Chapter 19 #2
Rose handed him a bag packed with lemon chicken, roasted potatoes, and pecan pie Rose’s had made specially for him that afternoon. He didn’t tell her who the meal for two was for and she didn’t ask. She just smiled secretively and wished him a good evening.
Noah had briefed him on Bonnie’s food preferences with the thoroughness of an intelligence operative. “She always gets the lemon chicken. And potatoes with little bits of green stuff sticking to them.”
It took Gray a moment, but it finally dawned on him the Noah meant Rose’s herbed roasted potatoes.
Noah continued, “And she says she shouldn’t get the pecan pie but then she always gets it anyway.” He added, “It is pretty yummy.”
Gray paid cash so the transaction wouldn’t appear on a credit card statement anyone at the bank might see and gossip about, and he’d asked Rose to bag it in a plain bag without the diner’s logo on it.
Rose had done so without comment, but the look on her face suggested she was filing this information for future questioning of him.
He drove up to the main house at the ranch at six forty-five. Jenna was there with Bobby. Sully was still in the barn finishing up watering the horses, which was just as well. If he ran into his brothers they would pick up on how nervous he was and harass him about it.
Bonnie’s car pulled up outside at seven o’clock.
Predictably, Noah was first through the kitchen door. Bobby immediately challenged Noah to a quicksand-building competition in the backyard involving the garden hose and a wheelbarrow of dirt, and the two boys disappeared.
Cassidy came in next. “She thinks you need her help looking at one of the heifers.”
“That’s what you told her?”
“I told her you sounded worried on the phone about one of the new calves and wanted a second opinion. She changed out of her work clothes.” Cassidy paused. “She also redid her make-up and put on perfume. To look at a sick cow. Draw your own conclusions.”
Jenna spun to face the sink and coughed conspicuously.
Gray drew several conclusions, all of which made it difficult to form coherent sentences when Bonnie came inside a moment later.
She wore jeans and a dark green sweater with her blond hair down around her shoulders.
It made her eyes look almost as golden as her hair.
She’d put on earrings. Small gold ones. To look at a heifer.
“Which cow?” Bonnie asked, pulling a pair of gloves out of her coat pocket.
“There’s no cow.”
She stopped with her hand half in a glove. “What?”
“Cassidy made it up. I wanted to surprise you.” He glanced behind Bonnie. Cassidy, standing in the hallway, gave him a solemn thumbs-up and disappeared into the living room.
“Surprise me with what?”
“Dinner. Just the two of us. Somewhere private.”
Bonnie looked at him. Understanding arrived in stages—the confusion clearing first, then realization, then something softer and more startled as if she’d been handed something fragile and wasn’t sure she was allowed to keep it.
Noah burst through the back door, trailing mud. “Have fun on your date! I didn’t tell her! Cassidy, tell him I didn’t tell her!”
“You literally just said the word ‘date’, you numbskull,’” Cassidy yelled from the living room.
“She already knows now! That doesn’t count!”
Bobby Foster appeared behind Noah, equally muddy. “Are you going on a date with Gray? My mom said you were going to, but it’s a secret.”
“You knew, Jenna?” Bonnie demanded accusingly of her friend.
Jenna merely shrugged and smiled.
“Jenna was kind enough to agree to look after the kids for a few hours,” Gray admitted.
Bonnie looked at her daughter, who had reappeared in the hallway with her book and an expression of quiet satisfaction. She looked at her son, who was literally vibrating with excitement.
Bonnie just shook her head and laughed. The sound of it went through him like a bolt of lightning.
“Okay,” she said, pulling on her second glove. “Let’s go on a date.”
He drove up the dirt track as the sky turned amber. Bonnie sat in the passenger seat with her window open. The chinook wind that came through the window was warm and dry, carrying the smell of dust and pine resin and the last of the snowmelt.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Up.”
“For a man who reads all the time, that’s not particularly descriptive.”
“There’s a clearing on the ridge above the ranch. Sully told me about it. Apparently, Fosters have been watching sunsets up there for a hundred years.”
Something shifted in Bonnie’s expression—a flicker of memory, bittersweet and complicated.
“I know that spot,” she said softly. “Jenna and I rode horses up there once right after she and Rob got engaged. I’d just found out I was pregnant with Cassidy and was freaked out.
I didn’t want to become a parent quite so young as I was.
Brent wanted me to get an abortion, but that didn’t feel right, either.
Jenna and I went up there to talk it out.
That’s the place where I decided to have Cassidy.
And Sweet Lord in Heaven, I’m glad I did.
She’s the light of my life.” She was quiet for a moment. Then she added, “It’s a good place.”
He glanced over at her. She met his gaze, and whatever she saw in his expression made her smile. “I’m glad you picked it. It deserves better memories than the ones I left there.”
The view was, as advertised, outrageous.
The valley unfurled below them in long, rolling waves, the hay meadows stretching to the pastures, which stretched to the road, which led to the mountains beyond, their snow-capped peaks blazing white against a sky that was cycling through shades of yellow and peach toward orange, copper, and pink that no painting or photograph could do justice to.
The wind was, as he’d calculated, blocked by the tree line. He’d gotten the temperature right, the humidity right, and the time of sunset right
What he had not taken into account was the mud.
Three days of warm chinook winds had melted the snowpack on this ridge and above it faster than the still frozen ground could absorb it. The clearing was now a shallow lake of red-brown Montana clay. His boot sank three inches on the first step.
He stood there with one foot in the mud, the cooler in one hand, the camp chairs dangling from the other, the blanket under his arm, and stared at the clearing with the expression of a man whose careful planning had been betrayed by hydrology.
Bonnie got out of the truck. Looked at the mud. Looked at him.
“Did your precise weather calculations account for snowmelt?” she asked. Her voice was perfectly, dangerously innocent.
“I checked the dew point,” he said, with the dignity of a man who had failed to check the ground saturation. “The dew point was fine.”
“The dew point.”
“Thirty-one percent humidity tonight. No fog risk. I was very thorough.”
“You were very thorough about the air.” She surveyed the mud field. “But less thorough about the ground.”
He looked at the camp chairs, which would sink to their crossbars.
He looked at the blanket, which would become a mud blanket.
He looked at the cooler full of lemon chicken and pecan pie and three separate thermoses of hot beverages, any one of which would have been sufficient if he’d been capable of choosing a drink.
“But I thought of everything,” he said blankly. “I even brought three thermoses. Coffee, cider, and hot chocolate. I didn’t know which you’d want.”
“Three thermoses,” she echoed. A hint of a smile flitted at the edges of her mouth.
“I approached it statistically.”
“You approached a beverage decision statistically.”
“In my defense, your preferences weren’t in the data set.”
Bonnie made a sound. It was quiet at first—a faint choking noise that turned into more of a cough. Her shoulders shook next. Then her hand came up over her mouth. But too late. The laugh broke through, helpless and startled and uncontrolled. She laughed until tears ran down her cheeks.
“You . . .” She gasped. “I’ll bet you brought a star chart, too, didn’t you?”
He looked at the cardboard tube sticking out of the bag behind his seat. “Jupiter’s visible tonight and I wanted to be able to show it to you.”
She sat on the tailgate and laughed until tears tracked down her face. Gray stood in the mud with his arms full of gear and watched her laugh, loving every minute of it.
Not because she was laughing at him. People laughed at him regularly, and he’d made his peace with being the kind of oddball who inspired that reaction.
But because she was laughing freely. Without checking herself.
Without composing her face for an audience.
She’d forgotten, for a moment, that she was supposed to manage, edit, and disguise everything she felt.
He started to laugh with her. “In my defense, the clearing was dry on Wednesday.”
“You scouted the location?”
“Yes. Yes, I did. I scouted the location.”
“When?”
“Wednesday afternoon. I also timed the drive and calculated the optimal arrival window for watching the sunset.”
She wiped the tears off her cheeks. “Grayson Lawton. You’re telling me you calculated the optimal arrival window for a sunset.”
“Seven-twenty. Twenty-two minutes of pre-sunset light followed by the full color display.”
“The full color display,” she repeated, shaking her head. “You are the most ridiculous man I have ever met.”
“So I’ve been told. As recently as yesterday, in fact. By your daughter.”
“She adores you, you know.”
He answered without thinking, “I adore her, too.”
He looked up quickly. “I’m sorry. They’re your children. I don’t mean to overstep.”
“You’re not. And it goes without saying the Noah worships you.”
Gray grinned. “Those questions of his are going to be the death of me. The day’s coming soon when I’m going to have to scramble to stay ahead of him and know the answers.”