Not jealous. She didn’t want to be paired off with someone, not necessarily. But it was impossible to ignore the fact that she was the only single person left in her family. In her group of friends.

Her stomach tightened, a strange metallic taste in her mouth.

Fear.

She’d ridden a horse up a mountainside today. Had weathered the animal getting spooked, and hadn’t even felt the slightest lick of nervousness.

But for some reason now she was afraid.

Realizing she didn’t fit. That there was no place left for her anymore.

“Look, whatever,” she said, shaking her head and trying to get a handle on the strange feelings rioting through her. “I’m going to go...make some nachos. And maybe...maybe we could sit together?”

Wyatt rubbed the back of his neck and looked toward the house. “I’m, um... I mean we’re...”

Of course.

Of course he wanted to spend time with Lindy. And of course it wouldn’t occur to him that Jamie was feeling low because they never talked about things like that and she never asked for him to take care of her, or baby her or anything like that.

If she said she needed him he would probably set aside how much he wanted to fool around with his wife. But she wasn’t begging her brother for attention. No thanks.

“Never mind,” she said.

She waved Wyatt off when he took a step toward her, and got in her truck, turning the key in the ignition.

And as she drove out toward her cabin, she felt some foundation in the deepest part of herself crack, shift. She had always felt like she knew who she was. Certain of her place in the world around her. And now she felt like she was looking inside at something she couldn’t understand, her face pressed against the glass.

People saw her as sad, apparently.

Everyone around her was involved in relationships, and she’d never been in one.

She’d never even wanted to be.

But right now all of that just made her feel rootless, adrift and very not like herself. Or maybe that wasn’t even the problem. Maybe the problem was it made her not want to be herself at all. And it made her feel a whole lot closer to that sad, motherless girl than she had ever wanted to be.

CHAPTER SEVEN

EARLY THE NEXT morning Gabe’s phone rang.

It was Beatrix Leighton, and it didn’t surprise him that it was regarding an animal emergency.

“Do you have room for another horse?”

“Sure,” he said, shifting his phone from one ear to the other, looking around the stable at all the empty space. “What’s the story?”

Bea filled him in on the details, which involved an injured barrel racer who’d needed money and had sold her horse to pay medical bills. The horse had ended up at a farm, which had numerous animals that had been abused and neglected for years. Thankfully, the horse hadn’t been there long and was in decent shape.