Chapter 6
Dillon knew he was in trouble the morning he walked into the farm supply store next to Cobbler Cove's grain elevator and bought a pair of blue jeans.
Not for himself, but for an eleven-year-old girl who wasn't his daughter, whose mother he had no business thinking about, and whose wardrobe was none of his concern.
He'd told himself it was practical. The kid was wearing skirts, leotards, and ballet flats in a barn.
He'd noticed during his first visit to the farm that Makayla had nearly stepped on a nail in those flimsy shoes—a rusty one poking through a board in the hayloft. It could’ve earned her a trip to the ER and a tetanus shot.
Practical. That's all this purchase was.
He also grabbed a pair of rubber muck boots with steel toes in what he hoped was her size, because nobody should be do barn chores in unsafe footwear. The boots were sage green, the only color in her size range.
The woman at the register—Donna something, whom he recognized from the pinochle group at Rose’s Diner—glanced at the jeans and boots with raised eyebrows. "These for the Lawrence girl?"
Small towns. You couldn't buy a gallon of milk without six people knowing about it before you got home. "She's doing chores in school clothes and sneakers," he said flatly.
He was still telling himself the purchase was purely practical when he pulled into Fern's driveway Saturday morning to check on the animals.
Tessa was in the barn. He could hear her before he saw her—talking to Dolly the llama in a voice he'd never heard from her before. Not the polished, careful voice she used with people. Something softer, gentler, and entirely unguarded.
"I know it itches, sweetheart. I'm going as fast as I can. Hold still, please. Please. I'm almost done with this side."
He stopped just inside the barn door and watched for a moment.
She was standing in the llama's stall in a plain gray t-shirt, jeans that had seen considerably cleaner days, and bright pink rubber boots that were caked with enough mud and worse to suggest she'd been at this for a while.
Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail and her face was bare of make-up.
No pearls. No French twist. No silk within a hundred yards.
She was swabbing the medicated wash onto Dolly's bare patches with a gentleness that surprised him. The llama leaned into Tessa's hand and hummed in a low, contented vibration that announced the treatment was soothing her irritated skin.
"That's better, isn't it?" Tessa murmured. "See? We're figuring this out, you and me."
Reluctant respect for her passed through him. He'd privately thought the betting pool at the diner, which averaged guesses of Tessa sticking it out here for between two and three weeks, had been way too optimistic. Was everyone, including him, wrong about her after all?
He ignored his impressed reaction to her with practiced efficiency. He'd been ignoring inconvenient feelings for the better part of five years. Ever since Lexi walked out on him.
He cleared his throat. "Morning."
She startled. Just a tiny flinch of her shoulders, but he caught it. The social armor went back on. Not all the way, not like at the funeral, but enough to straighten her spine and level her gaze.
"You're early," she said. "It's six forty-five."
"Beecham's mare needed checking at five. I was already out this direction."
"Do you ever sleep?"
He shrugged. "Now and then." He set his bag down and crossed to the feed room. Dolly's medicated wash was sitting on the shelf. He checked the application log Tessa had taped to the wall—a neatly printed schedule, color-coded by animal, with checkmarks in every box.
She was treating Dolly three times a day. Not twice. Three.
He looked at the log for a long moment. Nobody had told her to do that.
He'd said twice a day was sufficient. She'd asked if she could do more, and he'd said it wouldn't hurt.
And she'd added a midday treatment because the llama was uncomfortable and Tessa Lawrence, apparently, could not stand to watch an animal itch when she could do something about it.
"Charman Meow let Makayla give him his shot yesterday morning," Tessa said from behind him. "He let her scruff him and only growled twice."
"He must be going soft."
"Or Makayla’s tougher than she looks."
He turned and found her almost smiling. Almost. The corner of her mouth was engaged, but she was holding the rest of it back. Lexi used to do that. Claimed she'd been trained since birth not to show too much emotion to anyone because drama wasn't seemly.
"I brought something for Makayla," he said casually. "Could you send her out when she wakes up?"
"She's already up. She practices her violin before school every day."
That music coming out of the house was Makayla? He'd thought Tessa was playing a classical music station loudly on the radio. Seriously. The kid sounded like a professional musician.
Tessa's eyes narrowed slightly. He wouldn't call it suspicion, exactly. It was more like alertness when a variable she hadn't accounted for entered the equation.
"What kind of something?"
"Jeans and barn boots. She can't keep running around out here in those sneakers. She's going to step on something sharp and wind up in the ER."
"I was planning to take her shopping this weekend."
"Great. Then she'll have two pairs."
An awkward pause settled between them. He could see her working through it—the urge to refuse because accepting gifts from him meant more than she was willing to commit to versus the practical reality that her daughter needed jeans today and not a week from now.
Ahh, pride versus pragmatism. Lexi chose pride every time—
"Thank you," Tessa said quietly. Just that. No qualifier, no deflection, no devastating one-liner. A plain thank-you that had undoubtedly cost her more than any of her clever retorts.
Huh. That was not at all Lexi-like.
Don't read into it. She's just being polite. It's what she does.
He turned back to the animals.
Twenty minutes later, he was in the paddock checking Biscuit's hocks—the swelling was already down—and heard the screen door bang, followed by running footsteps on the gravel.
"Dr. Steele, Mom said you have something for me?" Her voice was high and breathless with excitement that no pair of jeans in the history of denim had ever warranted.
"Front seat of my truck," he replied without looking up.
A pause. A truck door opening and closing. Then a sound he hadn't expected and wasn't prepared for. A small, sharp intake of breath, followed by a silence so full it was louder than any of Loretta's braying.
That made him looked up.
Makayla stood by his truck, holding the jeans like they were made of gold. The awed expression on her face threatened the wall around his heart, and if he looked at her too long, something was going to crack that he wasn't ready to fix.
"They're real jeans," she breathed. "Like cowgirls wear."
"They're Wranglers. Standard issue around here. Nothing special."
"And boots!" She pulled the muck boots out of the bag and held them up, turning them in the morning light like she was inspecting a pair of glass slippers. "Can I put them on right now?"
"That's the idea."
She vanished into the house so fast the screen door nearly came off its hinges. Two minutes later, she reappeared on the porch in the jeans and boots, grinning so big it rearranged her entire face from careful and controlled into gloriously uncontained.
Abruptly, she looked like the kind of kid who might climb trees and catch frogs or come home with grass stains on her knees and not care.
Better.
"How do I look?" She posed in the driveway with her hands on her hips, one boot cocked to the side, chin tilted up.
He smiled. "Like you belong in a barn."
The grin she gave him in return hit somewhere around his solar plexus.
Tessa appeared on the porch behind her daughter. She looked at Makayla posing in her new clothes, and her expression went through pride, pain, and something that might have been gratitude if she'd let it land long enough for him to name it. She nodded once at Dillon and went back inside.
He returned to Biscuit's hocks and told himself his eyes were getting blurry because of the cold morning air.
They settled on a schedule. Tuesday and Friday mornings, with the occasional unscheduled day when Tessa texted him about something—Chairman Meow's glucose reading was off, June was acting lethargic, Loretta had eaten something suspicious and was making concerning noises.
The texts were clipped and professional.
The conversations at the farm were . . . less so.
"You're administering the bute paste wrong," he told her on Friday, watching her try to wrangle the dosing syringe into Biscuit's reluctant mouth.
"I'm doing it exactly how you showed me."
"You're squeezing too fast. Give him time to taste it."
"Taste it? It's medicine, not a wine pairing."
Grinning, he replied, "Horses are particular about mouth feel. If you squeeze it all in at once, he'll spit half of it out and you'll have to start over. Trust me. I've cleaned more horse slobber and paste dewormer off my shirts than you've had silk blouses eaten by donkeys."
"That is a very specific and oddly competitive metric."
"Welcome to veterinary medicine."
She gave him a look that, in a fancier setting, would have preceded her throwing a drink at his head. But she eased the plunger down more slowly, and Biscuit worked his jaw and swallowed the full dose without protest.
"See?" Dillon said. "Patience."
"If you say 'I told you so,' I will put this syringe somewhere creatively unpleasant."
He bit the inside of his cheek. Hard. "Wouldn't dream of it."