The Cowboy's Twins by Deb Kastner

out all wrong.”
    â€œYa think?”
    He held up a hand in surrender. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”
    â€œWell, you—you—” she stammered. Tears welled in her eyes, and she dashed them away with the back of her hand.
    Why, oh why did she have to cry when she got angry? The wetness gleaming in her eyes probably just reinforced everything Jax was already thinking about her—that she was a fragile, foolish woman who bawled at the drop of a hat and couldn’t possibly be successful running any kind of ranch, much less a wild-horse refuge.
    When she finally dared to glance up at him, she didn’t find judgment or censure in the chocolate depths of his eyes.
    He looked as uncomfortable as all get-out and downright flustered.
    Now, what did he have to be anxious about? She was the one who’d apparently planned herself into a corner—or rather, failed to plan enough for these early stages when there was so much that needed to be done.
    Whatever it was, Jax wasn’t taking her seriously. And that was a problem.
    Fences or no fences, those horses would arrive in the space of a couple of hours, and she needed to be as prepared as possible for them. She’d thought she’d be further along. She was willing to admit it was taking her longer to perform what she’d expected to be simple ranch chores—chores she’d performed hundreds of times when she’d worked on ranches before. She hadn’t allowed for the extra time it would take when she was working with run-down or missing equipment and no extra sets of hands. If she’d made mistakes—and she privately admitted she had—she would work it out.
    She had to.
    What she didn’t have time for was to deal with this giant of a cowboy making fun of her and her work.
    â€œDon’t cry,” he murmured, reaching out for her and then awkwardly dropping his arms again. “Please. I really didn’t mean to—”
    â€œI’m not crying,” she snapped, dashing the wetness from her cheeks.
    Stupid tears.
    A muscle in the corner of his jaw ticked as his gaze followed the path of her hand. Clearly, he wasn’t convinced. And why should he be?
    He didn’t believe anything about her—not that she was happy living simply for the time being while she funneled all her time and resources into her horses, or even that she was capable of running this rescue at all.
    Maybe he was right.
    The niggling doubt that haunted her late at night when she couldn’t sleep worked its way into her chest, pressing into her lungs and making it difficult for her to breathe. Adrenaline coursed through her, the fight-or-flight instinct that challenged her to run away from the difficult and unknown.
    She chose Door #1. She would fight. She would not run. She would do this thing, and no cowboy—or a whole herd of them—was going to convince her otherwise.
    She was just barely managing to tamp her hidden anxieties back into the recesses of her mind when a shiny new red truck pulled into her driveway, hauling an incongruently beat-up two-horse trailer.
    Oh, no.
    Panic revved Faith’s pulse even more, charging it into overdrive, and heat flushed her face.
    They were here. Her first rescue horses were here.
    She had Alban, her riding horse, already stabled. These were her mustangs. Wild and untamed and Faith planned to let them stay that way.
    Marta Stevens from the Mustang Mission in Wyoming waved out the window and then pulled her truck around, slowly backing the trailer toward the side corral gate.
    Faith had thought she would have a bigger window of time before Marta arrived. Two hours wouldn’t have been enough, of course, as Jax had so handily pointed out. But—
    â€œYour horses, I presume?”
    Faith expected Jax’s voice to be laced with sarcasm, but surprisingly, it wasn’t. Not too much, anyway. Mostly, he sounded only vaguely amused and very tired.
    Of course