on the rough bark for support. Her knees were shaking. Hell, her entire body was shaking.
Madison rubbed the center of her chest and sucked calming breaths into her lungs. She had no one to turn to. Not Adam—he wouldn’t want to hear her sob story after she’d left him. Not her best friend—that had been Kennedy. Most of her other friends were from work, so she’d hidden her relationship with Adam from them. How scandalized would they be that she’d had an affair with a client? Her parents? They always took Kennedy’s side. She doubted they’d celebrate her role in getting Madison fired, but she knew they’d be upset that she’d been hiding Adam from them as well. And grandma was gone.
She was going to have to sort out this mess on her own.
“Madison!” Kennedy called across the yard. “We need to talk this out.”
“Fuck you,” Madison shouted and pushed off the tree. She could just make out the roofline of her parents’ house up the road. Her parents might be there, but that wasn’t why she started walking in that direction. Ginger was there. Sometimes a girl just needed to ride.
“What did you say?” Kennedy said incredulously.
“Fuck you!” she said louder, sending a one-finger salute over her shoulder in case her sister had lost her hearing. They both knew sign language.
She could hear Kennedy’s gasp of disbelief all the way across the yard. “Really? That’s how you talk to your own sister?”
“You’re not my sister. My sister isn’t such a raging bitch!”
Madison kept walking, the heat of the late afternoon bringing a sheen of sweat to her skin.
“I want to help you make things right.” Kennedy called after her. “I said I was sorry!”
“And I did not accept your apology!” Madison yelled back. She would probably forgive her sister eventually, but it would not happen today.
As soon as Madison came in sight of the pasture, her gorgeous sorrel mare released an exuberant whinny and raced for the split rail fence as fast as her hooves could carry her.
People often confused the Fairbanks twins, but their respective horses never did. Kennedy’s silver gelding, Bullet, lifted his head to see what all the fuss was about, but immediately turned his attention back to dining on blades of grass. Ginger was already dancing sideways along the fence, nodding her big head in greeting.
Smiling, Madison cut across the ditch beside the gravel road and stretched both arms over the fence to rub Ginger’s neck. The massive animal nuzzled Madison’s shoulder, the horse’s hot breath stirring her hair, and she giggled as it tickled her neck.
“Do you want to go for a ride, girl?”
Madison jerked in surprise when Ginger nickered loudly in her ear. She laughed and hugged the horse’s broad neck.
“Me too,” she said.
She never felt freer than when she was astride a galloping horse with the ground racing beneath her in a blur and the wind catching her hair. Was that why Adam liked to ride motorcycles?
She pulled several twigs from Ginger’s mane as she mused about Adam.
Maybe they really weren’t such different people. Maybe they sought the same comforts but in different ways. She’d love to introduce Adam to her horse. She didn’t know if he’d ever ridden one. Being from a small town outside of Austin, he probably had, but he’d never mentioned it. When she talked about her happy past of barrel racing in rodeos and raising horses on the family farm, he’d always looked so sad. She’d felt he resented her for having a close-knit and loving family, so she tried not to mention them much. She knew his lack of a caring family had damaged him. And, God, if it hurt this much to be betrayed by her sister once, it must have been a living hell for him to be betrayed by both his parents again and again.
Families were supposed to love and support each other. Parents were supposed to protect their children. Sisters weren’t supposed to rat each other out.
In retrospect, maybe not talking about her family had done more harm than good. He needed to know all of her just as she needed to know all him. She had been shutting him out—only showing him the pieces of herself that she thought fit him best. Why had it taken a broken heart for her to see that?
She and Ginger walked the length of the fence, which served as a barrier between horse and rider until they reached the barn. Ginger was waiting in the paddock by the time Madison entered the barn from the opposite side. The half of the massive structure that faced the pasture was open so that the horses could find shelter from storms or the brutal Texas sun. Ginger took a long draw from the water trough while Madison collected her tack.
Without protest, the horse accepted the bit into her mouth. Madison then pulled the leather over Ginger’s velvety ears and carefully arranged her long reddish forelock so the leather didn’t pull her mane. The horse worried the bar of metal with her tongue. Interesting. Madison wondered what it would taste like and feel like to have a human-sized bit in her mouth. She was sure Adam would be willing to show her if she asked him nicely.
No, he probably wouldn’t. Not after she had walked out on him. She wouldn’t be surprised if he never wanted to see her again. And she couldn’t blame him. She was the one too cautious or stupid or scared to accept what he offered. What she wanted.
Fuck.
She dashed a tear aside and reached for the saddle pad resting on the top bar of the orange metal gate. As she turned, she caught sight of her father coming through the barn door. Her first instinct was to run to him and have him make everything all right, the way he had when she’d been a child. But if she did that, he’d want to know why she was upset. And that would lead to lots of questions, and she just didn’t have it in her to answer them at the moment. She needed to clear her head. When she got back from her ride, she’d sit down with her parents and explain what had been going on in her life for the past year.
Abandoning the remainder of Ginger’s tack, she clicked her tongue at the horse and gently tugged the reins to draw the animal alongside the gate.
Her dad waved eagerly and called, “Going for a ride?”
“Yeah,” she called back, not looking at him. Knowing she’d break if she did. Just seeing his strong profile in that familiar Stetson had her feeling all sorts of little-girly weaknesses. “We won’t be gone long.” To keep him from trying to delay her, she added, “I’ll stop by the house when I get back.”
She scrambled up the gate and slid her leg up and over Ginger’s bare back before turning the horse toward the pasture.
“Be careful out there,” her father said.
“Don’t worry!”
Ginger trotted out of the barn and sprinted through the pasture with her head and tail held high, as if to brag to the other horses that she was going out with her human and they weren’t invited.
Madison’s knees clamped into Ginger’s sides as the horse took a sudden turn around Bullet and almost unseated her. Perhaps darting off without a saddle hadn’t been the best idea. It had been months since Madison had ridden a horse, and she couldn’t recall the last time she’d ridden bareback.
Ginger automatically headed for the gate that led to the back eighty acres of the Fairbanks’ property. The extra pastures were not often used now that her parents had stopped raising cattle and only kept half a dozen horses for recreational use. The expanse of land was now more wilderness than ranch, but she preferred to ride the trails there. The terrain was familiar, and she didn’t have to worry about trespassing on some trigger-happy rancher’s land or worry that any motorized vehicles would make Ginger nervous.
As Ginger’s steady gait allowed her mind to wander, her thoughts kept returning to one person: Adam. The only thing that was clear to Madison was that she loved him. She couldn’t let him go.
It boggled her mind how easily he could throw caution aside and fall headlong into forever. She wasn’t half as impulsive as he was. She never would be. She admired him for it and appreciated that quality in him, but when his tendency to jump over barriers before checking if there was a cliff o
n the other side confronted her head on, she panicked. That was what had happened when he’d asked her to marry him. And happened again when he’d asked her to move in with him. She’d panicked. He encouraged her to be more spontaneous—more reckless—but when it came down to action, she was intrinsically cautious. She’d always been that way. She wished he could be more understanding of her hang-ups and not assume that because she didn’t immediately jump aboard his crazy train that it didn’t mean she never wanted to ride his rails. She just needed time to think and since her brain seemed nonfunctional when his sexy self was in her vicinity, that meant she had to do her thinking when she wasn’t around him.