Page 261 of Things Left Unsaid

I find Zee watching me with a soft smile lighting up her features and I can’t help but be happy she was here.

With a grin, I answer, “We’re about to find out.”

I beckon her into the stall but she hesitates. “Will Harriet let me? She barely knows me. She won’t recognize my scent.”

“She needs some love after going through that, don’t you, Harriet?” is Margot’s cheery declaration as she bustles around in the background.

Still hesitant, Zee steps into the stall and moves away from the foal and over to Harriet’s head. Crouching down and gently petting her, she croons soft words of praise to the mare who’s been hard at work for the past fifty minutes.

I switch roles with Margot who exclaims, “And we have a colt, Colt.”

“It wasn’t funny the first time, Margot, and that was at least fourteen foals ago.”

She cackles. “Got a name yet?”

The foal rocks his shoulders back and forth, flailing as he stretches his forelegs like he’s ready to stand, which he definitely isn’t, so I move beside Zee and run a hand over Harriet’s still-heaving side.

Her exhausted whinnies have me grimacing with guilt. “I’ll padlock his stall, Harriet. I swear.”

She nickers as if that’s precisely what she wanted to hear.

Zee chuckles. “I think she’s pissed at Fen.”

“He needs to watch his back. You got a name?”

Her eyes widen. “You can’t give me that task!”

“Sure I can. Only right. The first foal of our marriage…”

“Some women get jewelry or flowers, Colt,” Margot inserts.

“Some women would prefer that if they weren’t born on a ranch,” Zee defends hotly, making me chuckle as she glowers at the vet.

Which, of course, is when I remember they were both in school together.

Harriet breaks into the standoff by rearing upright, having decided it’s time to investigate her baby.

As she sniffs him, we back off a few steps while a couple stablehands come in to clear up the birth.

It’s only when Harriet stands and begins licking the foal that Zee tucks her arm around my waist. “Trever.”

“Trever?”

She shrugs. “With two E’s. He looks like a Trever with two E’s.”

“I didn’t know they had characteristics.”

A soft smile dances on her lips. “You have to be a special kind of person to recognize them.”

Chuckling, I press a kiss to her temple. “Trever it is.”

Zee

“Ihope you know I meant you no ill will, Zee.”

Halfway down the corridor toward the kitchen on this interminable day, I pause outside the solarium that’s Lindsay’s territory.

The last thing I want is a showdown.

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