“Um, thanks,” Wren said, not bothering to correct Gina on the origin of her name. She never did. She heard Foam’s hoof thudding on the mat in the grooming stall. She’d left him standing there alone too long. “Come on inside,” she said, gesturing toward the barn aisle. “I just need to put my horse in his stall, and then we can start the interview.”

  Which Gina would fail, unfortunately. Wren felt bad about it for several reasons. First, Gina seemed like a much more promising candidate than any of the others by far. First, she had actually shown up. Second, she was old enough to drive herself to job interviews. Third, she was carrying a black leather folio that looked a damned sight more professional than martial arts guy’s plastic grocery bag or the little girl’s Dora the Explorer backpack.

  Wren put Foam in his stall with a flake of hay to munch on until she finished talking to Gina. A few questions, some attempts to nod as if she understood the answers, and then Wren would send Gina on her way. She was far too distracting to have hanging about the barn, talking about the internet and taking lessons from Wren. Plus, she was making Wren wish she had something intelligent and insightful to add to a conversation about social media—a topic she had absolutely zero interest in pursuing. She was happy with her decision about how to live her unplugged, offline life, and she didn’t want some goddess lounging around her barn making her feel self-conscious or making her question her values. If this interview was for a date, Gina would already have the job. They wouldn’t have much to talk about, but who cared? A little small talk about the weather and the wine, a nice meal, some really hot sex…

  Wren sighed. That wasn’t what Gina was looking for here. She wanted a job, not a date. Riding lessons or board, not a one-night stand.

  She led Gina into the office and shut the door so the dogs wouldn’t crowd them in the small space. She had to edge around Gina twice as she retrieved the desk chair from the corner where it had been flung earlier, then searched for the dusty folding chair that had been tucked behind a case of trophies ages ago. Wren could smell cinnamon and honey every time she got too close to Gina—warm scents that should clash with the fresher, outdoorsy aromas of horses and woods but were instead oddly complementary. Plus, they made Wren long to lean close to Gina’s neck and inhale. She managed to resist, but barely. She was new to this interviewing process, but she was pretty sure that nuzzling was not encouraged.

  She tried to wipe the grime off the folding chair with the long sleeve of her shirt, but she only managed to smear it, not clean it. Gina was dressed casually but suitably for a business meeting in black pants and a lilac pinstriped shirt while Wren was wearing the same jodhpurs she’d had on while feeding, cleaning stalls, and riding two horses. She shrugged and sat down in the chair, crossing her legs and gesturing for Gina to take the reasonably clean one.

  Gina took two rapid steps back, bumping into the desk chair and sending it rolling into the wall with a bang. “Oh, sorry. I don’t want to take your chair. I can sit in that one.”

  Wren frowned, escaping her uncomfortable awareness of her attraction to Gina long enough to realize that Gina seemed flustered, too. Wren supposed it made sense for her to be nervous, since she was the one interviewing for the job. Wren tried to put aside her frustration with this whole project and with her unexpected response to Gina and instead focus on putting her more at ease. After all, she wasn’t going to get the job. Wren might as well make the experience brief and painless. “Please, sit. I’m already dirty, anyway. Careful with that one, though. It moves.”

  Gina pulled the chair closer and sat down. “Yeah, thanks. The little wheels should have been a clue.”

  She sat perched on the edge of the chair as if ready to bolt, probably because her potential employer had spent more time gazing at her than asking questions. Wren sifted through some possible things to say before she thought of a good opening line. “So, um, why don’t you describe your social media experience.”

  Wren was congratulating herself on coming up with a statement that bought her time to come up with some clever, insightful questions when she realized Gina was looking for a clear space where she could spread out her folio.

  “Let me just move some of this…” Wren stood up and made room on the cluttered desk by stacking a bunch of loose invoices and prize lists, and shoving two halters and a pile of jangly metal bits off to one side.

  “Thank you,” Gina said, putting her folio on the desk and avoiding Wren’s eyes again.

  “You’re welcome, but I’m deducting interview points because you’re laughing at my housekeeping skills.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Gina protested, even though the laughter she had been poorly concealing broke free at Wren’s words. She waved a hand vaguely at Wren. “I was laughing at your…well, you have a lot of dirt on your pants from the chair.”

  Wren twisted around and saw the layer of dusty gray coating the seat of her olive green breeches. She’d have to change before she sat in her nice, clean saddle. And she was giving Gina back those lost points and then some, for checking out her backside. She sat down again and pointed at the folio.

  “Go on, then. And you’d better impress me. You’ve got some ground to make up, and we’ve barely started.”

  Gina chuckled as she flipped to the first laminated page, either because she was too confident about her qualifications to be worried about slipping out of cool professionalism, or because she found the situation too amusing to care. After about two minutes, Wren realized the first was the most likely. Gina moved through her presentation with ease, moving swiftly through a skimpy and general biography—raised in a small town, moved to a city—and slowing down when she got to the pages filled with screenshots of her online life and numerous graphs detailing her popularity. Most of the phrases about organic growth and affiliates and click-throughs were meaningless to Wren, but a splash of color caught her attention.

  “Hey,” she said, pointing at Gina’s logo, which had a black cityscape silhouette with a cluster of purple peonies in the corner, enclosed in a slender silver oval. “Your clothes match your logo.”

  “Mostly because it’s my favorite color, so I have a lot of clothes in shades of purple,” Gina said as she glanced down at her shirt and tugged at the sleeves. “But it’s also part of branding myself. If you see anything purple in the next few days, I want you to think of me.”

  “I probably will,” Wren admitted. Or if she smelled cinnamon or looked at her desk chair or closed her eyes and imagined multicolored hair and light blue eyes. She cleared her throat and shifted her attention from Gina to the thought of having to go out and buy an entire computer-coordinated wardrobe. Not. Happening. “I wouldn’t have to go around dressed to match a website, would I?”

  Gina laughed. “No. But you’d want to figure out what you’d like future clients to know about who you are and what you do here. Then you choose one or two colors and images that represent that and make sure they’re visible to anyone who comes here in person or visits your site.”

  “Most barns do something similar at horse shows, with matching trunks and blankets and saddle pads.” Wren had meant to follow suit once she started competing with her training students, but it hadn’t seemed worth the money or effort when she only had one or two horses at each show.

  “That’s part of what I’d help you do—narrow your focus and send a clear message to your audience. I don’t know much about horses, but I know branding, and I can help you define the image you want to project.”

  “Well, you’ll learn plenty about horses during your lessons. If you’re hired, of course,” Wren said absently. Gina’s prospects were looking better, especially if she was going to encourage Wren to buy more horse-related things. She’d have to deal with her attraction somehow, but at the moment most of her brain was now occupied by daydreams about the way her barn aisle could look at horse shows. She still imagined herself with minimal students, but their horses would be decked out in elegant fly sheets and—

  “I’m not really interested in the lessons.” Gina’s voice interrupted Wren’s fantasy. “And I don’t have a horse to board. Your accountant said you had an apartment to rent in exchange for the work, though, and I need a place to live.”

  “An apartment? Dianna said you could live here?” Wren frowned as she tried to think of a way to get Gina out of the office for at least a few minutes of privacy. She needed to call her meddling accountant, and she had a feeling the conversation would include more swear words than an interviewee should have to hear.

  Gina stood up, as if reading her mind. “She also said I should excuse myself at this point in the interview and say that I really want to look around the farm, to give you a chance to call her.”

  Wren waved toward the door. “Fine. Look around. Just don’t get too comfortable because you’re not moving in.” She added the last sentence loudly as Gina shut the office door behind her. She heard her answering laughter, though, and figured Dianna had predicted she would say something along those lines.

  “She’s not moving in,” she said again, as soon as Dianna answered her phone.

  “She’s very nice. And very well qualified,” Dianna said, her voice calm.

  “I’m taking away your stirrups for an entire month.” Dianna complained incessantly when Wren made her spend even a few minutes in a lesson working on her legs and seat by riding without stirrups. Four weeks without them seemed like a fitting punishment.

  “I’ve checked her out online,” Dianna continued, ignoring Wren’s threat. “She’s an influencer, Wren. High numbers, a brilliantly creative mind, and a real gift for visual storytelling. Combine her skills with your riding talent, and you’ll have so many people wanting to train with you that you’ll have to turn most of them away. I know how much you’ll enjoy that.”

  Wren rolled her eyes. “I don’t enjoy turning people away. I just don’t want too many of them coming here in the first place.”

  She flipped through Gina’s folio as she talked, finding an outlet for some of her irritation as she snapped through the pages.

  “You can’t afford to pay someone of her caliber, let alone bribe them to work in exchange for a few lessons. You can’t pass up this opportunity.”

  Wren snorted. Yes, she could. Quite happily, too. “If she’s as amazing as you say, then why would she be swayed by a studio apartment in my barn? You’ve seen it. There are spiders.”

  She paused on a page in the folio’s section on Gina’s Instagram, where she had included photos of her Seattle apartment. It was a bright-looking space, with lots of color and texture. Even someone as design-challenged as Wren could see that this would be a beautiful place to live. Eclectic—but in a carefully crafted and thoughtful way. Not in the whatever-the-hell-I-can-find way Wren had decorated her own home.

  “She needs a place to stay for a while, Wren.”

  Something in Dianna’s tone of voice made Wren stop and close the binder. “What happened to her?”

  “Ask her. It’s her story to tell. But just…she needs a place, and you really could use her help.”

  “Two months. No stirrups,” Wren said before she hung up the phone.

  Chapter Four

  Gina stepped out of the office and was bombarded by Wren’s dogs. The one called Grover was intimidatingly huge, but he merely wanted to lean against her legs. The littler Biscuit, adorable as he was with his floppy ears and patchy brown and black spots, was apparently the vicious one of the pair. He launched himself at the hem of her pants and grabbed hold with determined teeth. Gina reached down and detached him, careful not to shred any fabric. She didn’t actively dislike dogs, but she had never spent much time around them. Her dad had owned hunting dogs when she was growing up, though they were meant to be working animals and were off-limits as pets. She had gotten in trouble the few times she had tried to befriend them by bringing table scraps or teaching them tricks, so she had quickly learned to avoid the kennels. She was a sucker for dog videos on YouTube when she had trouble sleeping at night, with their montages of animals welcoming their owners home from war or big dogs cuddling tiny kittens, but her canine encounters were restricted to online ones—never in person. These two, with their complete disregard for personal space, were just another reminder of how far this place was pushing her outside of her comfort zone.

  “Come on, you two,” she said with a sigh. “We might as well look around.”

  She led the dogs down the aisle toward the back door of the barn. The only place she really wanted to look around was the inside of her car as she was driving away, but she had to see this through. She was exhausted after the stress of telling her awful story over and over when all she wanted to do was forget about it. She’d explained the situation to her landlords, apologizing for bringing this mess directly to their doorstep. They had been sympathetic and kind, even telling her to contact them again when she was ready to move back to Seattle because they’d let her return if the apartment was still available. Gina had thanked them and said she would, but she could see the worry on their faces and knew she wouldn’t ever be coming back to the lovely space she had been turning into a home.

  Next had come the lengthy visit to the police department. The officers had been kind, but she’d had to repeat the graphic details of the doxing three times as she was shuffled from person to person before she finally got to someone who was able to help her. Not that their help was anything as satisfying as catching the cruel people who had posted her personal information, and giving her the freedom to return to her normal life. No, their help was more along the lines of thanking her for giving them the information, promising to look into the matter, and suggesting she find someplace safe to stay for a while. Someplace out of the way, where she couldn’t be traced.

  Gina paused by one of the stalls and patted the nose of a gray horse that was looking at her with enormous brown eyes. This farm was as out of the way as she was prepared to go. She had pored over a map of the state, searching for isolated pockets that would still give her driving access to Seattle and other interesting places she could blog about while keeping her living situation a secret. Poulsbo hadn’t been at the top of her list—or anywhere on it—since she hadn’t wanted to leave the I-5 corridor and head out to the Olympic Peninsula, but she had spotted the ad that Dianna had presumably posted for Wren when she was scrolling through local classifieds in search of an apartment that wouldn’t cost a fortune. She had called on a whim, and as soon as she found out that the job might come with a place to live, she had decided to give it a shot no matter how undesirable the location. She would have spent more energy regretting that decision if she thought there was any chance in hell that Wren would concede to having her move onto her property. Neither one of them wanted Gina to be here.

  Even if Wren decided for some reason to offer her the job, Gina would then be forced to tell her why she desperately and immediately needed a place like this to live, where she couldn’t be easily traced, but also where she could continue to run her business. She’d be sent packing for sure once Wren understood the potential risk caused by Gina’s presence. She was tempted to keep her secret from a potential new employer, but her conscience wouldn’t allow her to move in without being honest about her situation. How many more times would she be forced to rehash those damned comments before she would be able to settle into some new version of normal?

  Gina jumped back as the gray horse snorted at her, breaking her out of her ruminations. She continued walking down the aisle, staying in the center and as far away from the horses on either side as she could be. She’d just have to suck it up and repeat the story as many times as necessary. The hardest recounting had been the vaguest, oddly enough. She had posted an abbreviated version of the hateful virtual attack on every platform she used, assuring her followers that she would continue to post and repeatedly proclaiming that she had moved from her old location and that the police were involved—doing her damnedest to keep anyone from harassing her landlords or their family. She had also apologized to her viewers for switching to a mediated format and not allowing everyone to post freely as they had before. She had been overwhelmed by the immediate outpouring of kindness from her online communities, as her friends and followers expressed their shock at what had happened, as well as their wishes for her to find a safe place. And she answered every single one. She had long since stopped replying to every one of the thousands of comments left on her various channels. She read them, of course, and answered similar questions with single replies, but she didn’t have enough hours in the day to compose thousands of replies. Now she had to find those hours, as well as the ones required for her to review and accept each comment before it was made public.

  Gina made it to the end of the barn aisle, stepping outside and looking around. The day was cool, but the cloud cover was wispy enough to let plenty of sunshine through to spotlight the farm’s attributes. Large paddocks to her right, the bright green of the spring grass contrasting nicely with the grazing horses in various shades of brown and gray. A riding arena with red-brown footing and a low white rail marking its borders. Tall evergreens fringing the property, their highest branches swaying slightly in a breeze she was unable to feel at ground level. And the crown jewel of the view—the sparkling water of one of Puget Sound’s many inlets.

  Nature. Yep, just the way it looked when she lived in her childhood home, far from the concrete and glass of the city. She had left this kind of rustic emptiness behind years ago, and she still couldn’t believe she might have to return to this type of living situation, even if only for a short time. She was sure plenty of people, like Wren, loved this peaceful, boring, empty kind of life far from the energy and amenities of a big city. They could have it, because Gina sure as hell didn’t want it. She already felt out of range of sponsors, slowly slipping off their radar…