And Jamie felt a little bit lost.

But not here. Not right now. And not when it came to horses.

Animals made sense. And to Jamie, horses made the most sense of all.

“You have a problem, Jamie?”

She was doing her best to keep her spiked adrenaline under control. To be...nice. She’d been told, on a few occasions, that her direct manner of communication was off-putting sometimes.

“I just feel,” she said, searching for some tact somewhere inside her, “that perhaps you could handle Gus a bit differently.”

Gabe looked down at her from his position on the horse, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his cowboy hat. His large, weathered hand pulled back on the reins and he dismounted, muscles in motion from his forearms down to his denim-clad thighs.

He made for a striking visual, that was for sure. His horse there in the center of the arena, the white fence and manicured arenas, encircled by the bright green lawn, a stark contrast to the wildness that hemmed in the ranch itself.

Thick groves of pine trees that bled up the sides of the jagged mountains that closed in all around them.

It was a familiar sight, in every single way.

And for just a moment, her confidence faltered.

He was familiar in every way. A cowboy like the kind she’d grown up with. But when his eyes clashed with hers there was an unfamiliar echo in her stomach. It made her feel hot underneath her skin, and shaky down in her center.

She didn’t like it at all.

Jamie Dodge wasn’t a woman who wasted time on insecurity and uncertainty. She’d had to grow up fast, and she’d had to grow up tough. Living in a house populated entirely by men meant learning how to meet them on their level.

And so she’d done that.

Her father had been a man with a ranch to run and four kids to raise, with no wife to help him. Her brothers had been older. Gods, in her estimation, or something a little bit less perfect but no less unbreakable.

She’d wanted to be just like them.

There was no doubt about it; her older brother Wyatt wouldn’t be standing there like a guppy, staring at Gabe Dalton just because the muscle in his forearm had twitched.

It was normal to appreciate something like that. He was—she thought—a bit like a quality piece of horseflesh.

Muscular. Agile.

But that was just a little visual appreciation. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing at all to get wound up about.

“He’s sensitive,” she said, planting her boot against the bottom rung of the fence. She gripped the top rail, launching herself up over the top, jumping down into the fine arena dirt, a small cloud rising up around her.

One piercing blue gaze wasn’t going to turn her into a giggly feed-store girl. Giggling was for other women. Women who didn’t have goals of getting themselves into the rodeo by next season.