Donna held her gaze a long, unblinking moment, corner of her mouth twitching downward. Then she nodded. “Alright. Remind Asa to lengthen his stirrups this time.”
“Ma’am.” Mia got to her feet and made a hasty escape before Donna could change her mind.
~*~
She kept the fluids going the rest of the day, stayed in the shade as much as possible, and forced down a lunch of takeout chicken and veggies that Javier ordered from their favorite café. By the time she climbed into her truck and headed home, she felt tired, but pleasantly so. Strong, fit, and not like a fainting flower at all.
It really was just the heat, she decided. She turned up the radio and resolved to think about something else.
Which inevitably sent her thoughts spinning back toward Val.
The root of her problem, she decided between red lights, was basic loneliness. She got along with Donna, with Javi and the grooms. She enjoyed her students. But everyone around her was either much older, much younger, or happily married. Donna wasn’t the sort of trainer who kept lots of young students around. “I don’t want a bunch of gossip and drama,” she had said, dismissively, when Mia asked about the possibility of other working students. Mia didn’t want gossip and drama either – and she’d seen plenty of both in her lifetime of equestrian sports – but at the end of every day, she became acutely aware that she didn’t know anyone in Denver with which to hang out recreationally.
She read a lot.
Watched a lot of Netflix.
Most nights she was so tired that the thought of going out made her want to cry anyway, so what was the problem?
The problem was she didn’t have any friends at this stage in her life. She was twenty-eight, and bi-weekly phone calls with her mom were the highlight of her social calendar.
It made a crazy kind of sense that she’d invented her own charming, gorgeous man to talk to every night. Why try online dating when you could ogle a sleek blond with fangs?
Crazy or not, shewantedto see him.
She parked, went up to her little one-bedroom, locked herself in, flipped on the lights. Slid a single-serve frozen lasagna into the oven, showered, toweled her hair. And all the while she was composing an apology to Val in her head. If he showed back up, well…she was going to enjoy his company and stop questioning it. It could be her little secret. No one had to know she was losing her marbles.
She tugged on leggings, a t-shirt, and socks, and stepped out of her bedroom to find the object of all her obsessive thoughts lying across her sofa, his head tipped back over the arm so his hair spilled down to the floor. His brows quirked, and his mouth curved the tiniest fraction, a hopeful little smile.
Mia’s heart clenched, and oh no, she was introuble.
“Hi,” she said.
“I’m sorry about last night.”
“Me too.”
“Did I frighten you?” he asked, softly.
“A little bit.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
She nodded.
“You look tired. What’s wrong?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. The truth hurt, badly, but it proved to be the easiest thing to say. “When I was in high school, I had a brain tumor. The chemo, and radiation, and surgery almost killed me. The doctors didn’t know if I’d ever be able to ride again. But I beat it, and I can. And now…” Her voice cracked. “You’re here, and I’m afraid you’re just another hallucination. That you’re another tumor.”
His expression did something complicated, pain pressing grooves around his mouth. He rolled over onto his stomach, hair falling to frame his face. He reached one elegant hand toward her. “I’m sorry you were sick. There are lots of people who would say that I’m a cancer – but I’m notyourtumor. I’m real. I promise you that.”
She stared at his hand a long moment – a hand she couldn’t touch. She couldn’t get close enough to feel his body heat, to bury her face in the softness of his hair and breathe in the smell of it. Couldn’t trace a finger down the pale column of his throat and feel the beating pulse there. Couldn’t ask him to find her own pulse in turn, to sink his fangs in it and drag her down to some dark plane where she was strong and whole.
But she could allow herself this indulgence.
Shaking, she stepped forward, reaching out to him. Her hand passed right through his, and she held it there, inside the swirling smoke that had been his fingers. “Will you keep coming back?” she asked.
He smiled, soft. “As long as you’ll have me.”
