“Looking for me, baby?” This was his sweetheart, as kind and gentle a mare as he had ever worked with. He’d bought her as a foal, and now she was heavily pregnant and had been assigned to the foaling stall. He called her Darling.

“How’s it going today? You’re going to be happy here.” He stepped inside and ran his hands over her enormous sides. Like an expectant father, he was filled with anticipation and concern. She was small, barely fourteen hands, and he worried about how she would fare when her time came.

Darling liked to have her belly rubbed, and she blew appreciatively when Michael obliged her. “So beautiful.” He cupped her face in his hands as a man might hold the face of a cherished woman. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned.”

Pleased with the attention, she blew again, then lowered her head to nibble at his pouch. Chuckling, he took out an apple—she preferred them to carrots. “Here you go, Darling. You’re eating for two.”

He heard the voices—young, excited, almost piping—and stepped out of the stall.

“Mama said we’re not supposed to bother him.”

“We’re not going to bother him. We’ll just look. Come on, Kayla. Don’t you want to see the horses?”

“Yeah, but . . . What if he’s in there? What if he yells at us?”

“Then we’ll just run away, but we’ll get to see the horses first.”

Amused, wondering if Laura had painted him as an ogre or a recluse, Michael stepped out of the shadows of the stables and into the sunlight. If he’d been a poetic man, he would have said he’d encountered two angels.

They thought they were looking into the face of the devil himself. He was all in black, with shadows behind him. The hard, handsome face was unsmiling and dark with stubble. His hair reached almost to his shoulders, and he had a black bandanna tied around his forehead, like a wild Indian, or a pirate.

He seemed big, huge, dangerous.

Her heart jittering, Ali put a hand on Kayla’s shoulder, both to protect her sister and to steady herself. “We live here,” she stammered. “We can be here.”

He couldn’t resist playing it out a little. “Is that so? Well, I live here. And I don’t look kindly on trespassers. You wouldn’t be horse thieves, would you? We have to hang horse thieves.”

Shocked, appalled, terrified, Ali could only shake her head vigorously. But Kayla stepped forward, fascinated.

“You have pretty eyes,” she said, dimpling into a smile. “Are you really a troublemaking hoodlum? Annie said so.”

All Ali could do was whisper her sister’s name in mortification and fear.