"Remember to refill the water trough in the south pasture."
"Well, thanks, Sis, I would never have thought of doing that for the thirtieth time in a row this month if you hadn't reminded me." The porch door banged shut so loudly behind Alec that the four women sitting around the porch table jumped. Vicky looked down at the table and the other three women shared brief meaningful looks before going back to sipping drinks and assembling brochures for Sinclair Horse Ranch boarding stables in the lush, rolling hills to the southwest of Lexington, Virginia.
"So, how's the arrangement with your cute brother to come help you run the ranch working out?" Denise, a Lexington Realtor and a recent divorcee—for the third time—with a roving eye, asked with a straight face.
"He's not cute, and don't you dare do your vamp thing on him," Victoria—Vicky to her friends—Sinclair, their hostess, answered, giving her friend a mock glaring stare. "And we're doing just fine."
"Certainly sounds that way," Denise said, with a snort.
"Stop picking on her, and I saw Alec first," the redhead at the table, Peggy Cooper, said.
Denise Lee, the curvy bottle blond, snorted again and said, "Fat chance that would do either of you any good." She gave a meaningful look at the fourth, raven-haired, voluptuous Spanish woman at the table, Sabela Rios. That Peggy and Sabela, who jointly owned a gift shop in Lexington, which stocked quite a few selections from Sabela's native Galician, northwest Spain, region of origin, were a couple was known and comfortably accommodated by both Vicky and Denise.
In turn, the couple joked with Denise about her propensity to chase, catch, use, and release men and were supporting Vicky through her bereavement. Vicky had lost her husband to a tragic fall from a horse that early spring. Four years earlier, Vicky and John Sinclair had opened a sanctuary ranch for ill-treated horses, where, in addition to boarding and training horses, they brought derelict horses back to health. As a hallmark of and advertisement for the ranch, the Sinclairs had teamed horses they rehabilitated to sleekness to pull an old Western-style stagecoach through Lexington's streets in its Fourth of July Parade the last three years. Their friends, Peggy and Sabela and Denise and whatever man she was matched with that year, joined the Sinclairs in dressing in Old West attire to ride on the stage coach.
The bond between these people had grown deep and they'd all been devastated by John's death earlier that year. July 4th was fast approaching again, and Vicky's three friends had been discussing what to do about the Fourth of July Parade. Thus far it had been obvious to all of them that Vicky wasn't emotionally up to doing that again—at least not this year. It had been John's favorite activity and, because it was his, Vicky had taken it as hers too. Her brother, Alec Gleason, had come to help her out with the ranch, and they were doing all right there, but Vicky just wasn't regaining the spark she once had. At the same time she was clutching at what she still had, which wasn't helpful when there was more work to do than one person could physically manage alone.
As was usual, after the topic had been talked around today but not yet directly tackled, it was Denise who plowed into it. "It's June, Vicky. What were you thinking about doing with the Fourth of July Parade this year?"
"Well, I don't know . . . I haven't given it much—"
"Because Peggy and Sabela won't be able to ride with the stage coach this year, if you were thinking of taking it out and spinning it around downtown. Did Sabela tell you? They're going to a festival in Spain—in the La Estrada region in Galicia, near where Sabela was born—and including a buying spree for stock for the gift shop. I'm thinking of going with them. We . . . I think you should think about doing that too. It would be good for you to get away. I know the July 4th weekend will be hard on you."
"Oh, I couldn't possible get away. The ranch—"
". . . Would be just fine with Alec running it for a while," Denise continued. "It would be good for both of you to separate for a bit. That little set to the two of you had just now about filling a water trough is what made me think of it."
That, of course, was one big fib. The women and Alec had gotten together on this point already.
"You need time away from all of this, and Alec needs to be alone with it for a while for you both to accept that he can handle it, so that both of you will feel comfortable to pull away from it for a few days from time to time."
"Well, I don't know . . . I don't think—"
"Here. Here's a brochure on the hotel we're going to in Galicia," Sabela said on cue, taking a couple of pamphlets out of her purse and fanning them out on the table. "Isn't it great—with that ancient building ruin below the hotel by the pool, with its roof open to the stars and used for open dining? And here's information on the festival. It's an old one, symbolic of going from childhood to adulthood—"
"Ah, a sex rite," Denise interjected, with a laugh.
"Down girl," Sabela said. "It's about horses. Wild horses. Bringing them down from the mountains once a year, checking them for healthiness, ID chipping them, cutting their manes and tails, and branding the foals. They make a three-day celebration out of it."
"Culling the wild horse herds and seeing to their needs?" Vicky asked, showing interest at last and picking up the brochure on the festival.
"Taking care of the horses, like you do here," Peggy said.
"That reminds me of John and how we met," Vicky said. "You know about the wild horses of Chincoteague Island, don't you, over on the Virginia coast?—that every year they have a festival of fording the wild ponies across to the mainland, checking them over, and moving some of them on to domestication, with human owners."
The other three wagged their heads, without committing to how much they knew about that—which was pretty much everything Vicky had in her memories. Alec had told them the story and they were using it now to try to bring their friend back into life.
"One summer," Vicky continued, "I was working in a gift shop on the mainland there and John was one of the young men herding the horses over the stretch of water they had to ford. I went out to watch the annual horse swim. The first time I saw John he was riding bareback on one of these Chincoteague ponies, guiding it to the mainland. He looked so handsome—fit and brown as a berry—and happy. Afterward he came into the gift shop and we talked about the wild horses. We discovered we both wanted to save horses from neglect. Matched interests, just like that. Imagine that."
"Yep, imagine that," Denise said with a straight face. "And so you two went right out and did the deed?"
"On a beach later that night after we'd visited the corral where they were keeping ponies that had been swum over that day and I saw how good he was at handling horses, yes," Vicky answered. She went further than that in her mind—how he'd held her as they walked toward a deserted part of the beach. How she'd known what she wanted him to do—then he'd done it: the kisses and fondling; lying on the beach under him, his hand under her skirt and then inside her panties, and then taking possession of her, driving her into heat. Knowing what he'd do and wanting him to get on with it. Feeling him move into position as they kissed, digging her fingernails into his shoulder blades as he entered her. Then moving with him, against him, bucking with him, exploding with him.
"But that's all I have to say about that," She said, turning her face away from Denise so that the woman couldn't see her blush.
"Yes, who could possibly deny a fit, brown-as-a-berry man who played with wild horses?" Denise quipped, for which Vicky rewarded her by sticking her tongue out at her.
"Well, think about it—about going to Spain with us for the first weekend in July and taking in this festival," Peggy said, moving in to change the subject, her voice gentle and coaxing. "Sabela and I would like all of us to be together again for the Fourth of July—but the usual parade here in Lexington might be just too much to cope with this year. And we'll be gone and can't help you with it, and—"
"Well, I don't know," Vicky said.
"Keep these brochures to look at. We have another set," Sabela said.
Denise opened her mouth to speak again, but Peggy gave her a warning look, conveying that they had planted the seed as well as they could at this point and Denise's continued direct approach might not have the desired effect. Denise wisely snapped her jaw shut.
An hour later, Alec returned from the south pasture and found Vicky sitting alone on the porch, reading through the travel brochures.
"It's done as you commanded, Lord and Master," he said. "The horses in the south pasture have water. I told them to be grateful to you—that'd I'd just let them die of thirst myself, of course."
"I'm sorry I snapped at you," Vicky said. "But it's hard to let loose of the responsibilities around here. I'll try to be better. I know you're capable of doing it all."
"You know what we need," Alec said, acting like he'd just thought of it, even though he'd carefully worked it out with Denise, Peggy, and Sabela.
"No, what?"
"What we need is for you to take a vacation. It would do you a world of good and I'd have a chance to establish that I can handle the work around here—that I can hold up John's end. If you just weren't here for a few days, we'd both learn something. You'd learn to trust me to do my part and I'd learn whether there was something I needed to get a better handle on."
"A vacation? Maybe just a few days?" Vicky mused, fingering the brochures on the hotel and festival in Galicia. "Maybe you're right."
Alec damn well knew he was right—and so did Denise, Peggy, and Sabela.
* * * *
The dishes had been cleared away from the meal in the ancient, roofless stone-building ruin by the pool below the Torre do Rio Hotel in Galicia's Caldas de Reis, a town where they were staying in preparation to go to the start of the A Rapa das Bestas festival, the festival of the gathering of the wild horses, in the mountains near the town of Sabucedo the next day. Brandy had been brought, and a handsome, well-built Spanish man in his late thirties or early forties was playing the guitar and singing quietly in a deep, smooth baritone. His songs had been more lively during dinner, during which he kept looking over at the table the four women sat at and, Vicky imagined, mostly at her. She focused on him more now, with the meal done, because his songs had turned softer, more sensual. She did an assessment on him again; there wasn't a single test of appreciation that he didn't pass without further research and exposure.
"Isn't his singing divine?" Vicky turned to Denise and said. But Denise was only half listening to her. She was looking at a young, sultry, and dark Spanish man at a nearby table. The two had been flirting with each other with their eyes for some time.
