Chapter 16
L enore had never been kissed the way Brandon currently kissed her.
She felt like she’d entered a free fall, and the only thing keeping her tethered to Earth was Brandon’s hands.
He slid one down the side of her neck while the other moved back into her hair, and he kept kissing her as if he might like it too.
All of Lenore’s irritation with his tardiness had disappeared the moment she’d seen him, and now she felt nothing but warmth and excitement about her relationship with him.
He finally pulled away, and Lenore tucked herself into the warmth of his chest and the sincerity of his embrace. He simply held her, the Texas Panhandle wind flowing around them and the scent of paint riding it.
Feeling safe, Lenore said, “I know this is dumb, but I thought you might not come back this morning.”
Brandon stepped back, forcing her to look at him. “You thought I wasn’t going to come back?” He searched her face, clearly confused. “Why would you think that?”
“Because I have problems,” Lenore said with an unhappy laugh. She sighed and backed away from him further, tucking her hands into her back pockets.
“Because when my daddy went to the hospital, he promised he’d come back,” she said, her memories flowing thick and fast. “And he didn’t. He never came back. And I know it’s dumb, and I know he was sick, and I know it wasn’t his fault, but….”
She paused because she loved her parents dearly.
“You felt abandoned by him,” Brandon said, no question mark in sight.
“Kind of,” Lenore said, frowning, because it didn’t quite fit. “It felt like he broke a promise, for sure.”
“What about your momma?” Brandon asked gently. “If you don’t mind sharing with me.”
“They both really died out here,” Lenore said, her voice faraway and hardly her own.
“My momma was trying to fix a fence, and she ended up driving a nail through her finger. Daddy had to drive her to the hospital, and they got in an accident on the way there. My momma didn’t make it, but Daddy was in the hospital for about a week before he passed. ”
Lenore turned around and faced the patch of land that bordered the fence near the entrance of the homestead. “They’re buried right over there. I lost them both so fast, and sometimes I’m still angry about it.”
Brandon’s hand slipped into hers. “I’m real sorry, Lenny.”
She drew in a deep breath, which drove out some of the negative feelings. “We all have something, don’t we?” she asked, and she looked at Brandon with hope.
“Yeah, we seem to,” he said. “I mean, my parents didn’t die, but I’ve been looking for a change in my life and feeling like it hasn’t been coming.”
“You mentioned that,” Lenore said.
“Yeah. I’m searching for, you know, the things I think all men want. A wife, a family, and land of their own.” He grinned at her. “That’s why I said I was serious about you. I’ve done the dating-for-fun or to have a friend. And this isn’t that.”
Lenore swallowed, because she wasn’t sure what he was saying.
“Anyway, I better get back to work.” He swept a kiss across her cheek and returned to the paintbrush and paint tray he’d left behind.
Lenore watched him work for a moment, and then she said, “Come get me when you’re ready to do the barn,” because she had never stained a barn, and she needed to learn how to do that too.
“Will do.”
She left him to finish the chicken coop as she went back into her cabin to do a little more research on growing strawberries. The website she’d been reading said they could planted anywhere from late September to early November, and she wondered if the second week still counted as “early.”
She’d also been thinking about what she could do to try to make money with the homestead. She knew she needed to get it to the point where it could sustain her first, but then, why couldn’t she sell lumber, or hay, or even eggs?
Her daddy had raised turkeys and sold them for a lot of years, and Lenore had definitely added that to her list as well.
She sat down at her dining room table and looked at the things she’d been brainstorming: raising chickens to sell, or peafowl, or honey, strawberry jam, lumber, turkeys, alfalfa. And she could do all of that from right here, if she got the land functioning the way it should.
She picked up her pen and wrote Brandon at the bottom of the paper. She put a question mark after it, her mind a runaway train of thoughts.
Brandon?
What did he mean when he said he was serious about her? Was it because he liked her or…because he wanted her land?
The next morning, Lenore woke earlier than usual, which wasn’t good for an early bird like her. She ate her breakfast of eggs and coffee and went out to get the animals fed and more staining done on the barn. Brandon wouldn’t be outside for hours yet, and his family wouldn’t be either.
Something seethed inside Lenore, this need to show them how much she had also done here at the homestead. That she could take care of herself and her land, that she’d just gotten behind and had needed a little help to get caught up.
When her shoulders ached from running the roller along the breadth of the barn, she left that chore and picked up a chainsaw to fell more trees.
Calvin had left his planing machine for her to use, and she wanted to get as much lumber cut as she could.
She could now store it in the dry, airtight barn for use later. “Or to sell.”
She’d just felled her third tree of the day when Brandon joined her in the woods. “Morning, sunshine,” he said, and he carried a thermos with him, so he’d definitely had some coffee already.
She gave him a smile, somehow able to swallow her anxiety for a moment.
He came closer, and Lenore turned off the chainsaw and set it aside to kiss him.
It felt wild and wonderful to do that, and Lenore sure did enjoy the nearness of him, and the place he’d carved inside her life in such a short period of time.
“You ready for today?” he asked, his arms still curled around her waist.
“I hope so,” Lenore said.
“Good,” he said. “Because my brothers are fifteen minutes away, and I’m getting text after text of all the pictures of the chickens that Arizona, April, and Shiloh are picking up right now.” He grinned at her.
Lenore’s stomach flipped, but she nodded. “Let’s go get ready for them, then.” She took the chainsaw back to the barn and left the felled trees for now.
Sure enough, Dawson and Duke arrived right on time, and Lenore stayed out of the way while the three of them got the housing unit for the chickens up on the posts and secured in place.
Then they worked together to stretch the wire over the top, and Lenore stood looking at a twenty-foot by twenty-foot enclosure with that pretty ten-by-ten house in the middle of it.
Duke attached the ramp for her chickens to walk up and into their roosting area while Dawson hammered down the final corner of fencing along the side of the house.
Brandon hung watering feeders from the fencing, which she could also fill from the outside. Then they all exited the coop, and Brandon locked the gate behind him.
“What do you think?” he asked, coming to her side.
Dawson and Duke stood back as well, and Dawson said, “That’s the best-looking chicken coop I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s mighty nice,” Duke added.
Her three chickens clucked around, inspecting their new home, and all Lenore could do was smile and smile and smile.
Duke clapped his hand on Brandon’s shoulder. “Let’s get to work on the barn.”
“I don’t expect you to stay to stain to the barn,” Brandon said.
“I cleared my whole day,” Dawson said. “And the sooner we get done, the sooner my day ends.”
Brandon grinned at him. “I’m not going to say no to help on the barn.”
The three of them started toward the barn with their long, cowboy strides, and Lenore marveled at them, because she had also not anticipated them staying and staining the barn. With the three of them working, they could probably get it done today.
Thrilled, she turned and looked across the road to her new gardening area.
She had it all set up and ready to go, but she didn’t have any plants to put in it quite yet.
She and Brandon also hadn’t gotten the plastic sheeting or bendable wiring yet, and she wasn’t quite sure what she could plant outside and what still needed to be in the greenhouse during the winter months.
Someone whistled, and Lenore looked over to the barn. “Zona’s only five minutes out,” Duke called.
“Great,” Lenore called back, another round of buzzing nerves in her throat.
Sure enough, Arizona pulled onto the homestead with her two young adult daughters only a few minutes later.
She drove a big truck and seemed perfectly at ease doing so, while Lenore felt like someone had poured an angry hive of bees down her throat.
She went to greet them anyway, smiling when Arizona pulled her into a hug.
This time, she stepped back and held on to Lenore’s shoulders. “How are you doing out here? Really?”
“Mom, leave her alone,” April said. “You haven’t met my sister, Shiloh.” She indicated the other girl, who stood a couple of inches taller than April.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Lenore said, stepping over to shake the young woman’s hand. “And I’m doing really good. Brandon is amazing, and he knows how to do so much.”
She beamed over to the man who currently held a long pole with a roller on the end to reach the highest part of the barn.
“Yeah, he’s pretty amazing all right,” Arizona said dryly. “Is he treating you right?”
Lenore looked at her, a slip of surprise moving through her. “Yeah, he’s great.” She reached up and wiped her mouth, not quite sure why she did.
Arizona settled her weight onto one leg. “Oh, I see what’s happening.”
“Mom,” Shiloh said this time. “Come get these chickens.”
The two girls moved to the back of the truck and opened the tailgate, but Lenore stayed rooted to the spot, as if Zona had pinned her there with her gaze.
“He kissed you, didn’t he?”
Hot humiliation ran through Lenore, but she pushed it away. “Yeah. We’re seeing each other,” she said. “I think that’s pretty normal for people who are dating.”
Arizona sighed and folded her arms as she looked over to the cowboys. “Yeah, but you’re different.” She moved to the back of the truck and lifted out a carrier with squabbling chickens inside.
“What does that mean?” Lenore asked, but April pressed a carrier of chickens into her chest, and the three of them walked past her with a cacophony of clucking happening around them.
I’m different? she thought, and then she hurried to follow the other women so they could release all dozen chickens into their new nesting area at once.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Brandon said, rushing toward them. “I wanted to take a video of this.”
Lenore felt silly, and yet she couldn’t erase the smile from her face either.
Arizona grinned like a child on Christmas as well, and she entered the coop area and set her carrier down. “Let’s line up, ladies.”
Lenore did what she said, as did her daughters.
“Okay, on three, two, one.”
Lenore opened the catch on the crate at the same time as the others did, and one beautiful, fluffy, brown chicken emerged from the crate. She sucked in a breath, because this was no ordinary chicken.
With the beautiful golden feathers fading like a river delta into the deep, dark brown body, Lenore realized Arizona had gotten a Leghorn.
These chickens could lay over three hundred eggs a year.
A snowy white Leghorn followed the brown one. She looked over to the carrier next to her, from which emerged three dark red chickens with a single red comb. Those were Rhode Island Reds, and they also could lay up to three hundred eggs a year.
Lenore could definitely sell eggs with just these two birds—and Arizona had brought a dozen.
April had released a trio of beautiful black and white Plymouth Rock chickens, who laid brown eggs—perhaps not quite at the rate of the other two breeds, but still plenty.
Doing the math, with just these nine chickens, Lenore estimated they could produce twenty-five hundred eggs a year. That was seven eggs per day, and there was no way she would eat that much.
Down on the end, April had released three dark black birds, and they almost had a greenish-purple sheen to their glossy feathers.
“These are Black Australorps,” Zona said, as if no one there knew. “And of course, the Rhode Island Reds.” She beamed at the beautiful auburn birds. “And we have a few Leghorns and some Plymouth Rocks.”
Duke whistled and said, “Those are some pretty birds.” He grinned at his wife, and Zona did a little curtsy for him.
“We couldn’t get any Golden Comets,” she said matter-of-factly. “But I put six on preorder for you. They’ll be perfect in your mobile mini coops.”
Lenore opened her mouth to say something, but she had no idea what.
“I was thinking we should’ve gotten the Isa Browns,” Brandon said. “We can put those in the second mini coop.”
Lenore felt whipped around, but in the best way possible, once again riding that wonderful roller coaster with Brandon and now his family.
“All right, girls,” Zona said. “Let’s go show her what else we got.”
She picked up her now-empty carrier and led the way out of the coop. Lenore, as overwhelmed as she was, fell a few steps behind them, but she managed to make it out, and she let Brandon lock the door behind her.
“What else did you get?” he asked, a certain wariness in his voice.
“You’ll see.” Zona climbed up into the back of the truck and stacked the carriers along one side of it. Then she lifted out a flat of plants, and Lenore sucked in a breath and covered her mouth as she came to a complete stop.
“Strawberries,” Arizona proclaimed.
Lenore burst into tears. Everyone stared at her as the sobs wrenched through her chest, and she shook her head, trying to tell them she was okay. She just needed a second.
“Hey, it’s all right,” Brandon said, moving to shield her from his family.
“I told you not to get those,” Duke said with plenty of ire in his voice.
“Momma, you made her cry.” April picked up a second flat of strawberry plants, and while Lenore wanted to tell them that she simply cried sometimes when she got really overwhelmed, the emotion choked in her throat too much, and she couldn’t say a single word.