Animal Attraction by Jill Shalvis

again. “It’s important with any animal, especially a spooked one, to be calm, assertive. Dominant.”
    “Okay.”
    “A horse’s emotions depend on its surroundings and also on the emotions of its human counterparts.”
    She went still. “Are you saying that my emotions caused Reno to try to bite me?”
    His silence said he was going to let her wrestle with that one. “Relax your arms,” he said, making her realize she was hugging herself tight. She dropped them to her sides with effort.
    “And breathe,” he said.
    He was right, she wasn’t breathing. She sucked in some air.
    “Better,” he said, and leaned past her to rub Reno’s neck the way he was rubbing hers.
    Reno gave a snort of pleasure and shifted closer.
    “It’s calming,” Dell said.
    Yes. It was calming as hell. If he kept it up, she’d do as Reno just had and make sounds of pleasure and shift even closer, too. “You have a bond with him,” she said, managing to sound like she still had bones in her legs.
    “Yes, and so do you. You just have to find it, and use your touch and voice to assure the animal that you’re not going to let anything harm him.”
    His hand was slowly moving up and down her back now. And she got the message.
    He wasn’t going to let anything harm her, either.
    “Jade.”
    She closed her eyes. “I still don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Ever.”
    The sun was warm on her face, telling her that even though it was fall, summer hadn’t quite given up the fight yet. She could almost pretend that they weren’t having a conversation she didn’t want to have.
    “Ever is a long time,” Dell said.
    “I mean it.”
    “I know.” He nodded. “I felt the same.”
    She shook her head. This didn’t compute. “What are you talking about?”
    “I know what it’s like to suffer a trauma. What it’s like to struggle to get past it.”
    Deny, deny, deny. “I’m not struggling.”
    He just looked at her, and she blew out a breath. “Okay, so sometimes I struggle, but don’t change the subject! You’re six foot two and outweigh me by at least sixty pounds. How were you ever a . . .”
    “Victim?” His smile was grim. “I wasn’t always thirty-two and built like a linebacker, you know. Actually, I started off more like a pipe cleaner with eyes.”
    That surprised a laugh out of her and she sidled him a glance. No one in their right mind would confuse that well defined, tough, rugged body with a pipe cleaner. “Come on.”
    “Jade, trust me when I tell you that in my freshman year I was five foot three and weighed a buck twenty soaking wet. I got my ass kicked every which way, every single day.”
    An ache built in her chest for the boy he’d been. “Why?”
    “Because I couldn’t keep my mouth closed to save my life. I was a punk-ass kid whose mother had walked away and whose dad had died. I had a chip on top of the chip on my shoulder.”
    His mother had been Native American. According to Lilah, when the woman had been a teenager, she’d fallen for a white kid—a big offense in her family. She’d run off with him, but after having her second baby—Dell—she’d run off again, back to the reservation. When the boys’ father had died several years later, she hadn’t wanted her sons back.
    Jade and her own mother had some issues, basically control issues, but Jade had never once doubted that she’d been wanted, cherished and fully, one hundred percent loved.
    A luxury Dell nor Adam had been given. It made her hurt for him, for Adam, too. For the men that they’d become, not that they’d thank her for the sympathy. They were both far too proud for that. But in spite of what had happened to them, they’d become good men. For both of them, trust had to be earned, and Dell certainly didn’t give it away easily. He shielded his emotions behind his intellect and his job, though he completely surrendered himself to every single patient.
    “I’d been dumped into yet another foster home and was