Dalton's Undoing

Jenny Boyer was just about the polar opposite of that kind of woman. Cute or not, he probably wouldn’t usually take a second look at a woman who looked like a suburban soccer mom, with her tailored tan slacks and her wool blazer. Jenny Boyer was the kind of settled, respectable woman men like him usually tended to avoid.

Yet here they were, and he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off her. She might not be his usual type but he sure liked looking at her.

He frowned a little at the unexpectedness of his attraction to her, then decided to shrug it off. He would never do anything about it. Not with a woman like Jenny Boyer, who had Complication written all over her.

Morgan’s color was much better when they returned to the living room. She was sitting up bickering with her brother, something he figured was a good sign.

She took the juice from him with a shy smile.

“Cole and I have things to do but you two are welcome to hang out here until Morgan feels better.”

“I think I’m all right now,” the girl said.

“I should get her home for a nebulizer treatment and to check her peak flow.”

“I can carry you back out to the car if you want.”

Morgan shook her head. “I can walk. But thanks.”

After her daughter was settled in the SUV, Jenny turned to him and to Cole.

“What time shall I come back?” she asked.

He thought of his schedule for the day. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be running into town about four. We should be done by then so I’ll bring him back and save you a trip. Just take care of Morgan.”

“All right. Thank you.” She looked at her son as if she wanted to say something more, but she only let out a long breath, slid into her vehicle and drove away.

“So are we going to work on the car or what?” Cole finally addressed him after the SUV pulled away.

If Seth hadn’t noticed how concerned the boy had looked during those first few moments of the flare-up, he would probably find him more trouble than he was worth.

“Oh, eventually,” he said with a smile that bordered on evil. “First, you’ve got some stalls to muck. I hope you brought good thick gloves because you’re going to need ’em.”

Chapter Three

Fourteen was a miserable bitch of an age.

Though more than half his life had passed since that notable year, it felt just as fresh and painful now as Seth watched Cole Boyer shovel manure out of a stall.

Though the kid wasn’t tall by any stretch of the imagination, he was gangly and awkward, as if his muscles were still too short to keep up with his longer bones.

Seth remembered those days. He’d been small for his age, too, six inches shorter than most of the other guys in his class, and with asthma to boot. His father’s death had been just a few years earlier. And while he hadn’t been exactly paralyzed by grief over the bastard, he had struggled to figure out his place in the world now that he wasn’t Hank Dalton’s sickly, sissy-boy youngest son.

He’d been a little prick, too, full of anger and attitude. He had brothers to pound on to help vent some of it, but since fights usually ended with them beating the tar out of him, he tended to shy away from that activity. Eventually, he’d turned some of his excess energy to horses.

He trained his first horse that year, he remembered, a sweet little chestnut mare he’d ridden in the Idaho state high school rodeo finals a few years later.

Yeah, fourteen had been miserable, for the most part. But the next year everything started to come together. Between his fourteenth and fifteenth years, he hit a major growth spurt, the asthma all but disappeared and he gained six inches of height and thirty pounds of muscle, almost as if his body had just been biding its time.

Girls who’d ignored him all his life suddenly sat up and took notice—and he noticed them right back. After that, adolescence became a hell of a lot more fun, though he doubted Jenny Boyer would appreciate him sharing that particular walk down memory lane with her son, no matter how miserable he looked about life right now.

He should be miserable, Seth thought. Though he was tempted to turn soft and tell Cole he’d done enough for the day, he only had to think about the damage to his GTO to stiffen his resolve.

A little misery never hurt a kid.

“Can you hurry it up here?” Seth leaned indolently on the stall railing, mostly because he knew it would piss the kid off.

Sure enough, all he earned for his trouble was a heated glare.

“This isn’t exactly easy.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” Seth said.

After three hours, the kid had only mucked out four stalls, with two more to go. The more he shoveled, the grimmer his mood turned, until Seth was pretty sure he was ready to implode.

Tempted as he was to wait for the explosion, he finally took pity on him and reached for another shovel.

Cole gave him a surprised look when Seth joined him in the stall. “I thought I was supposed to be doing this.”

“You are. But since I’d like to take a look at the car you trashed sometime today, I figure the only way that’s going to happen is if I lend a hand.”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Cole muttered.

“I know. If I thought you were slacking, you can bet I’d still be out there watching.”

Surprise flickered in eyes the same green as his mother’s, but he said nothing. They worked in silence for a few moments, the only sounds the scrape of shovels on concrete, the whickers of the horses around them and Lucy’s curious yips as she followed them.

Only after they’d moved onto the last stall did the boy speak. “Why don’t you have a real job or something?” he asked, his tone more baffled than hostile.

Seth raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think this is real work?”

“Sure. But what kind of loser signs up to shovel horse crap all day?”

Seth laughed. “If this was the only thing I did around here all day, I’d have to agree with you. But I usually leave the grunt work to the hired help while I get to do the fun stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Working with the horses. Breeding them, training them.”

“Whatever.”

“Not a real horse fan?”

“They’re big and dumb. How hard could it be to train them?”

“You might be surprised.” He scraped another shovel full of sunshine. “I can tell you there’s nothing so satisfying as taking a green-broke horse—that means an untrained one—and working with him until he obeys anything you tell him to do without question.”

“Whatever,” Cole said again, his voice dripping with scorn.