CHAPTER 89

He squeezed back. “She’s young, and you’re gonna have to work with her a lot before you can ride her. But if you train her right from the start, she’ll always mind you, and she won’t let you down.”

“My first horse. Yay! I feel like an eight-year-old girl. Dad, thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ll ride her, and pet her, and feed her, and take her for walks everyday, and she’ll be my best friend…”

“You are such a smarty-pants.”

“How cool is that? Pretty soon I’ll be clip-clopping along on my very own horse, shootin’ varmints with my new rifle.”

“You bought her a rifle too?” Gemma asked.

They both turned around. Her dad’s face lit up like the bug zapper. He wrapped his arm around Gemma’s shoulders and kissed her temple. “Well, yeah. She needed her own gun out here in the wild wild West.”

Macie watched her father and Gemma mooning over each other. They were so deliriously happy; she didn’t begrudge them a bit of it. It spilled onto her. And rather than his relationship with Gemma driving