And if it doesn’t, I get to learn who to call to dispose of a cow carcass.
Is there someone you call out here for cow-carcass removal?
This is not what I want to do today.
My finger connects with the right little words on the screen to skip the ad on the video as Junie gasps again. “Mom, there’s a—”
A mountain lion’s roar explodes out of my phone at full volume.
A horse neighs.
“Mother,” Junie gasps, drawing the word out into approximately eleven horrified syllables, which sounds impossible until you have a teenager.
The mountain lion sound roars out of my phone again, and this time, when I look up to see if it’s scaring the bear, I see what Junie sees.
There’s a man.
On a horse.
No, not on a horse.
He was on a horse, and now he’s flailing on the ground, getting out of the way as the horse rears back, neighing like—
Well, like a mountain lion is after it.
The horse lands, its front hooves mere inches from the man’s back, then leaps over him and takes off at a dead run toward the trees that line the creek at the edge of the ranch.
The man rolls.
The bear turns to look at him, and I swear, there’s barely ten feet between man and beast.
“Oh my God!” I squawk.
“Run!” Junie yells at him. “Run for your life!”
My phone roars with a mountain lion roar once again.
“Off,” I tell it. “Turn off!”
“Turn it off,” Junie yells.
“I’m trying!” I yell back.
Twenty feet away from my window, the man leaps to his feet, straightens his baseball cap, and waves his sun-kissed arms at the cow-eating bear. I suppose I shouldn’t judge the bear, considering I eat beef too.
Just . . . not exactly like that.
“Get out of here, Earl. Go on. Git,” the man cries.
The bear snorts.
I finally succeed in shutting off the mountain lion video on my phone.
The man waves his arms again, making his T-shirt ride up and show off a flat white stomach with a happy trail dipping below his belt and ridges right above his hip bones. His jeans are plastered to the hard planes of his thighs, his feet clad in cowboy boots, his shirt sleeves hugging his solid biceps that might have tattoos on them. He’s moving too quickly for me to tell, and really, that’s not the important part here. Also, I can’t see his face under the hat, but I can make out a copper beard.
“Did he just call the bear Earl?” Junie whispers.
She’s gone still on my back.
I’m frozen too.
There’s a man having a stare down with a bear over a dead cow right outside my bunkhouse.
A burly man who’s clearly afraid of nothing—not runaway horses, not bears, and probably not hormones either.
All three of those things are currently making me rethink my life choices.
We are very permanently and irrevocably off relationships with men, I remind my nipples, my vagina, and my brain.
Be that as it may, the view is currently incredible. Please pass the popcorn, they reply in unison.
“Don’t make me get the sheriff, Earl,” the man says.
My ears shiver. His deep, rumbly voice is actually making my ears shiver.
It’s clearly been too long since I’ve taken care of my own needs if a man can make my ears shiver almost before the ink’s dry on my divorce papers.
But in my defense, he’s taking on a bear for us.
Also, my marriage has been formally over for almost a year, and theoretically a lot longer than that. We kept up appearances to meet the contractual obligations for Dean’s show. Some for Junie’s sake, too, until she bluntly told me she’d overheard Dean making plans to hook up with the star of one of our rival shows.
The number of times I’ve wished I had skipped filming to go to her soccer games or to take her shopping for back-to-school supplies or to just be there to hear how her day was at school . . .
I don’t blame her for being so snippy with me.
Between leaving her for weeks at a time to be raised by nannies, my in-laws, or my mother—which is another thing I need to address—and the normal teenage hormones, I’m lucky she talks to me at all these days.
“Tell me you are not drooling over this,” Junie says entirely too loudly as I note that this man does, in fact, have a tattoo peeking out from beneath one of his shirtsleeves.
The bear studies the man once more, looks at Junie and me, snorts like he agrees with my teenager that I’m disgusting, and then swaggers in the other direction, taking his sweet old time.
It honestly reminds me of Junie on the nights she’s supposed to do the dishes.
You can make me, but you can’t make me do it fast, that swagger says. I’m still a damn bear, and I can still eat you in your sleep. Don’t you forget it.
I feel Junie swing all her attention back to our unexpected hero a moment after I do.
She doesn’t climb off my back.
I don’t shake her off.
Not when I’m gaping as the man pulls his baseball hat off, looks around—I presume for his horse—pulls a disgusted face, and then turns fully to the window where Junie and I are gaping at him.
He reaches us in about ten long strides, even with having to walk around the carcass. Despite just being thrown off a horse, he’s not limping—not even a little—and my gape gets gapier with every one of his determined, confident steps.
His cheekbones are chiseled over his beard, his eyes hooded under a strong brow, his lips full, and his hair thick and mussed. I can’t tell what he has tattooed on his upper arm, but there’s definitely ink there. I’d guess he’s somewhere between thirty and thirty-five—maybe a couple of years younger than me—and there’s no doubt he is not happy to see us.
When he stops on the other side of the window, his hazel gaze flickers from my face, to my shoulder—undoubtedly taking in Junie, who’s still hanging on my back—and then back to me. “Mrs. Spencer?” he drawls in that deep baritone that’s no longer making only my ears shiver, despite the subtle curl in his lip like he, too, thinks just as much of me as my teenager does.
“Mai—” I start, then have to stop and clear my throat as I realize he knows who we are.
Junie makes a disgusted noise like she knows Mom’s having a little bit of a reaction to being in the presence of this much male-ness.
And reactions, while healthy and normal, are the last things I can afford to act on right now.
I shake my head and smile at the cowboy who just saved us from the bear. “Call me Maisey.”
Then I wipe the smile off my face.
It’s too soon to look eager. I am not here for dating, no matter what kind of inappropriately timed reaction my body’s having.
Not until I’ve gotten back on track with being a good mother and then reconnected with who I want to be and remembered how to love myself first.
However, it’s perfectly legit to smile at the man who just saved us from death by bear, so I smile again. Don’t be coy, Maisey. While he out-beared a bear, he is not your new hero. Do. Not. Be. Coy.
“Thank you so much for scaring off that bear. That was—you were—just wow. Not that we can’t handle a little wildlife, but we got in late last night, and we weren’t prepared to have that big of an animal this close, this fast, but you just rode in and—wow. Thank you. Will your horse be okay? I didn’t mean to scare it. We didn’t see you coming. This is my daughter, Junie. And you are . . . ?”