My gut twists at that, as I think about how many times over the last few weeks I’ve smiled or laughed when I felt like doing anything but. The only person I’ve actually shown my darker side to lately is Candice. But that’s just because she provokes me like no one else does—intentionally, too.
We eat dinner quickly, the Wilson siblings devouring their food with military-like precision, barely pausing to breathe. It puts a smile—a genuine one—on my face. They’re so alike and they don’t even realize it. Afterwards, Beau heads upstairs to go to bed and ignores my jabs about him being an old man.
Candice and I sit on the couch in the living room, where she immediately snuggles into a blanket. She passes me her phone, unlocked and open to the rescue’s social media.
“Here,” she says. “Work your magic.”
“Oh no, that was not our deal,” I say, pushing it back towards her. “I’m not doing it for you, I’m teaching you.”
“God, what I did to deserve havingyouas my teacher, I’ll never know,” she moans.
Hearing her call me her teacher sends a spike of lust through my blood. I shake it off, refusing to let myself think about all the things she probably doesn’t know. Clearly I need to get laid, and soon. Beau and I will need to plan a trip out to the local bar or something.
“Nathan? Hello? Earth to Nathan.”
Candice’s words jolt me out of my head. “What?” I ask.
“I was asking you what you think I should post,” she says. “I have a few photos from today.” She scrolls through the photos and shows them to me, including one of Maggie against the brightening dawn sky and dusky mountains.
“You should post that one as your story,” I say. I lean in closer and show her how to post it, and tell her to come up with a few bits of text to go with it too.
“I always try to make my captions and stories interesting from the get-go,” I explain. “People’s interest is lost really quickly, so you have to capture it within a second or two.”
“That quick?” she asks. “I’m not really sure I?—”
“Stop,” I say to her. “You’re definitely capable of this. You run an entire business by yourself.”
“Well, sure. But there’s still the fact that the page only has a hundred followers. Even if I post this, no one is going to see it.”
“Here,” I say, pulling out my phone. “What’s your number?”
“What?” she asks, jerking away from me.
“I’m going to send you a photo to post.”
“Sorry, Nathan, but I’m not going to use your selfies to promote the barn.” She smirks as she says this, but puts her number in my phone anyway.
“No,” I say. “But you are going to tag me in the photo I just sent you. And then I’m going to follow the barn’s account, and you’ll follow me back.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Because I have nearly a million followers. If you post something saying that I’m here at Star Mountain, they’ll follow your account just out of interest.”
“Fine,” she grumbles. And then she looks down at her phone, and her face lights up. “A foal. When did you take this?”
I feel my cheeks heat, because Candice is beaming and she’s focusing all the energy of that smile right on me. Maybe this iswhy she does it so rarely. If she smiled more often, there would be an epidemic of fainting, swooning cowboys.
“Um, Beau brought me with him to a foaling the other day. He mentioned you’d want to see the photo I took. But I also think you should post that.”
“I love that idea,” Candice says, still smiling at me.
I help her come up with a good caption, and then she tags me in it, and we follow one another.
“Your next assignment is to post every day, at least once a day, for the next three days. And try to take some videos to post as well.”
“Mhm,” Candice says, but I can see that she’s fading fast, and her eyes are already drooping. She snuggles deeper into her blanket.
We say good night and then I head back to the bunkhouse in the dark, the cold night air wrapping around me and chilling me to my bones. As I’m falling asleep on the thin bunk mattress, I can’t help but think about Candice smiling at me. Feeling her smile on me is the same feeling you get when the sun finally breaks through the clouds after a long, relentless grey day.
