Page 131 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Blaze flipped his hand in the air, indicating the road, the highway, I-80, half of Pennsylvania, and all of New Jersey. “We still have a long drive to New York City. We don’t have time to be mucking about the meadows, looking for a baby horse that may or may not even exist.”
“She needs us. I’m not going to leave this poor mare alone.”
Blaze surveyed the pastures and cornfields on the hills around them. “Can’t we just call someone to take care of this horse? Its owners? A neighbor?”
Sarah set her mouth in a rigid line. “We are obviously in Amish country. While they might have cell phones, they don’t have landlines. How would we even know what number to call? The fastest option is to stop arguing and help this poor horse!”
“If I were in Good Samaritan mode and trying to make this piece-of-shit world slightly better, I’d be working the suicide prevention hotline, helping my fellow veterans who are trying to deal with moral injuries deeper than anyone should have to bear, not traipsing all over the Pennsylvania countryside, psychoanalyzing a horse.”
Sarah stared at him, her dark eyes flared open like cannon turrets. “I don’t know what all that was, but this horse needs our help. Don’t you have any compassion?”
If the Navy had wanted Blaze to have a sense of compassion, they would have issued him one.
The military hadn’t taught Blaze compassion at Basic Underwater Demolition School, neither at Officer Training School, and certainly not at the War College. “Compassion is not mission critical.”
Sarah blinked and gaped at him, making him feel like a goddamn heel. “How can you say that? This horse came to us. She is telling us that she needs our help, so we are responsible for helping her.”
The word responsible pushed all of Blaze’s buttons like an asshole teenager poking every floor in a high-rise elevator.
Sarah might be manipulating him so she could make a run for it, but somehow, this equine mental patient had become his responsibility. “All right. I’ll pull the car over. Let’s see what we can do, but we can’t take too much time.”
Blaze locked the car and followed Sarah, who followed the horse over the rounded grassy hills to another part of the pasture.
The horse kept looking back at them as she pranced ahead, flashing a white star-shaped marking on her burnished bronze forehead.
“Starlight says the foal is this way!” Sarah called back to him,
Dear baby Jesus on a cracker, she’d named it. Sarah had named the horse. Blaze hoped she wasn’t going to adopt the horse and try to stuff it in the elevator to her brother’s Manhattan apartment.
No, the beast would probably need a parking space in the building’s subterranean garage, which would run to ten grand a month.
The horse loped a few yards and skidded to a stop in a hollow, bucking in the grass.
Sarah started running.
Blaze tore off after her.
When they reached the horse, a mud puddle spread at her hooves, probably left over from that driving rainstorm that had swept through Illinois, too.
In the churned mud, a tiny model of a horse lay on its side, its flanks heaving, and it thrashed in the sucking mud when it saw them.
Blaze’s hopes that they would find the foal locked in a pen or having gotten on the wrong side of a gate evaporated, leaving sadness.
This was a problem.
A problem that might take hours to rectify.
Beside Blaze, Sarah went rigid. “Oh, no. I hope he hasn’t broken his leg. Or her leg.”
Blaze took a look at the spindly horse panting in the mud. “His leg.”
Sarah turned to him. “We need ropes to drag him out.”
The sun was already descending in the sky, having crested at noon hours before.
Blaze nodded. “I have the kinbaku ropes.”
“I mean, will those work?” Her voice rose at the end, a song of incredulity. “They’re not real ropes.”
