Page 13 of Broken Ride

I've spent my life around horses. I know what injury looks like, what exhaustion looks like, what a horse coming off a bad haul looks like. This doesn't look like any of those things. This looks like something got into this animal's system that doesn't belong there, and the gelding's body is trying to process it and failing.

This is the second symptomatic animal she's dealt with since the circuit started, and this one is worse. I don't know what the barrel horse's bloodwork showed—she wasn't inclined to share—but whatever she found, this gelding is telling the same story louder.

I buy two cups of coffee from the concession trailer and walk to the livestock pens. She's writing notes on a clipboard when I set the first cup on the tailgate of her truck. She looks at it. Looks at me. The assessment is quick, and I feel her deciding whether accepting obligates her to something.

"It's coffee," I say. "Not a blood oath."

She picks it up. Drinks. She doesn't thank me. The refusal to perform gratitude hits me lower than it should, a pull in my gut that has nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with her throat moving when she swallows.

"The dun bronc," I say. "The one you were just working on. He looked rough."

"He looked symptomatic." She sets the clipboard face-down on the tailgate, casual enough that someone who wasn't paying attention might miss the move. She doesn't want me reading her notes.

"Same as the barrel horse?"

Her eyes come up. Sharper than anything in that cup. "Why do you keep asking about animals that have nothing to do with your event?"

"Because Thornton's stock keeps showing up symptomatic at every event I've worked this season, and I don't think that's a coincidence." I take a drink and let the words sit. "You don't either, or you wouldn't be spending your evenings going through delivery records by yourself."

She doesn't answer right away. The angles are working, how much I'm worth against how much I could cost her.

It's the same guarded assessment I've seen on her face every time someone gets within striking distance: measure, weigh, choose whether to engage or walk.

"What do you know about Thornton?" she asks.

"I know that company called it ‘reorganization’ and ‘new management’ after Merrick went down. I know they underbid every regional hauler to lock up the stock contract, and I know their animals are arriving stressed and dehydrated from hauls that should take half the time they're taking. I know two separate contractors have complained about it, and neither one knows the other has the same story." I pause. "And I know you've been pulling their transport records, which means you found something in the paperwork that matches what I'm hearing from people."

She studies me like she'd study a horse she hasn't decided whether to trust. "How do you know what I've been pulling?"

"Because I watched you do it. For hours. In an empty lot. While you told me you were just doing your job."

The corner of her mouth twitches, not a smile but a concession that she walked into that one. "I was doing my job."

"Your job involves hauling company delivery records?"

"My job involves knowing why animals are getting contaminated."

Contaminated. Not sick. Not symptomatic. Contaminated. That word changes everything.

She's also standing close enough that antiseptic hits me first, and then something warm and clean underneath it. I have to drag my attention back to the conversation.

"Contaminated how?"

"That's not something I'm ready to discuss in a parking lot with a man I've spoken to once."

"Twice. But who's counting."

Her jaw loosens for a fraction of a beat, the closest she gets to letting her guard slip. I catch it the way I've started catching everything about her, without meaning to and too late to stop.

"You're pushy."

"I'm interested."

"In the investigation or in me?"

The question comes fast, and it's sharp enough to cut. She's testing whether I'll dodge it or walk into it.

I look at her across the tailgate, the coffee steam rising between us. She seems like a woman who can smell a lie from a county away, so I give her the truth.