Aria wanted to cover her eyes as she watched the little boy careen around the riding ring on a sorrel lesson horse that was more bona fide saint than animal. This was a beginner class, and they were barely learning to steer while their horses were trotting around the ring. The kid was actually lucky as hell that the horse already knew he was supposed to stay on the rail. Not only was the horse doing most of the steering, Aria could have sworn she saw the animal bunch up his shoulder more than once to toss the kid back in the saddle.

“Good boy!” The dad was shouting from the bleachers and doing fist pumps. He was one of the most annoying parents Aria knew. She knew that his name was Buck Owen. He was one of those men who ran around in tight blue jeans and cowboy boots with his broad-brimmed hat in place and a blank silver belt buckle strapped around his waist because he had never actually been on a horse or any kind of livestock long enough to win an actual title. Buck was absolutely determined that Mason was going to legitimize their family’s claim to cowboyhood. “That’s my little cowboy! Go Mason!”

Aria wanted to groan. Unfortunately, Mason was not as talented as his parent might want to think. This was an uncomfortable reality of her job. She figured it was pretty much that way with anyone who coached or trained kids. Parents often times had much bigger dreams than their kids could possibly hope to live up to.

“All right, Mason!” Aria shouted. “Go ahead and bring him back to a walk. Go back to the rail and get in line, please. Emily, you’re next up! Remember to keep your heels down and your eyes up so you can see where you’re going!”

Aria had learned years ago that it was a bad idea when teaching beginner riders to trot to let them all try it at the same time. Having seven horses in the ring with almost zero steering and not very steady riders in the saddle was just a bad idea.

As Aria watched Emily bounce wildly around the ring on one of Aria’s little lesson horses, Aria could not help but wonder what Bella would look like trotting around. There was almost no doubt in Aria’s mind that Bella Hernandez would be a prodigy compared to these kiddos. Whether it was in the genes or just a natural ability, Bella was impressive.

Thinking about Bella’s genes brought Laredo Hernandez to mind. No matter what Jesse swore, Aria had a really tough time believing that Laredo had ever been happy or friendly. She had a difficult time even imagining what his smile would look like. The man was like a perpetual sourpuss. At least he’d been that way as far back as Aria could recall. And when it came to Laredo, Aria could pretty well remember back to the dawn of time. He had always fascinated her the way a wolf is fascinating to a lamb right before he eats it.

Laredo was quite a few years older than Aria. Aria was two years older than Jesse, which still put Laredo four years ahead of her in school. He had always been brooding and bossy and pretty much the grouchiest boy in school.

“Uh, Ms. Callahan?” Emily was standing in front of Aria on her black horse and waving her hand in Aria’s face. “Can I stop trotting now? My butt hurts.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Aria had totally zoned out. Not good! “Go get back in line. Um, Gregg! You’re next!”

“I don’t want to trot!” Gregg was whining again. The kid hated horses. Aria could not figure out why his mother was so determined that he was going to ride. It was sort of sad.

Aria exhaled a long, slow breath and prayed for patience. “Just walk around once and go get back in line, Gregg. We’re almost done. I promise. Lacey, you go just as soon as Gregg is on the opposite side of the ring from you. That’s called leaving a safe distance.”

Of course, Mason’s dad was the first to jump on poor Gregg. He pointed at the scrawny kid and waved to get Aria’s attention. “Why is that kid in my son’s lesson? He doesn’t belong here! Get him off the horse and out of the way. He’s holding them all back!”

Aria groaned. Uh oh. Here we go again!

She could see poor Gregg’s little face crumple as he struggled not to cry. The little boy was ten and looked about eight. He was plagued with all sorts of other little qualities that had been dubbed nerdy by society at large too. It annoyed Aria to no end that his mother insisted he take horseback riding lessons, but Aria sure as heck didn’t want the little boy to be any more emotionally scarred by the experience.

“Hey!” Aria waved to Gregg. “Come here, kiddo! Right here.”

Gregg steered his little black horse over toward Aria. “I’m sorry I’m holding up the class.”

“You’re not,” Aria said flatly. “You’re doing just fine. And honestly, the way you take care of your horse after your lesson is really the important part of learning to ride. Plenty of people can sit in a saddle and let the horse bum around the ring, but those same people can’t scoop poop in the aisles, groom a horse 'til he shines, and make sure their tack is clean and well cared for. Those kind of people are the real cowboys,” Aria assured Gregg.

Gregg’s little face broke out into a grin. “Can I just go back to the barn and brush Topsy?”

“Sure you can.” Aria opened the gate and let Gregg out of the ring. “You know where all the stuff is, and I know that I can trust you to do it right. That’s a big deal. I don’t trust just anyone in my barn.”

Gregg dismounted and began leading Topsy back to the barn, talking a mile a minute to the little mare. Aria shook her head and fought back a huge grin. Sometimes horses were important to people in very different ways than was expected. And just being around the four-legged beasts was soothing to the soul.

“That’s right!” Mason’s dad shouted. “Get him out of there! Mason, you go take his turn. You go trot around and show the rest of these kids how it’s done!”

Mason started to pick up his reins to follow his father’s orders. Aria cursed beneath her breath as she realized that the next little girl in line had already cued her horse to start trotting. With his poor steering skills, Mason was on a collision course for sure.

“Mason!” Aria shouted. “You stay on that rail until I tell you otherwise. Do you understand me? You disobey directions in a lesson and you won’t ride the next time.”

The kid froze. Aria could see in his head that he was fighting that horrible war between following her directions and doing what his dad was telling him to do. For a moment, he sat there on the rail. But one more grunt from the stands and Mason put his heels to his sleepy little horse and sent it bouncing down the rail at a trot.

Aria started running but already knew she was going to be too late. She had been standing by the break in the arena fence. The disaster was happening on the opposite side of the ring. So, nervously obeying the pushiness of his parent, Mason kicked too hard and his horse decided a full throttle trot was fine with him.

Mason’s horse was now dashing toward the back end of Lacey’s horse, which had just come from a trot to a walk because that was the exercise. Because Mason wasn’t steering, his horse decided he was going to have to make an executive decision to avoid being plastered against his barn buddy’s butt.

Lacey gasped in surprise, spinning in her saddle just as Mason’s horse turned a very tidy sharp left. The horse pivoted toward the center of the ring, and Mason could not keep his balance. The kid went flying as the horse continued on at a trot. Of course, when the seasoned lesson horse realized he’d lost his rider, he immediately stopped.

The entire ring was in total confusion. Parents were standing on the bleachers trying to see if their kids were okay. Mason’s father was climbing into the ring. Mason was screaming as though he’d been decapitated. And into it all went Aria feeling as though she were having just about the crappiest night in recent memory.

“I’m going to sue you!” Buck was pointing at Aria as she approached Mason.

She ignored him for the moment and squatted down on the ground in front of the boy. “Look at me, kiddo.” Mason was sobbing with about as much drama as an after-school special. Aria sighed and snapped her fingers. “Hey, quit your crying and look at me. Tell me where it hurts.”

The boy had fallen on his butt. He was wearing a helmet, but there weren’t even any scuff marks on it. He had basically rolled off the horse. He finally seemed to calm down enough to do a mental regrouping.

“Well?” Aria prompted. She held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three.”

“Good. Can you see stuff clearly?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you move your arms and legs? You can feel everything?”

Aria was about to grab Buck’s tooled cowboy boot and yank it out from under him. The man was hovering back and forth while yakking on the phone to someone—presumably Mason’s mother. He was talking about taking the kid to the emergency room. This was where Aria’s job got a little dicey. If you got on a horse enough times, you fell off. That was how it went. Helmets kept the more serious head injuries from happening unless there was some pretty serious activity going on. But for the most part, a tumble off a slow-moving school horse was not a reason to go running in for a CT scan.

“Here, buddy.” Aria took Mason’s hand. “Let’s get you up and look for scrapes. You look pretty good to me.”

“What?” Buck barked. “Leave him on the ground. We’re having an ambulance come and get him.”

Aria snorted. “That’s hardly necessary. In fact, the most necessary thing right now is to get Mason back in that saddle.”

“What?” Buck seemed to be awfully partial to that word. “You can’t be serious!”

“I thought you wanted your kid to be a cowboy,” Aria pointed out drily. “If cowboys called an ambulance every time they fell off, they would never get out of the ambulance.”

It was easy to see that was striking some pretty deep chords in Buck. Mason was sniffling and looking at his dad for cues. It was up to this grown-ass man to put on his big girl panties and help his son learn a valuable lesson about dusting himself off and moving on.

Aria looked at the remaining six kids in the class. “Hey, guys, we’re going to go ahead and stop here for tonight. Okay? Go back to the barn, untack your horses, and make sure you brush away the saddle marks. These guys have had a workout and you all did great tonight! Tori is inside to help you”—thank goodness for teenaged barn rats—”and I’ll be back there in just a minute.”

There were lots of stares, but the kids did as they were told. It didn’t take long, and Buck, Mason, and the sorrel lesson horse were the only ones left in the ring. Aria had already decided that the horse was going to get an extra flake of hay tonight in his stall. The little gelding had pretty much done his job times ten tonight. The average horse would have thrown up its hooves and quit ages ago. But that was why Aria took her lesson horses so very seriously.

“All right.” Aria put her hands on her hips and checked the cinch on the sorrel horse’s saddle. “Mason, let’s get you back up on this horse.”

“I don’t wanna.” Mason was swiping at his eyes. “I don’t want to ride anymore.”

Buck was sputtering, but Aria had plenty of these conversations under her belt. “I’m sorry to hear that, especially because you were having so much fun just a little while ago.”

“Then I fell off,” Mason reasoned.

“So, it’s not fun anymore?”

Mason screwed up his face. “I don’t want to fall off again.”

“I can understand that.” Aria kept her face very serious. “Why did you fall off tonight?”

“Charlie turned too quick.”

“Why did Charlie turn?” Aria kept nudging the kid’s brain.

Buck snorted. “Because he’s glue factory quality. That’s why.”

“Oh, really?” Aria rounded on Buck. “You realize that nine out of ten horses would have tossed your kid sky high and stomped all over the remains, right? They don’t like being steered right into another horse’s butt.”

“Oh!” Mason’s expression actually brightened. It was as if Aria could see the light going off in his brain. “I steered him into Lacey’s horse’s butt.”

“Exactly!” Aria nodded emphatically. “He had to turn fast. If he hadn’t, you would have crashed, and that would have been a whole lot worse. So, what do we always do when we’re in our riding lesson?”

Mason scuffed his toe in the sand. “We follow directions.”

“My directions, right?” Aria cast a sideways glance at Buck. “We follow my directions, and we pay attention to where every other horse in the ring is. We do not steer our horses into bad places, and we keep our heels down! If you’d had your heels down, you wouldn’t have come off the horse.”

“That’s preposterous!” Buck blustered.

Aria was so done with this guy. She was pretty well ready to fire him as a client. She took Mason’s hand and walked both him and Charlie away from Buck. She sat them beside the mounting block in the middle of the ring and helped the kid mount. He didn’t argue this time. He just got on.

“Walk him around,” Aria suggested. “Just walk. You can even hold onto the saddle horn if you want.”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to sue you!” Buck called after Aria. “You’re completely incompetent as a teacher!”

“Now that’s just not true.”

Aria swung around to see who had decided to join their conversation and was stunned to see Darren Hernandez standing at the edge of the rail. The little boy Jaeger was with him, and the two of them were watching Charlie and Mason.

“Excuse me?” Buck turned around to glare at Darren. “And who the hell are you?”

Darren ducked between the fence rails and entered the ring. Jaeger came with him just like a little shadow. Darren stuck out his hand to Buck. “The name is Darren Hernandez. This is my son, Jaeger. And we’re here to beg Ms. Callahan if she will please start teaching Jaeger here to ride.”

“Please?” Jaeger added, bouncing up and down on his toes. He was actually wearing little cowboy boots and looked damned adorable for a mini Hernandez brother.

Aria couldn’t help but smile. “I think we can arrange something.”

“Hernandez?” Buck’s eyebrows shot up. “You want your kid to ride here?”

Darren faced down Buck and curled his lip. “I’ve known Aria Callahan almost her whole life. She and my sister, Jesse, do some horse trading, and Aria is one of the best riders and trainers I know of, especially when it comes to kids. But if you want faster results, you toddle on down to the Flying W’s rodeo kids program. They’ll get your kid in the ring and get you some ribbons, but he’s not going to learn how to ride and it’ll cost you a hell of a lot more in the long run.”

Aria hid a smile. Darren had certainly put Buck in his place. It wasn’t what she had expected. Darren was certainly different these days. Maybe it was the kid and the new fiancée and the job. It was a damned shamed that having a wonderful kid and a great job hadn’t improved Laredo at all.

“Mason?” Aria turned to the little boy and gestured for him to dismount. “I’ll take care of Charlie for you. I really appreciate you getting back on and riding around. That was really important. But now you and your dad can head on out. I need to talk to my friend Darren here.”

Mason looked confused. “I don’t have to untack Charlie?”

“I’ll take care of it since your daddy isn’t sure you’re going to come back for lessons.” Aria looked at Buck. “He’s welcome to come back, but you need to stop talking about suing me. I haven’t done anything wrong. Not only that, but you signed a whole ream of paper’s worth of forms before your son starting taking lessons here. Those forms said you understood the risk and took responsibility. There have been lots of clients who take their trainers and their barn owners to court for injury. Very few of them win those cases. You get me?”

Buck gave a wordless nod and then snatched up his kid’s hand and walked away. Aria then turned her attention to Darren and Jaeger. Beside her, Charlie was quickly starting to doze. She raised her eyebrows at Darren. She owed him a thank-you for the compliments, but she wasn’t sure exactly what all of this was going to entail. Was getting further mixed up with the Hernandez family really to her benefit?