“You work for me, Colt. Don’t forget that.” She then turned again.
“Don’t get too overconfident, Brielle. It makes you look like a spoiled little snot, and that happens way too often.” He wasn’t even attempting to be pleasant now. Though there’d been a nice stretch in the middle, the day had gone rather badly and was aiming to end even worse.
She turned to glare while still walking away, and that’s when her foot sank into in a big pile of fresh horse dung.
“That’s it!” she yelled, causing several heads to turn in her direction. “Look all you want! I’ve had it with this stinky, smelly place.”
The men in there were trying desperately to quiet their laughter, but after she was gone and the echo of her front door being slammed could be heard all the way down in the horse barn, the men let go and laughed aloud.
“That’s enough,” Colt warned them, and they stopped at once. “She may be having a difficult time here, but she does own the place. You might want to remember that.”
“Aw, Colt. You’ll own it soon enough,” one of the hands said.
“I don’t know, Brandon. She may be a pain in the ass, but I think a lot of it’s an act. That woman has more backbone than I would have given her credit for on the first day I met her,” Colt told the young man.
None of the men knew how to respond to that, so they shut up. They were so sure the city girl would run off into the night that they hadn’t even considered the possibility that she might actually stick around.
Colt decided it was a good time to head home. He handed Brielle’s horse over to Brandon to take care of, then climbed on board his stallion, and rode off.
One thing was certain. He had a lot to think about.
Chapter Eleven
For two days Brielle refused to leave her house. It was probably the only place in the entire county where the door was locked and the lights were off. She didn’t want to see anyone, and didn’t want to climb from her bed. She was embarrassed that she’d opened up to Colt, and more embarrassed about her snotty attitude afterward.
But that’s what Brielle did. When she was afraid, when she began to let someone in, she had to fix it quickly, keep that person away. Because if she let them in to her heart, they had power to break it.
That had happened once when she was thirteen, a naïve idiot full of absurd hopes. It wouldn’t happen again. Shaking her head, she shut down her memories of that horrible day so long ago. She’d told herself she wouldn’t think about it, and she wasn’t going to. No way.
She’d made her way downstairs a few times and fetched food to carry back to her room and eat in bed, but other than that, she stayed upstairs and popped Advil like candy to relieve her miserable muscles and the ache in her hip where the deep scratch burned.
A few hot baths, a lot of movies, and about sixty hours were just what she needed, though. Because on the third day, she woke up to find she wasn’t hurting nearly as badly.
She could run this ranch without looking like a spoiled brat. The key was to not open up to anyone, to keep it all about business. If she did that, she’d be tough, ready for anything. Brielle knew she was smart, even if most people didn’t see that. She chose for them not to. Just one more effective barrier against the world.
Falling from the horse, then stepping in the horse manure, aching so badly she thought she was going to die, and hearing the men laugh at her had all added up to her finding herself at the breaking point. But she wasn’t going to prove all of them right and be the pampered princess they were making her out to be.
If she wanted to work, she could. That was for sure. So what was she going to do about it? That was the real question. As she took a nice long hot shower, the wheels in her brain were turning. What had she done in the past when things hadn’t gone her way?
She found a solution, that’s what she did. So how did she get the young ranch hands to listen to her? There was nothing she could do if they weren’t willing to follow her lead. Of course, that was sort of like the blind leading the blind, but, dammit, she was the leader whether they liked it or not.
She didn’t want to take advantage of them; she just wanted them to help her make this place a success so her father wouldn’t think she was a failure. Somewhere in the past couple of weeks, his opinion had begun to matter to her. Not that she would ever tell him.
Somewhere along the way she had switched her thinking. Maybe it was her conversation with Colt, though she wished that hadn’t happened. And maybe it was just that she’d had so much time on her own. Maybe it was even the ranching books she’d been flipping through, and all the Web pages. But, whatever the reason, she had made a decision to do this, and so she would. But she knew she couldn’t do it without serious help.