I hear her before I see her.

Some overplayed pop song leaking from her phone speaker, Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter. I round the side of the barn, fully prepared to tell her to turn that shit down, but she’s got her AirPods in, twirling around like she’s the main character of a movie.

Jesus.

Walk away, Caleb.

She’s not my problem. But she’s got her back to the corral like one of those horses isn’t liable to stick its head over the fence and scare the hell out of her.

And I guess I am an asshole, but I’m not that much of an asshole.

“You planning on getting trampled today?”

She spins so fast I think she’s gonna fall over, clutching her chest like I’m a goddamn ghost. “Holy shit. Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

I nod toward the fence. “You shouldn’t be standing there.”

She exhales through her nose, like I’m the one being unreasonable. “It’s a fence.”

“It’s a fence that weighs a hell of a lot more than you if that horse decides he doesn’t like you standing there.”

She looks over her shoulder at the horse in question, an old show horse, Rum, and then back at me, unimpressed. “Right. Super dangerous.”

This is why I don’t deal with city girls. They’ve got no sense of the real world.

“What the hell are you even doing out here?”

Her lips twitch, and that’s when I know I just made a mistake.

“Oh, you know,” she says, like she’s barely holding back a grin. “Just admiring the fine shyt around here.”

I blink. “What?”

“Fine shyt,” she repeats, like that’s a perfectly normal sentence.

I stare at her.

She stares back.

And then, mocking a robotic voice, she plays: “Fine shyt—adjective. An individual who is, in fact, fine as shyt.”

It takes a second. A long, slow second. And then it hits me.

She’s talking about me.

I feel my jaw clench. “You need better hobbies.”

She grins like she’s won something. “And you need a better attitude, cowboy.”

I shake my head, turning on my heel.

Fucking city girls.