“Sure, if you look at it that way.” He played with her fingers. “But most horses get all their training in one place, and then they go bug-eyed when you try to stuff them in a trailer and go to a show. Lawler horses are bred to show, and that means travel. What if we raised them that way from the start? Get them used to trailers and being ridden in new places.”

The idea tugged at her. From a training standpoint, it was a unique idea, one so effective and bizarre that only LJ would propose it. It felt unexpected and right, just like the first time he walked into her kitchen.

“Do you think we really could?”

“I think I’d train horses on the moon if that’s where you wanted to live,” LJ said. “Though that whole gravity thing might turn out to be a problem.”

She started to laugh, and he kissed her right in the middle of it, so her smile got all tangled up with his, the warmth in her chest rising until she wasn’t sure if it was his body heat or the flood of her own relief. She wrapped her arms around him and gripped the back of his shirt, knuckles throbbing with the ferocity of her hold. She didn’t have to let go. Thank God, she didn’t have to let go.

“I was just trying to do the right thing when I left,” she whispered. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“I know, sweet girl. I know it.” He kissed her again, and she stopped worrying that it was all about to be over, and melted into him.

When they eventually parted for air, she let him go just long enough to lock the door. Not that it would help much, since all the employees had a key. LJ must have been thinking the same thing, because he took a tack trunk and shoved it in front of the door. She grabbed his wrist and tugged him backward until they hit the plaid couch. A button popped off his shirt when she pulled it off his head, and he threw it aside as she went after his jeans. LJ kicked off his boots and lay down, Andra snuggling into his chest.

She couldn’t believe he was really here, that LJ had followed her thousands of miles north, even knowing that when her father found out, it would cost him his job.

She laid a kiss on his shoulder, his collarbone, his strong throat. Taking her time and enjoying him the way she hadn’t gotten a chance to in his backyard shed. The feel of his body was so much more than she would have known to wish for. Thick muscle with just the right amount of cushion to make it comfortable to curl against him, yet firm enough he always felt steady. Powerful, but in a casual way that was so quintessentially LJ.