“No, it’s okay.” She swept her sunglasses off the floor and waved them toward the stallion now standing patiently at his side. “That can count as your first interview question.”

A smile tickled his lips. “Hell, if all you needed was to see if I could hold a horse, you might as well start filling out my W-4s.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Mr. Lawler said. “We’re not hiring.”

Andra scowled at her father, the pallor that followed her attack starting to give way under a flush of anger. “You agreed to let me place the ad.”

“I agreed if an appropriate candidate came along . . .” He cleared his throat.

LJ’s jaw locked, and this time, he put the reins in Andra’s hands without asking permission. “I’ll wait at the house,” he said to her. “If you want to speak to me about a job, that’s where I’ll be.”

He headed for the exit, his insides all fists and fire. He was all too aware that he’d just turned his back on the owner: an owner who’d decided after his first glance that he wasn’t an “appropriate candidate” for employment. His new chance here was cinders, and there was no point even glancing at the beautiful horses he passed.

His friends had warned him how it would be out west, but fool he was, he figured anyplace had to have more opportunity for a black cowboy than southern Louisiana.

“You agreed I could pick someone I was comfortable with,” Andra’s voice hissed behind him as he tried to shut out the sounds of the argument he was leaving behind.

“Comfortable? He wasn’t here five minutes and you were having a panic attack!” Mr. Lawler protested. “I don’t care about training more horses per year, Andra. What I care about—” Mr. Lawler’s voice was lost in the snap of the breeze as LJ’s long legs carried him farther from the barn.

Even if she wanted to give him the job, he’d probably always be in the middle of an argument between her and her father. That wasn’t going to earn him the freedom he wanted to try his own, gentler training methods.

LJ hesitated, thinking of Andra’s kind hands on that stallion’s reins. But then his gaze fell on his old pickup, parked in front of the Lawlers’ log-and-river-rock mansion. He’d left his secondhand suitcases stashed by last night’s campsite, but the rust-fringed dent in his driver’s-side door told the whole story he was trying to hide. And it wasn’t one of years of experience with the caliber of horses who were named in sentences instead of single syllables.