Page 63 of The Mistletoe Kisser
“I’ll tell you why,” she said, warming to the topic. “Because you need to be challenged with a puzzle, a mystery. We all do to a point, but you especially. There’s a special kind of chemistry between people when there’s interest. When you don’t already understand every motivation. When you’re surprised by a reaction and feel the need to dig into it and get to the bottom.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm ‘interesting point’ or hmm ‘shut up’?” she asked.
“Hmm, somewhere in the middle,” he decided. Ryan carefully leaned forward and patted Shakira on the neck.
She knew better than to ask him if he was having fun. Instead of admitting it, he’d provide a list of criticisms for the experience before even attempting to decide if there were any positives. But somewhere, deep down, Grumpy Ryan was having a nice time.
“You know, the last twenty-four hours have felt like an out-of-body experience,” he said.
“Every once in a while, we all need one of those,” she sympathized.
“Will Magnolia come to live with you when you finish your barn?” Ryan asked, changing the subject.
“She will. As long as I have another horse. She came from a big riding stable operation in Pennsylvania. An unstable ex-husband broke into the barn and shot the trainer. The trainer survived, the bad guy went to jail, but Magnolia here was traumatized. The students and staff couldn’t seat her anymore and put her up for sale. I fell in love with her the second I saw her online, and I think she liked me at first sight. She’s doing really well here.”
“How do you deal with it?” he asked with a frown aimed between his mount’s ears.
“Deal with what?”
“The cruelty. The neglect. You’re not a DEA agent busting up drug rings. You’re an animal lover caring for animals that are in pain or traumatized. Some you can’t save.”
She pulled up on the reins and brought Magnolia to a halt before exhaling a stream of silvery breath to the sky.
The view from the ridge of the hill was a picture-perfect winter scene. Fields rolled out gently before them. A small pond where the Pierce men were rumored to skinny dip on occasion turned almost turquoise under the afternoon sky. Patches of woods and sentry lines of pine trees popped green against the white and blue.
“It’s not easy,” she admitted. “It can be crushing to try to save a starving calf, to see the fear in a horse’s eyes when you try to approach it after years under bad hands. To know you can’t save them all or give them all the life they actually deserve.”
“I hate that for you,” he said with a quiet vehemence that she found oddly comforting.
“Thank you,” she said, not daring to look at him. “But the key is to find the good and to hold on to it with both hands. I’m there when a calf takes its first breath in the spring. I get to watch sheep unburdened of their winter wool dance around the pasture in the spring. I fix baby goats’ legs so they can keep up with their siblings. I celebrate every birth, every recovery with the family.”
“That means you also mourn every loss with them,” he pointed out astutely.
“Ah, but there’s no good without the bad, Ryan. No life without death. No celebration without mourning.”
“But someday, you’ll watch Magnolia take her last breath,” he said. Not cruelly. Almost like he was warning her, like he was afraid she hadn’t protected herself enough from the eventuality.
She reached out and laid her gloved hand on his. “I know. But when she does, I’ll know that I gave her the best possible life I could between our meeting and our parting.”
He wrapped his fingers around her fist. “You have to know how terrifying that concept is to me.”
“Maybe that’s why you think you can look for a life partner and not the love of your life.”
“I like certainties. Guarantees.”
“You don’t get a lot of those in real life,” she said with sympathy. “This land? It was tended by John Pierce. Phoebe’s first husband and father to the Pierce brothers. This was a dilapidated, broken-down farm when he took it over. He grew crops, raised a family, taught the whole town a lot about respecting the land and each other. To honor him, his family carried on with his legacy. They took what he’d built and found ways to make it their own. Carter works the land. Beckett’s the natural-born leader. And Jax has the artistic soul. Phoebe remarried, but she still lives on the land she and John worked together. Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean they all don’t still love him.”
Sammy thought about John on that long-ago Winter Solstice, beaming at her in that flannel coat. “For a long time, I thought it was your cousin who talked me into being a vet, but I think the credit is really due to John Pierce. We all leave fingerprints on each other. His mattered so much to so many people. I want mine to matter too.”
“Some fingerprints shouldn’t be left behind,” Ryan said softly. His grip on her hand tightened, and she wondered who had left their fingerprints on him.
“No, they shouldn’t,” she agreed. “Maybe that’s why we gravitate toward people and animals with the right kind of prints.”
They sat shoulder-to-shoulder on their mounts and took in the panorama.
“This doesn’t suck,” he said finally.
