There were no similarities between her and the mare. While working with the horse, she had deduced that the animal had tried to please her former owner and been punished for doing things she didn’t know were wrong. Or she may have done nothing wrong and her owner was just impossible to please.

As that thought meandered through Erin’s sleepy brain, she blinked wide awake and sat up in bed, suddenly seeing so many similarities between herself and the mare that she was appalled. Erin’s father had been impossible to please. In order to gain his approval, she had struggled to attain perfection at anything he wanted her to master, but once she achieved that goal, he only set her a new one. And though he’d never physically punished her for failing at a new assignment, he’d always acted disappointed in her. For Erin, that had hurt as much as, if not more than, any physical blow ever could. She’d yearned for her dad to tell her how proud he was of her. Only no matter how well she performed, she never got that praise. He just set the bar higher.

Resting her shoulders against the headboard, Erin stared at a patch of moonlight on the bedroom wall and mentally moved forward in time to the present. Now, even as an adult, she was still reacting mindlessly to her father’s expectations. She also imagined everyone around her was judging her and being critical of her, just as her father had once been. Even worse, she was slipping into top-performance mode so that nobody could criticize her or look down on her. It wasn’t so much that she felt a need to compete with the men on this ranch. She just wanted to show them that she could work as hard as they could. Correction. What she wanted had little or nothing to do with it. She needed to show them that she was as good as they were, just as she’d always needed to show her dad that she was just as good as any boy.

A memory flashed in Erin’s mind of when she’d begun to develop at age twelve. She’d stood in front of a mirror, looking at her budding breasts and crying, because she knew boys didn’t have them and her father would therefore hate them. In a twinkling, Erin came face-to-face with so many truths that she’d been avoiding. As a young child, she had started to hate her body because her father had hated it, and now, as an adult, she still felt embarrassed when people saw certain parts of her, like the day she’d removed her shirt and Wyatt had walked up. She’d been ashamed for him to see her shoulders and arms, not because they were feminine, but because she’d worked at the gym to pack them with as much muscle as she could without taking steroids. She’d been afraid he would think she looked too masculine, and yet, at the opposite end of the spectrum, she had dieted and worked out like a fiend to have a muscular physique.