henry was right, and she didn’t have to be on the ranch all day, every day.

Nobody had called today; there had been no texts, no emergencies, no pictures of dead horses or dead men. Everything was just fine without her. She wasn’t sure if she liked that or not, as it made her feel even more unsettled. As she took her first bite of the rice pudding, she glanced over to Henry.

“Do you ever feel just utterly replaceable?” she asked.

He sighed as he pulled the spoon out of his mouth, his tongue darting out to lick his full lips. Angel glanced away quickly because she’d already started thinking about kissing him. And that would not do.

In truth, she wasn’t sure what would do and what wouldn’t. What would her father do if she started dating one of the cowboys at Lone Star? He wasn’t in charge anymore. She was.

What if she was willing to put up with the drama? What if she was willing to work with someone who had broken her heart or whose heart she’d broken?

Daddy had made the rule many years ago, because he couldn’t stand drama. There had been some in the past when they’d had some female trainers and farriers. But Angel didn’t employ any women right now. And she’d never really wanted to date any of the cowboys at Lone Star.

Until Henry.

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I’m the second son, and Paul is perfect.” He sounded a little bitter about it. “I mean, he’s not perfect, but he seems perfect. He doesn’t argue with my parents the way I do. He got great grades in high school and even went to college. I passed. I made it by, because I’m not really a school person. And then John is my next younger brother. He was like the prince of everything. He was on the football team. He was in student government. He got a scholarship to Baylor. It was like Momma and Daddy could just skip over me. Go from Paul to John and be just fine. They didn’t need a Henry.”

Angel didn’t like the sound of that at all. “They didn’t need a Henry?” She stuck her little spoon in her rice pudding and reached over and took Henry’s hand in hers. She brought it to lay flat against her stomach and curled hers over the top of it. “I think everyone needs a Henry.”

Henry drew in a sharp breath, and Angel wasn’t sure if it was born from emotion, or surprise, or something else entirely. “That’s a really nice thing to say.”

“Well, it’s true,” she said. “I’m not just saying it. Everyone needs a Henry. Lone Star would be lost without you. You lead the summer internship farriers with kindness and power. All of the horses love you. My daddy thinks you’re the greatest farrier we’ve had in years.”

“I’m not a master farrier,” Henry said.

“So what?” Angel said. “You still have value every day. Today you do. You showed me an amazing time. You helped me get out of my head. You helped me slow down.” She took a breath and watched the golds and oranges turn into bruises—purples and pinks and deep blues. “Sometimes I have a really hard time slowing down.”

Henry adjusted his hand, threaded his fingers through hers. “I do too,” he said. “I’ll help you slow down anytime you need it, Angel.”

She nodded, and the movement of the trampoline probably told him that, so she didn’t have to say anything. The sun dipped lower. She took another bite of the rice pudding on her baby-sized spoon.

“This is really good,” she said.

“See?” Henry said with a chuckle. “I’m not a liar, that’s for sure.”

Angel did like that about him. He was honest. He spoke his mind, sometimes in a fiery, passionate way. When he got fired up, it was something important, and everyone around him stopped to listen.

If he said nothing, it wasn’t that big of a deal. If he said his opinion and didn’t bring it up again, also not a big deal. But if he would go back and forth with someone and continue on an issue, trying to solve a problem, then it meant something to him, and Angel really needed to pay attention to what those things were.

“How’s Gilligan’s shoes?” she asked.

Henry let out a frustrated sigh. “Nothing’s working on him,” he said. “That horse deserves good shoes, and I’m gonna put together something for your daddy. I was gonna go see him last week, but it didn’t quite work out.”

“What are you going to propose?” she asked. “I think you’ve been through every shoe on the market.”

“Yep,” Henry said. “But they’re doing amazing things with 3D printing these days, Angel. And I think we can make a custom pair of shoes for every horse with a 3D printer.”

“3D printed shoes?” she asked. “That’s not going to last.”

“You’d be surprised what they can create,” he said. “I’ve been doing some research on it, which is why I didn’t go talk to your daddy yet. But I hope to have something new for him this week. If I can get on the computer at some point. Maybe tomorrow night when we get back.”

“Interesting,” she said, really impressed with Henry’s out-of-the-box thinking. “3D printed shoes.”

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re really amazing. You can print anything 3D now. There are all kinds of printers. You can print on doors and garage doors and stickers for cars. You can cut things out. I mean, the engineering school that I was in, we did tons of stuff with 3D printing.”

“What engineering program did you do?” she asked.

“Industrial engineering,” Henry said. “I have a degree in it and everything.”

“I didn’t know that about you.”

“Yeah, we used 3D printing a lot. We would use it for the construction of things, to do models, to see if something would resist weight, all of that kind of stuff. And I’ve played around with a lot of it, and I really think we can make horseshoes.”

“Will they be made out of metal?”

“No,” he said. “Not metal. That would be too heavy, and I’m not sure we can have a 3D printer that could do something like that.”

“Yeah, seems a little strange.”

“Yeah. So I’m thinking something maybe more lightweight, that’s real thin, that you might not even notice. Right now, I’m working on the materials. I’m going to put a presentation-type proposal thing together. If you’d like, you can come to the meeting when I’m ready.”

“I’d like that, Henry.”

“Great.” He took a breath, his passion for the 3D printing clearly evident. “I’d like that too.”

Angel looked to the western sky as the sun steadily sunk into the horizon, which swallowed it up inch by inch until it was half sun, and then only the very tippy top, and then nothing.

Henry sighed. “There’s nothing better than a Texas sunset.”

“There sure isn’t.” Angel couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken the time to watch the sunset, and she sure was glad that she’d done it tonight. She had no idea what she and Henry would do tomorrow, what time they would leave to get back to the ranch, or any of it. But right now, it didn’t matter. Right now, she had rice pudding, the gorgeous rays of the sun shooting up from beneath the land, and Henry’s hand in hers.

For right now, that was enough.