As Leo slipped his foot into one now, he could see she was right. They’d obviously been worn, but when he stood, the instep gripped like it should, and the heel was snug enough not to slip. “Still fit perfectly.”
She hummed in the corner: acknowledgment, not interest.
The familiar, stubborn set of Lily’s shoulders creaked open a time capsule buried beneath Leo’s ribs, sending a stabbing ache through him. He reached up, rubbing the spot just beside his breastbone. He’d loved Lily so deeply that it changed his biology. Standing here now, it seemed his love for her hadn’t gone away, it had just been vacuum-sealed and stored. Back in her presence, the physical memory of his infatuation was released in a deluge, gasping to life, and adrenaline flooded his bloodstream.
He knew he’d been excused, but his feet wouldn’t move. A heavy, knowing silence stretched between them. “How have you been?” he finally said.
“We’re not doing that, Leo,” she said, not bothering to turn around. “We’re not long-lost friends. I am the guide, and you are the guest. We’re only talking right now because you’re paying me.”
Well, then. He bit back a reply, knowing it wouldn’t be helpful; there was a canyon of hurt between them on both sides, and five minutes in a toolshed wasn’t going to bridge it.
Besides, they were standing in a room full of sharp ranching implements. The Lily he remembered knew how to use every one of them—there was a pitchfork right next to her, for God’s sake.
And yet he had so many questions. Lily had always hated these stories, this trail, hated the word treasure. Duke might’ve been a wanderer, but the Lily he’d known would’ve had to be buried in the barn at Wilder Ranch before she’d let someone else run things. She’d never willingly leave.
“I just wondered what you were doing here,” he managed, finally. Something ugly settled in his gut. “Why are you out here instead of getting the ranch ready for the season?”
Lily turned on him and instinct propelled him back a step.
“It’s not my ranch anymore.” She lifted her chin. “Now get your boots on and head out. We’re done in here.”
Chapter Seven
AFTER A BRIEF orientation to the gear they’d be using, Lily led the group over to meet the horses. Dynamite was patient enough to keep steady as Walter worked up the nerve to step into the saddle. Bullwinkle—as big a jokester as his rider—had Bradley on his ass twice before they’d even left the corral. In a stroke of irony, Terry was matched with Calypso—a grouchy, bitey mare—and after only a moment of hesitation, Leo managed to swiftly mount Lily’s most sensitive horse, a beautiful black gelding named Ace.
Lily held back a flash of irritation. She would have liked to have seen him fall on his ass, too.
They worked on steering, halting, and dismounting. Once they were all comfortable enough for a walk, they tried a trot. Leo and Bradley even attempted a lope, all in the safety of the small fenced arena.
But once the guides and guests were out on the trail, the landscape swallowed up the camp behind them, and the guys seemed to realize that every step took them farther and farther from the safety of their everyday lives. No phones, no computers, nobody else to depend on but Lily and Nicole.
Lily had the sense that it was going to be a very long week.
Because no matter what she did—no matter how hard she blinked, or how savagely she pinched her own thigh or stared at the sun to burn something else into her vision—she couldn’t seem to shake herself out of the stunning reality that Leo Grady had popped back into her life.
A couple of hours into the ride, she could take him in without her stomach clenching. He was still lean, but subtly bulkier in the way swimmers are—broad-backed, long-limbed, toned. Looking at him now, she could see nothing of the colt still growing into his frame. This Leo was a man who moved with ease in his body. His riding posture was as instinctively solid as it had ever been: hips forward, back straight but relaxed, heels down in the stirrups, with one hand resting on his thigh, the other loosely holding the reins.
Eager, hyperattentive, twenty-two-year-old Leo faded into a childish fever dream, paling in comparison to this man.
That summer, it had taken her forever to realize that the way he chased her wasn’t standard for him. For weeks she’d assumed he was a player, a flirt pretending to be shy. No one who looked like that and came after a girl with such bare intentions could possibly be as sincere as he seemed.
But he was. And the more she’d gotten to know him, the more she’d realized that he was usually reserved to the point of stoic silence. That Leo trusted only the people closest to him with the quiet, raspy flow of his thoughts. And right now, being reminded of how carefully controlled he was—how that same control meant that he would spend hours figuring out her body in ways she hadn’t even understood yet, how that control meant that when he’d decided to stay at the ranch with her she knew he’d thought about it from every angle, but how that control also must have been what allowed him to disappear entirely, like a ghost into fog—made Lily want to knock him off Ace and onto his ass.