Rein In (Willow Bay Stables #3)(6)

I could hear Grant’s laughter behind me as I walked toward the barn.

It wasn’t a short walk.

The property was almost twice the size of Willow Bay Stables and twice as swanky. Grant had spared no expense in having his family estate renovated to accommodate Equine for Hearts. While the main house and gardens were situated on the right side of the acreage, the barn and subsequent buildings for the program were situated on the left. This included a larger-than-average office, which was attached to the volunteer room. It sounded more important than it was. In all reality, it held a small kitchen that stored our lunches and a place to sit and eat if the weather outside was too hot or too cold.

Beside that was essentially two barns joined together by an enclosed walkway that took up a considerable amount of space and led out to the circular driveway and staff parking. Behind the barn were two riding arenas, a lunging arena, feed storage, and The Shed.

The Shed had been one of Grant’s newer projects (he had a fondness for projects), and I’d yet to get a chance to see the completed renovations. Originally, it had been a small house designed for the stable hands to live in back in the day, but Grant had it remodelled to accommodate the changes to the program.

I waved at a few of the volunteers as I passed them in the barn. Volunteers were easy to notice, as we were required to wear white shirts (there were also sweaters and jackets, weather permitting) with the Equine for Hearts emblem over the left breast and VOLUNTEER written in black on the back across our shoulders.

Each volunteer was properly vetted and usually assigned a youth to work with until their completion of the program. This helped the youth be able to bond with their volunteer instead of being bounced around. It was important to Grant that the youth were given the best possible chance to succeed here at Equine for Hearts, and he felt that building connections was a large part of the recipe for that success.

Scanning the barn, I found my assigned youth sulking behind a wheelbarrow. This was not uncommon.

In the last month, I’d spent most of my Sundays working with Josh Farina. His case was a special one in the sense that it differed from the normal court-ordered youth cases we saw here on a regular basis.

Josh had been caught spray-painting and vandalizing a building in the city. It just so happened that the owner of the building was Grant. Instead of pressing charges, Grant offered Josh’s parents community service at Equine for Hearts. Josh would come every Sunday for six months in exchange for essentially working off the damage he’d done.

Josh’s parents were thrilled, Josh, however, was less than.

The boy was thirteen going on thirty and an absolute brat on the best of days.

“Hey, Josh.” I moved the wheelbarrow to the side and grinned at him. “Ready to get started?”

He reached a hand up and yanked his massive headphones off his ears. “No.”

“Great,” I chirped.

Josh grunted, sliding the pencil and paper he’d been doodling on into his backpack. I looked at his hands that were almost always covered in some kind of paint or chalk and watched as he wiped them across his clean shirt.

His poor mother, I thought to myself. My momma would have tanned Owen’s hide if he’d done something like that. Though in Owen’s case, it would have been dirt.

“We’re going to muck out the back paddock and when that’s done, I’ll take you for your riding lesson. Sound good?”

“No,” he bit off.

His sarcasm practically bounced off of me, as did most people’s. Momma always said you get more bees with honey than with vinegar, and Josh needed all the sweet he could get.

“This is yours.” I tossed him a pitchfork, and the way his face twisted up you would have thought there was horse crap all the way up the handle.

He slung his backpack over his shoulder and grabbed the edges of the wheelbarrow, pouting as he stalked down the aisle way.

I didn’t bother asking him to put his backpack in the youth lockers; he wouldn’t do it, no matter how many times we asked him to. The boy treated whatever he kept in that bag like it was made of gold, but I assumed it was his current art project and an array of contraband spray-paint cans. As long as he didn’t use them to paint the horses, as I’d mentioned before, then I was okay with him hauling it around every Sunday.

Mucking the paddocks took longer than it should have, but that was how it always was with Josh. He moved at a glacial pace even on a good day. He strived hard toward the illusion of a tortured artist. That made me his torturer, I gathered.

“Can you pass me the next bag of feed?” I asked Josh from where he sat perched in the shade as I wiped the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand.

It was unusually hot for May.

He looked up at me, pausing only slightly before turning the volume up on his headphones and looking back down at his sketch.

Pursing my lips, I adjusted the gloves on my sweaty hands and jumped down from the truck. Technically, it was still his lunch break, but it wouldn’t hurt the kid to give a lady a hand.

Bending over, I squatted low to the ground and wrapped my arms around a large bag of grain that probably weighed as much as Josh did.

“Ooph,” I grunted as I heaved it into the air.

“You need some help with that, baby girl?”

Dropping the bag onto the tailgate, I looked over the bed of my truck to see a gangly-looking boy, or was he a man, walking toward me. His brown, shaggy hair stood nearly straight up on his head. He wore some kind of basketball sneakers, and his pants looked to be two sizes too big.