Читать книгу High Country Cowgirl - Joanna Sims - Страница 12

Chapter Four

“Okay,” Bonita announced after taking a shower, changing her clothing and putting on some makeup. “Now I actually feel like a normal human again.”

After five more hours of travel, during which she was subjected to the full Willy Nelson catalog, they arrived at an equestrian facility in Grimes, Iowa. Considering the name of the town, Bonita was pleasantly surprised by the accommodations for Val. The stalls were a generous size and well maintained. There was a separate turnout paddock for Val, so she could be assured that he wouldn’t get injured trying to figure out his position in the herd hierarchy.

Once they got Val unloaded and settled and after they cleaned the mobile stall, which gave Bonita a chance to work off some of her junk food calories, Gabe found an overnight spot to park the rig. Part of the living area expanded outward with a simple push of a button, adding additional square footage to the kitchen and sitting area. The rig had solar panels on the roof, so Gabe could park the rig away from electrical hookups. He had found a spot to park the rig that would allow them to see Val in his paddock.

Gabe was sitting at the dining table, a table that resembled a booth in a diner with bench seats on either side. Bonita slid into the bench opposite Gabe, feeling refreshed and awake for the first time that day.

“What’s the plan for dinner?” she asked. In her family, food was important and meals were meant to be an event.

Gabe put down his phone and looked at her. Every time their eyes met and held, she was struck by how clear and blue the cowboy’s eyes were. She couldn’t always see them, for the brim of his hat, but when she did, it was a moment that lingered in her mind. There was a raw honesty there. And a kindness that always surprised her. She supposed she had a set opinion of men who wore cowboy boots and hats, and it wasn’t, upon reflection, a positive one. Gabe was, little by little, changing that opinion.

“I usually stock what I need.” He paused a second and then added, “I wasn’t expecting company.”

Bonita felt an immediate pang of guilt. She should apologize for barging in on the trip. She’d always had a difficult time apologizing—even when she knew she was squarely in the wrong, like now. The words I’m sorry just couldn’t find their way to her lips. Instead, she stood up, went over to the kitchen cabinets and started to assess the situation. After scouting the refrigerator and the cabinets, Bonita, who had been cooking since she was young, already had several dishes in mind that she could make for dinner.

“You have ingredients for fajitas, a breakfast burrito or steak and eggs,” she said as she wound her long, damp hair into a knot on the top of her head and secured it with a ponytail holder from the front pocket of her jeans. “What’s your pleasure?”

Gabe looked at her like he was caught off guard by her offer. “I have all that in there?”

“Yes. You actually do.” She laughed, feeling happy for some unfathomable reason. “You don’t cook?”

“I grill.”

“Of course. Well, I cook. Love to, actually. So let me make you dinner. It would feel like I’m being useful. What’s your pleasure?”

“Steak and eggs sounds good.”

“Coming right up,” she said with a smile. “How do you like your steak cooked?”

“Just barely dead, I suppose.”

“Rare it is.”

Gabe went out for a bit to speak with the manager of the facility. While he was gone, Bonita hummed while she located all of the cooking essentials she would need to deliver on the promised meal. While the steak was broiling in the oven, she found plates and silverware and set the table.

It made her feel content to be cooking, even in such a tiny kitchen. Cooking had been her connection to her family in Mexico—all of her aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins on her father’s side, most of whom still lived in Mexico, had taught her how to cook authentic Mexican food. Her mother, whose family was of European descent, hadn’t even known how to cook when she met Bonita’s father. But before Evelyn became ill, she could cook a wide variety of traditional Mexican dishes, the kind that always brought a smile to George’s face.

Bonita was just finishing the eggs when Gabe returned.

“Sorry about that.” He took his hat off and hung it on a hook just inside the door. “They’ve got a horse they wanted me to look at.”

“I’ve been having a good time.” She turned the burner off and took the pan with the scrambled eggs off the stove. “I hope you like scrambled. I forgot to ask.”

“I’m not too picky.” Gabe sat down at the table. “That smells good enough to eat.”

“Well. I hope you like it.”

She made them both a plate and then joined him at the table. She knew from traveling with him that he was going to want water with no ice in his glass, so she had already taken care of that. Bonita already regretted the soda she had consumed, so she switched to water as well.

“This is the first real meal that’s been cooked in that kitchen,” Gabe told her.

She waited for him to take the first bite of steak, to give her a stamp of approval for the dinner, before she began to eat her portion of the scrambled eggs.

“Now, that’s good,” he said with a satisfied little smile. Her mother always said that a way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. So far, Bonita believed her mother was right about that. “Where’s your steak?”

“I don’t eat meat.”

“You don’t meet very many vegetarians in Montana.”

“You don’t meet very many vegetarians in my family!” Bonita countered. “My father thinks it’s sacrilegious to not eat meat, and trust me, none of my relatives in Mexico get it.”

Gabe cut a tiny piece of steak for Tater, who had been waiting, ears perked forward, at the cowboy’s feet.

“Is that who taught you to cook like this?”

Bonita nodded while she washed some eggs down with water. She wiped her mouth off with a napkin and then said, “Cooking and food is a big part of our culture. My mom didn’t know how to boil water when she met my dad, but she learned quickly. I’ve been cooking since I was a kid.”

“Well, you’re dang good at it. It’s rare for me to have a home-cooked meal on the road and it’s been two nights in a row for me this time around. So I thank you.”

“It was my pleasure. It’s the least that I could do seeing as I’m technically a stowaway.”

She meant those last words to be a roundabout way of apologizing. Gabe met her eyes, but he didn’t pick up on the cue and run with it. He just gave her a simple nod, as was his way she was discovering, and let the matter drop.

“I’d like to go check on Val after we’ve cleaned up,” she said. “I saw one of the hands take him to the stable and I’d like to see how he’s settling in to his stall.”

Gabe dropped his crumpled-up napkin on his plate. “You cooked, I’ll clean.”

“Are you sure?”

“I got the better end of that deal. Go on and visit with Val.”

Bonita took Gabe up on his offer and headed to the barn. She found Val in his designated stall at the end of the long aisle, eating hay.

“Hi, handsome boy.” She opened his stall gate and held out her hand to him so he could begin to learn her scent.

“There’s some grooming tools hanging on that hook if you want to use them,” suggested one of the stablehands mucking out a stall across the aisle.

“Thank you. I think I will.”

Bonita grabbed a body brush; she was glad to finally have some time to bond with Val. But when she started to brush his neck, Val nipped at her, backed up into the corner of the stall to avoid her and swished his tail, a sign that he was resisting her.

“I know you don’t think so now, Val.” She fought through the nerves she always seemed to feel around her new horse and kept on brushing him, not letting him rule the moment. “But you are going to learn to love me.”

She brushed his body, ignoring his grouchy attitude when she switched sides and asked him to move his feet. Then she combed his mane and his tail and finished by cleaning out each of his hooves. The entire time she worked on him, he tried to bite her, and his body language, from the tail swishing to stomping his hind hooves, was a sign that he had some behavior issues that they were going to have to work on.

“You look super handsome now, Val.” Bonita wrapped her arms around the horse’s neck and gave him a quick hug. “I’ll see you tomorrow. At a ridiculously early hour.”

While she was putting the grooming tools back in the bucket hanging outside the stall, Bonita heard Gabe’s voice nearby. She walked toward the sound of his voice.

He was standing next to what looked to be a full-blooded Thoroughbred in the large, indoor riding arena. He was talking to a couple of people who Bonita assumed to be the owners. She looked around and found that there were empty bleachers nearby. She climbed up to the midpoint in the bleachers and sat down.

“Everything we do with horses is pressure,” Gabe was saying. “We put a halter on them, it’s pressure. We ride them, it’s pressure. What they want is to be left alone and eat. That’s not how it’s going to be for them, but we have to understand what they want if we’re going to change their behavior. What is that you want this horse to be able to do?”

The younger of the two women, the one wearing a pair of riding breeches, said, “I want him to not freak out every time he sees a flag. When I take him to a show, he’s fine, unless there’s a flag. Then all bets are off. He bolts, he tries to buck me off...”

“Well, he might have had someone train him wrong with a flag. We don’t know his history. So his reaction, at least to him, could make perfect sense, even if it’s doesn’t make perfect sense to you. But don’t worry, we can work on it. We need to operate on the principle of pressure. Operating on the principle that horses respond to the application or the release of pressure, we can desensitize this horse to stimuli. In this case, a flag.” Gabe nodded his head toward the other side of the arena. “Why don’t the two of you stand over there so when he reacts, you won’t be in the way, and I’ll show you what you can do with him.”

In Gabe’s free hand, he was holding a training device that looked like a long crop with a flag on the end. He had the flag grasped in his hand, so the Thoroughbred didn’t see it. Calmly, as was the way Gabe seemed to operate in the world, he stepped away from the horse, gave him some length of the lead rope and then showed the horse the flag.

The moment the horse spotted the flag, it started to rear and then buck and tried to run away. Gabe held on to the horse, and instead of taking the flag away, he waved the flag to keep the horse moving.

“If he’s not doing what I want him to do, which is stand still, I keep him moving,” Gabe explained while he worked. “In the horse world, whoever moves the feet is the boss. That’s the way it goes. All this horse is looking for is a leader. That’s what a horse is looking for in all of us.”

When the horse finally stopped moving and stood still, Gabe dropped the flag to the ground. For the next thirty minutes, Gabe worked with the Thoroughbred, repeating the steps over and over again, until the horse let him rub the flag over his body.

“We don’t want to teach him that this tool is another thing to fear, so we want to rub him all over his body with it to let him know that it’s not.”