by Erin Wright
“Huh. Makes sense.” He scratched at his stubble-covered jaw. It was such a different way of looking at things, and yet it made perfect sense how she could be totally ignorant and totally intelligent about the same topic at the same time. It hurt his head a little, truthfully. “You wanna see a cattle operation in action?”
He had no idea where that question came from. Certainly not from him. It was his voice, and it was his mouth moving, sure. But he wouldn’t make that offer to Jennifer. Despite the fact that he trusted that she wanted to help him save his farm, that didn’t mean that she would actually be able to. There was no guarantee. So dating someone in that position – who held that kind of power over him – was an insanely bad idea.
Which was why he’d run last night. A small part of his brain still seemed to be keeping up with reality, which was that Jennifer and Intermountain West Bank & Loan held his future in their hands, and they may just choose to squash him flat.
Unfortunately, the part of his brain that was keeping up with that reality seemed to be growing smaller by the day.
“Oh!” Jennifer stared at him over her coffee cup. Carmelita had disappeared somewhere, leaving just the two of them in the kitchen, and as the electricity crackled between them, the fact that they were alone seemed to be all he could think about.
Well, that and some other things, of course.
Jennifer swallowed hard, licking her lips. Stetson held his breath. The clock ticked on the wall.
“Yeah! I mean, sure. Yes. That’d be good.” She took another sip of her coffee.
“Great!” he said, a little too cheerfully. He groaned inwardly. He sounded like a randy teenage boy who’d just convinced a girl to go on a date with him.
Which was probably a little closer to the truth than his pride wanted to admit, although he wasn’t sure how much of a date a city girl would consider the tour of a working farm to be.
“Let me go get your car out of the ditch first,” he said quickly, trying to cover his nerves, “and then I can take you on a tour of the farm. Hold on – did you bring any clothes with you that aren’t skirts or pantyhose or something?”
“I didn’t bring any clothes with me at all. That’s why I’m wearing your basket—”
“Not to the farm, here to Sawyer,” he clarified. “Did you just bring auditing clothes to Sawyer?”
“Oh. Right. Ummm…yes. I don’t normally pack any play clothes while I’m on an audit.”
He had to work hard to keep from rolling his eyes. Jeans and boots were not play clothes. They were work clothes. The skirts and high heels – now those were the impractical ones. Although he would admit that it seemed like a stretch to call them play clothes, either. They were good for looks only, by his estimation.
She did look good in them, but that was besides the point.
“Hold on – how much longer are you going to be here?” he asked bluntly. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought to ask that question before. When she’d first arrived, he’d been blindly hoping she’d be gone by the end of the day, but it was Friday now, and she was still here. Didn’t she need to go back to Boise at some point?
“An audit can last anywhere from one to two weeks, depending on what I find,” she said, shrugging. Stetson gulped. He was glad she hadn’t informed him of that fact when she’d first arrived. He really would’ve blown a gasket.
Now, the idea of her sticking around for another week was terrifyingly thrilling, like being poised at the top of a steep drop on a rollercoaster ride at Six Flags. Or what he assumed a rollercoaster ride would feel like. His parents hadn’t exactly taken him to amusement parks every weekend growing up.
“The more complicated the business, the longer it takes. Or the messier an office, the longer it takes.” She sent him a teasing grin. He grimaced in return.
“My filing skills aren’t…exactly top notch.” Which was his way of acknowledging that they plain didn’t exist, and apologizing for that fact, guy style.
She shrugged. “Most farmers aren’t. I would’ve been surprised if your office had been spick and span.”
My office. That seemed so weird to hear. It was his office, even if it still didn’t feel like it.
Would never feel like it.
“Well, I’ll get to work on your car, if you want to get to work on the audit. I’ll come get you when the Honda is out of the ditch.”
Her eyebrows creased with concern. “Are you sure? You don’t need me to drive it or something? I hate to have caused you a mess that you have to clean up.”
“Nah, it’s all good. I’ll have Christian help me. He was already done for the day when you showed up on the front porch last night, or I would’ve had him help me then. I try not to call him out after-hours.”
“Who’s Christian?” she asked, confused.
“My foreman. Him and a couple of other guys live full-time here on the farm; my other employees are seasonal. Christian’s father, Jorge, is my brother’s foreman, but I stole Christian away a long time ago with the siren call of handmade tamales.” He’d seen Carmelita coming in through the doorway behind Jennifer, and had known that she’d love the compliment.
He was right. Of course.
“Christian is a good boy. He knows good food when he tastes it,” Carmelita said with a wink, swooping in to grab their dishes and begin cleaning up. “Wyatt does not have a housekeeper, so he cannot bribe people to work for him with tasty food.”
“He sure ain’t gonna cook it himself,” Stetson mumbled. The idea of his brother putting on an apron and cooking a meal was ridiculous. Wyatt was more likely to actually smile than he was to put on a frilly apron.
And God knows, Wyatt wasn’t real likely to actually smile.
“Well, I better get to it,” Jennifer said. “If I’m going to tour the farm, I should get more paperwork sorted before then. And hey, maybe with a tour of the farm, I might be able to spot something that could help with the bank loan.”
As she headed upstairs to the guest room to get ready for the day, all Stetson could think was that if she told him to sell his truck, all bets were off. He was willing to do a lot of things for his farm, but that wasn’t one of them.
Chapter 28
Jennifer
Jennifer stared down at the pile of clothes on the edge of the bed – they were her clothes from yesterday, clean and dry and pressed, courtesy of Carmelita. She’d never had a live-in housekeeper before, or even a maid who came and cleaned once a week, but Jenn was quickly starting to realize the benefits of such an arrangement.
Of course, if she continued to eat omelets and bacon strips and English muffins and diced fruit and handmade jelly every morning, she was going to need help walking pretty soon. Maybe they could just roll her from place to place. It would totally be worth it.
She pulled her skirt and white button-up shirt back on, and looked down with a sigh. It was true that this had to be the least practical outfit possible to tour a farm in. It may be clean right now, but she was pretty sure that thirty minutes in, it will have lost that crisp, clean look. Not to mention tramping through the mud in her high heels.
Farm tours were not normally part and parcel of an audit, but then again, neither was drinking wine or staying at a client’s house or making out with said client on the couch or…
She forced those thoughts away. It’d been hard enough to fall asleep last night. Reliving those glorious moments on the couch was not going to help her concentrate on her job.
She looked around the beautiful guest room with a happy sigh. The roses on the wall, the fireplace, the hardwood floors – it was like a decorator’s idea of what an old-fashioned farmhouse should look like, but with the patina of age and use that no decorator could ever fully imitate.
She had just stepped into the guest bathroom when she noticed that Carmelita had put a fresh toothbrush and toothpaste in there for her, for which Jennifer was wildly grateful. She could live through a lot of things, but unbrushed teeth was not one of them.
With a flush of embarrassment, she backed up into the bathroom, sliding the door shut again. She shouldn’t be poking around in a client’s home, no matter how much he had stopped feeling like a client, and had started feeling like a friend. Or more than a friend, actually.
She walked over to the vanity and set about brushing her teeth and getting ready for the day. Now was not the time to have those thoughts. She had a farm to save, dammit.
Chapter 29
Stetson
He approached the door to his dad’s office quietly, not wanting to disturb Jenn from her work, even though necessity dictated that he would; it didn’t mean he had to want to. She was not going to be happy when she heard his news.
He peeked in to find her bent over the desk, her back to the door, mumbling as she ran the adding machine, the tape spitting out the top and curling every which way over the scarred desktop. The clanking noises from the calculator reminded him so much of his dad. He blinked, and there was his father, his reading glasses on the end of his nose, mumbling to himself as he fed numbers into the adding machine, his shoulders stooped with age and pain.
A stab of heartache tore through Stetson and he gasped at the pain. He missed his father so damn much sometimes…
The gasp must’ve been louder than he realized, because Jennifer jerked her head around and spotted him in the doorway. She managed to extricate herself from the Fainting Goat Chair without falling down on the floor, and sent him a big smile. “Did you get my car out?” she asked, leaning against the desk with a coffee mug in hand. He watched the way her skirt tightened against her thighs, and gulped.
“Uhhhh…” he mumbled, tearing his eyes away from her thighs. Bad news. I have bad news to deliver. “So, I have bad news to deliver.” Way to ease into it, jackass. He sent her an overly bright smile. Her eyes were widening with panic, and he rushed on. “I broke your car!” he blurted out.
Which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t the easing into the topic that he could have done. She gasped and stared at him, thumping the coffee cup onto the desk next to her, brown liquid slopping out onto the desk. “You what?!” she practically hollered.
He sent her a painful smile. “Yeah. Broken. Ummm…not all of the parts are still attached to your car.”
“What parts are not still attached?!” Her voice broke, squeaking like a pre-teen boy at the end of that question. He winced.
“Well, the mud had hardened once the rain stopped, and it turns out, the car was in there pretty deep. I was so close to getting it out, so I gave it one last yank, and…only the bumper came out.”
“So my car is still in the ditch?” She was just staring at him like he’d killed her kitten. He gulped again.
“No, no, the car is out. Christian got the backhoe and pushed on the backend while I tugged on the front end. He’s loading it up onto a flatbed right now – he’s going to drive it over to Mike’s place to be fixed.”
“Hold on, who’s Mike?”
“Oh. Right.” She doesn’t have every person in town memorized, jackass. Which made him a jackass for a second time in the same conversation. He was on a roll. “Mike the Mechanic,” he clarified. “He owns the best mechanic shop in town. His daughter does all of his paperwork for him. Good guy. His wife died years ago from cancer but he still owns the shop and is hard at work every day.”
Annnnddddd…I’m going to shut up now. When even he could tell he was rambling, that wasn’t a good sign.
“You broke my car,” Jennifer repeated in disbelief. “I can’t believe…” She broke out into laughter.
Laughter. Why was she laughing? It was his turn to just stare at her.
“This is a whole new level of insanity, you know that?” she got out. “I’ve never had a client break my car before. Just think – this audit is breaking all sorts of records. I’ve never spent the night at a client’s house, I’ve never kissed a client—” his ears went bright red, but she just kept going, ticking the items off on her fingers as she went, “—I’ve never gotten my car stuck in the ditch, and I’ve never had a client break my car. So! An audit for the record books.”
She sent him a brilliant, laughing smile, and he finally groped his way to the realization that she wasn’t pissed. She wasn’t ready to punch him or call him a bastard or knee him in the nuts. She was…
She was fine.
“Aren’t you angry?” he burst out. He thought she’d made his head hurt before; that was nothing compared to what she was doing to it right now.
“Well, I can’t say that it was the happiest, most awesome news I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders, “but eh, it’s just a car. Mike the Mechanic – great name, by the way – will put it back together again. It’ll go down the road again. Life will go on. I mean, I like my Honda, but it’s just a thing – an item that can be replaced. You know?”
“Right,” he mumbled, his head swimming from the effort of trying to understand that viewpoint on life. “Uhhhh…ready to go on that tour? My brothers will be here in a couple of hours, so we should probably get going.”
As they walked towards the front door together, Stetson turned her words over and over in his mind. A car was just a thing that could be replaced. She was right. It just felt…weird.
He’d been raised by a father who emphasized holding onto anything and everything, because as a farmer, he just might need it someday. Stetson liked to pretend that he hadn’t been raised to be a hoarder, but really, the only difference between him and a cat lady who owned 102 cats and had her living room stuffed to the ceiling with old newspapers was that his animals were cows instead of cats, and he stuffed his barn full of shit, not his living room.
Ever since he was knee high to a grasshopper, he’d been taught that stuff was important. Stuff had value. If Stetson had broken a piece of farm equipment like he’d just torn off Jennifer’s bumper, his father would’ve been livid. Stetson would’ve gotten the whaling of his life, and wouldn’t have been able to walk for a week.
As alien as Jennifer’s viewpoint on life was, Stetson couldn’t help thinking that it was more rational. Evenhanded. Focused on what truly mattered in life.
Weird.
Chapter 30
Jennifer
They stepped off the front porch and into the bright sunshine. She raised her hand up to shield her eyes. She’d been squirreled away in the office for so long, she’d rather forgotten what it was like to go outside into the sunshine and fresh air. It was still cool, the clouds busily scuttling away in the brilliant blue sky, but she knew by tomorrow, it would be hot again – typical summer temperatures. This reprieve from the heat wouldn’t last much longer.
Stetson looked down at her skirt and then up at her. “I guess we’ll go in the truck. I’d been thinking the four-wheeler, but I don’t think you could straddle it in that outfit.”
She looked down at the skirt with chagrin. “I wish I’d thought to pack pants,” she said, as he helped her swing up into the passenger seat of the truck. “Is there a place in town that sells jeans?”
He closed the door and walked around to the other side, waiting until he opened the driver’s door to answer, “Frank’s does. Have you been there yet?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, I met the tortaco already.”
“The what?” He started the diesel engine and then turned in his seat to stare at her. “Two taco?”
“No, tortaco. Let’s just say that you should thank God every day for Carmelita. Otherwise, you’d know just what I
’m talking about.”
He chuckled. “Don’t let Carma hear you say that. She tells me that often enough.”
“I’m sure she does.” Jennifer sent him a sassy grin. “Smart woman.”
“She tells me that too,” he said dryly.
Jennifer snorted with laughter, then turned serious. “What would you think about taking me to town, instead? If I bought jeans and boots and stuff, then tomorrow, you could take me on a proper tour of the farm.”
She bit her lip as soon as she said it, her stomach flipping at her audacity. Why would he want to take her clothes shopping? He probably didn’t even want to take her on this tour of the farm. He’d probably just offered out of some weird sense of noblesse, like something that he should offer to every guest of the Miller Farm.
“That’s a great idea!” he said, shooting her a wide grin. “I really think you’d get a better feel for the place if we could ride around in the four-wheeler anyway.”
“Awesome,” she said, letting out the breath she’d been holding without realizing it. She opened the door back up again and slid out onto the ground, turning back and looking waaaayyyyy up at Stetson who was still behind the wheel of the truck. “Let me go get my purse. I hadn’t expected to need to buy anything on our tour. Be right back!” She shut the door and hurried back up the front steps and into the house. Heart thumping double time, she grabbed her stuff and ran as fast as her skirt and heels would let her back out to the waiting truck.
Either she was sadly out of shape, or just the thought of spending time with Stetson was making her heart go triple time.
Maybe it was both.
That was an idea she was going to ignore, at least for now.
He was waiting for her on the passenger side of the truck so he could help her back in, and then hurried over to his side. As he shifted into gear and headed back towards town, he said, “I was just thinking while you were grabbing your purse…you should probably stay out at the house. You don’t have a car to drive back and forth from town, and there’s no car rental agency here. You’d have to go over to Franklin or back to Boise to find a rental car to drive, and I just don’t see the point. To be honest, Carmelita loves having someone else to hover over besides me. She used to have the whole Miller family to take care of, so just me by myself is boring the hell out of her. I’m expecting her to adopt a herd of cats any day now, just to have something to do.”