Christmas Kisses with My Cowboy - Diana Palmer Page 0,3
us the ranch. She was from here. That lawyer helped Mom get Daddy’s affairs straight and he’s really sweet on her. I don’t think she likes him that much. He wanted to take her out and she wouldn’t go. He’s just per . . . per . . .”
“Persistent?”
She nodded. “That.”
“Well, we all have our problems,” he returned.
There was a sound of hoofbeats. They turned and there was the palomino, galloping back toward them.
“Wait here a sec. Don’t go toward him,” he added. “It’s a him?”
“It’s a him.”
“Be right back.”
He went to the stable and got a sack of oats. The palomino was standing in the road, and the girl, Teddie, was right where he’d left her. Good girl, he thought, she wasn’t headstrong and she could follow orders.
“Look here, old fellow,” Parker said, standing beside the dirt road. He rattled the feed bag.
The palomino shook his head, raised his ears, and hesitated. But after a minute, he trotted right to Parker.
“Pretty old creature,” Parker said gently. He didn’t look the horse in the eyes, which might have seemed threatening to the animal. He held a hand, very slowly, to the horse’s nostrils. The horse sniffed and moved closer, rubbing his head against Parker’s. “Have some oats.”
“Gosh, I couldn’t get near him!” Teddie said, impressed.
He chuckled. “I break horses for J.L. Denton. He owns the ranch,” he added, indicating the sweep of land to the mountains with his head.
Parker smoothed the horse’s muzzle. “Let’s see.” He eased back the horse’s lip and nodded. “About fifteen, unless I miss my guess.”
“Fifteen?” she asked.
“Years old,” he said.
“I thought he was only a year or so!”
He shook his head. He hung the feed bag over the horse’s head and smoothed his hand alongside him, all the way to the back.
“You know about horses?” he asked Teddie.
She shook her head. “I’m trying to learn. Mom knows a lot, but she doesn’t have time. There are these YouTube videos. . . .”
“You never walk behind a horse unless you let him know you’re going to be there,” he explained as he smoothed his way down the horse’s flank to his tail. “Horses have eyes set on the sides of their heads. They’re prey animals, not predators. Their first instinct is always going to be flight. As such, they’re touchy and sensitive to sound and movement. They can see almost all the way around them, except to their hindquarters. So you have to be careful. You can get kicked if you don’t pay attention.”
“Nobody said that on the video I watched,” she confessed.
“You need some books,” he said. “And some DVDs.”
She sighed. “Mom said I didn’t know what I was doing. He was such a pretty horse and I didn’t want them to put him down. They arrested his owner.”
Parker just nodded. He was seeing some damage on the horse’s back, some deep scars. There was a cut that hadn’t healed near his tail, and two or three that had on his legs. “Somebody’s abused this horse,” he said coldly. “Badly. He’s got scars.”
“They said the man took a whip to him.” She grimaced. “They told me not to touch him on his front leg, but I was trying to look at his hoof and I forgot.”
“His hoof?”
“He was favoring that one.” She pointed to it.
He patted the horse’s shoulder, bent, and pulled up the horse’s hoof. He grimaced. “Good God!”
She looked, too, but she didn’t see anything. “What is it?”
“His hooves are in really bad shape. Has a vet seen him?”
“I don’t know. The animal control man brought him to the ranch for us. Mom was calling to get the vet, even before he knocked part of the fence down and ran away. She’s going to be really mad.”
Parker noted that the horse had no saddle on. “You didn’t try to ride him bareback, did you?” he asked.
She grimaced. “Mister, I don’t even know how to put a saddle on him. I sure can’t ride him. I’ve never ridden a horse.”
His black eyes widened. “You don’t know how to ride?”
“Well, Mom does,” she said hesitantly. “She grew up on a ranch in Montana. That’s where she met my daddy. She can ride most anything, but she’s been on the phone all day trying to get the movers to find a missing box. They think it went back East somewhere, but they haven’t done much about finding it. It had a lot of Daddy’s things. Mom’s furious.”