Then he’d turned around and given it to a teenager he barely knew? Harper couldn’t deny the pain of betrayal squeezing her heart. So long. So long she’d prayed for his acceptance. Apparently young Skylar Thorson naturally possessed the key to getting that rare commodity.
The first tear traced down her cheek. It wasn’t Skylar’s fault, but envy blazed through Harper as if she were a child again, burning through her rational thinking and heading straight for the tinder that was her grief. None of this was fair. It hadn’t been fair from that night when, at age ten, she’d refused to help feed the horses until she’d finished her painting. Without any warning or second chance, Dad had hidden her pad of heavy canvas paper and starter set of brushes in his study and locked her easel in a closet where she would not have access to it until she’d learned to straighten out her priorities.
The moment still loomed as pivotal. It had started Harper on the path of hiding her work and sneaking away to draw. It had pushed her away from the ranch as soon as she was old enough to go to college, but she had been too young to know how to handle the freedom she’d never had under her father’s thumb. She’d made terrible choices about friends and school and her life for the first years of independence. Choices so stupid that she’d been kicked out of art school. Evicted from apartments. Fired from jobs. It had taken four more years of intermittent counseling and Tristan Carmichael’s constant “believe in yourself” mentoring to turn her into the artist she’d always wanted to be. Nonetheless, she still considered herself more of a failure at life than she ever wanted her good, God-fearing family to know.
She’d made a terrible choice again. A very selfish one. She’d seen Skylar’s face at the end of the camera discussion. Clearly confused and wounded, the girl had drawn up the protective wall of suspicion and attitude that had temporarily fallen away as she’d shared her drawings.
Harper knew how fragile an artist’s ego and confidence were. The girl had to have been hungry for feedback, or she wouldn’t have trusted Harper to look at the sketches. And she was surprisingly good, with an innate understanding of shading and texture. Given some instruction her talent could become something special.
There was no excuse for Harper’s pettiness.
And yet. The thought of pretty, young Skylar with her wide, blue eyes and spikey, strawberry blonde hair having possession of that Minolta created stupid and unreasonable feelings.
“Please, please.” She raised her eyes to the cloudy heavens. “Let this be because my system is out of whack from all this emotion.” She didn’t want to be known as the jealous diva sister. The inner demons she already owned were enough to handle.
“I should go back,” she said aloud. Chevy flicked his ears back, awaiting further instruction.
She picked up her slack reins, but before she could start the turn to head back, Chevy halted with a forceful hoof plant and wheeled all by himself. She kept him from bolting, holding him steady with her legs, and coaxed him back in the direction they’d been traveling. He side-stepped and let out a powerful whinny, but he moved forward.
“What is it, boy?” she asked. “Another rider?” She stroked his neck. He was only five—new to the ranch Rico, one of the ranch hands, had told her at the barn—so given his inexperience it was good behavior for him to trust her. Still, she had to continually persuade him to move down the gently sloping hill on the scree-and-dirt path that skirted the wide base of Wolf Paw Peak.
Before they reached the back side of the mountain, a rumble of engines grinding over uneven terrain confused her. When Chevy rounded a last bend, Harper stared across the green-and-yellow expanse of valley floor spreading between Paradise and the Teton Range sixty-five miles north, and her mouth popped open in shock. Two
The first tear traced down her cheek. It wasn’t Skylar’s fault, but envy blazed through Harper as if she were a child again, burning through her rational thinking and heading straight for the tinder that was her grief. None of this was fair. It hadn’t been fair from that night when, at age ten, she’d refused to help feed the horses until she’d finished her painting. Without any warning or second chance, Dad had hidden her pad of heavy canvas paper and starter set of brushes in his study and locked her easel in a closet where she would not have access to it until she’d learned to straighten out her priorities.
The moment still loomed as pivotal. It had started Harper on the path of hiding her work and sneaking away to draw. It had pushed her away from the ranch as soon as she was old enough to go to college, but she had been too young to know how to handle the freedom she’d never had under her father’s thumb. She’d made terrible choices about friends and school and her life for the first years of independence. Choices so stupid that she’d been kicked out of art school. Evicted from apartments. Fired from jobs. It had taken four more years of intermittent counseling and Tristan Carmichael’s constant “believe in yourself” mentoring to turn her into the artist she’d always wanted to be. Nonetheless, she still considered herself more of a failure at life than she ever wanted her good, God-fearing family to know.
She’d made a terrible choice again. A very selfish one. She’d seen Skylar’s face at the end of the camera discussion. Clearly confused and wounded, the girl had drawn up the protective wall of suspicion and attitude that had temporarily fallen away as she’d shared her drawings.
Harper knew how fragile an artist’s ego and confidence were. The girl had to have been hungry for feedback, or she wouldn’t have trusted Harper to look at the sketches. And she was surprisingly good, with an innate understanding of shading and texture. Given some instruction her talent could become something special.
There was no excuse for Harper’s pettiness.
And yet. The thought of pretty, young Skylar with her wide, blue eyes and spikey, strawberry blonde hair having possession of that Minolta created stupid and unreasonable feelings.
“Please, please.” She raised her eyes to the cloudy heavens. “Let this be because my system is out of whack from all this emotion.” She didn’t want to be known as the jealous diva sister. The inner demons she already owned were enough to handle.
“I should go back,” she said aloud. Chevy flicked his ears back, awaiting further instruction.
She picked up her slack reins, but before she could start the turn to head back, Chevy halted with a forceful hoof plant and wheeled all by himself. She kept him from bolting, holding him steady with her legs, and coaxed him back in the direction they’d been traveling. He side-stepped and let out a powerful whinny, but he moved forward.
“What is it, boy?” she asked. “Another rider?” She stroked his neck. He was only five—new to the ranch Rico, one of the ranch hands, had told her at the barn—so given his inexperience it was good behavior for him to trust her. Still, she had to continually persuade him to move down the gently sloping hill on the scree-and-dirt path that skirted the wide base of Wolf Paw Peak.
Before they reached the back side of the mountain, a rumble of engines grinding over uneven terrain confused her. When Chevy rounded a last bend, Harper stared across the green-and-yellow expanse of valley floor spreading between Paradise and the Teton Range sixty-five miles north, and her mouth popped open in shock. Two
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