Page 119 of Iron Unicorn

As I couldn’t bring myself to get upset over Willow’s behavior, I patted his neck, waited for him to be ready to work, and turned him in a few circles to make certain we were on the same page.

The cops grinned at me.

Olivia mounted, and her Akhal-Teke behaved. “Is Willow upset?”

I shook my head and brought my stallion alongside her mare. “He’s excited to be working, and this is his RPS tack. He gets a different saddle when we’re pleasure riding. Wes brought out his RPS gear, and he remembers. I’m going to have to put him into the work rotation now because of it, but as long as I put him to work once a week, he should be happy. My queen and king will need lessons, so I’ll have Willow work those days. You can come along and suffer for those sessions if you’d like.”

“I would like.”

Once the cops were ready and the other horses were on route for the palace, we rode to the ranch, which was a mix of livestock and horse working ranch with a main house, several guest houses, and numerous barns. I whistled at the operation. “Do you know anything about this ranch, Olivia?”

“It’s a royal ranch that provides the palace kitchens with animal products. The royal horses that aren’t at the palace also live here. Maine teaches veterinarian sciences on site, and it makes for a good place for my brothers and sisters to visit when we need to escape Montana for a while but want to be around horses.” She pointed in the direction of the smaller buildings. “Jane and her family will be over there. One of the houses is wheelchair accessible.”

Ah. I spotted a small horse trailer, and Wes waved us over. I rode Willow over, and once close, I slid off my stallion’s back and said, “You didn’t go to the palace?”

“I wanted to evaluate your choice of pony, get a bow, and be on hand to help the little one with her first ride. Nice choice of pony, though.”

“Thank you. I had the auction barn help. What’s the plan?”

“I’m going to go fetch the girl and her parents, and you’re going to stand with the pony and meet us in the middle. All I know is that she remembers you as ‘Mr. Terry’ and keeps wanting to thank you because she’s feeling a lot better. That’s all my briefing on the way over included. I’m betting Princess Melody wants her charge to have as few reasons to be upset as possible. Once you’ve given her the pony, you’ll be here for a few minutes before you head over to the palace. Your horses will have to tolerate the box trailer for the drive to the palace. They’ll survive.”

While I preferred stalled trailers, Willow knew how to behave himself in a trailer, and I suspected Olivia’s horse did as well. I gathered Willow’s reins and followed after Wes, who retrieved the pony from the trailer. She wore a new saddle and bridle decorated with a pink bow. Pink ribbons had also been braided into her gray mane. While she had reins draped over her neck, she also had a pink lead line, which Wes handed to me.

“Olivia, he’s going to get upset, so just bear with it. He’s going to get hammered when the family meets him,” Wes warned before heading off in the direction of the guest houses.

“Troublemaker,” I teased, leaning over so I could grin at Olivia. “I might be a horse empath and a generalized empath, but you’re the concentrated empath, so this is all your fault.”

“No. It’s all your fault for being handsome, treating me like a human being, and finding my nose to be what?”

“Adorable. It was adorable then, and it’s adorable now. But I have pictures from before, so if I miss your adorably crooked nose, I can look at them. And no, I will not delete them. They’re mine, and I treasure them. You can’t take away my treasures.”

“As I said. This situation is entirely your fault. I was just innocently helping a bereft husband recover from the loss of his wife. You’re the one who kept making commentary about how sweet and wonderful and beautiful a person I am. You asked for this.”

I had, and I wouldn’t change anything. In retrospect, the long, winding path we’d taken to reach the same destination together had made us stronger—and would be the reason we had a relationship that would last. “Remember the tank thing?”

“The one that almost gave you a literal heart attack? Yes, I remember.” She wrinkled her nose, a new behavior for her, as her crooked nose had twitched more than anything else.

I’d spent an hour encouraging her to make faces.

Before her operation, such things had caused discomfort.

“I consented to that. I allowed them to do it, and I swore if I didn’t win a date with you, I would be haunting them for all eternity,” I confessed. “They even told me they were torturing me with crustaceans. They made me confess my fears. If it wasn’t crustaceans, it was going to be millipedes and centipedes. The crustaceans seemed safer. I was not expecting them to go to the extremes they did. You are loved, Your Highness. Me? Not so much. I’m just some man after a princess.”

“You’re not just some man.”

I grinned at her. “Does that mean you’ll rescue me if the lobsters try to get off the plate and still have their legs?”

“You can hide behind me all you want, and I’ll even remove the legs from your lobster if it becomes too much for you.”

“Ten legs is too many legs, Olivia.”

Before she had a chance to reply, a man and woman helped a wobbling but walking Jane across the yard. Her service pony trotted along in front of them, making sure nobody got in Jane’s way and supervising. Melody and Jack accompanied them. The prince talked with Wes while Maine’s heir kept close to Jane, ready to catch the girl if she fell.

I understood why we were going to meet in the middle. While the little girl could walk, it would take her a while to make the journey at her uncertain pace. I tossed Willow’s reins over his head to rest against his neck and ordered him to follow me, focusing on the pony to make sure the meeting went well.

I met the girl in the middle, crouching so she wouldn’t unbalance herself. Unable to help myself, I smiled at the progress she’d made in such a short time. “Hello, Jane.”

One day, she might find her voice, but she pulled away from her parents, came over, and held her arms out to me. I picked her up, stood, and took care with settling her weight on my arm, glancing at Melody and hoping I hadn’t done something wrong.

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