Chapter 11
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Reeves didn’t believe for a single second that Bailey had been thinking about the chicken-fried venison, not when she looked at him with her eyes wide and full of vulnerability like that.
He reminded himself that he still had plenty of things to disclose to her too, and none of them he wanted to reveal on the first date.
No, this had to be full of wildflowers and sunshine and unicorns, so he could get a second date—where he could hopefully reveal more at that time.
“I think you should get it if you want it,” he said. “Have you ever had venison?”
“A couple of times, yeah,” she said. “Sometimes my clients in Montana would pay me with goods, and I got a package of venison steaks once.” She laughed and shook her head. “I learned really quickly that I don’t know how to cook venison steaks.”
He chuckled too. “It’s definitely a learned skill.”
“Can you do it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said easily. “I grew up hunting and fishing, and I lived in Alaska for a bit, so I know how to do all that kind of stuff.”
Bailey set down her menu, and Reeves wasn’t sure what she’d ask next. “Alaska’s a big place,” she said. “Lonely and wild.”
“I’ve got a friend up there,” he said. “I stayed with him for a while.”
“Is he who you stay with when you go fishing?”
“Sometimes,” Reeves said. “He’s got a salmon fish wheel, and that can hardly be counted as fishing.”
Bailey grinned at him. “Oh, so you’ve got to be reeling it in for it to be real, huh?”
“Yeah, of course.” He smiled at her and moved his arm enough to take her hand in his. “You don’t have any pets, right?”
“Not permanent ones,” she said. “I just have the rescues I bring home from the clinic that need extra care.”
“Seems kind of odd for a vet,” he said.
Bailey cocked her head at him, and Reeves hoped he hadn’t said the wrong thing. She seemed to consider everything she said before it came out of her mouth, and seeing as how Reeves did the same thing, he couldn’t really fault her.
“I work a lot,” she said. “And I suppose I could bring my dogs or cats to the clinic with me, and I have enough land for horses or a milk cow.” A smile beamed across her face.
“I’ve thought about getting both of those, but I’ve never owned them before.
I feel like maybe I need to watch some videos or something first.”
Reeves’ smile fell off his face and out of his soul. “Yeah, you could do that,” he said, his voice completely bland and standoffish.
If Bailey noticed the change in him, she didn’t comment on it, and thankfully the waitress returned for their orders. Reeves hated the tension between his shoulder blades, and he leaned back and pressed into the frame of the chair to relieve it.
“Can I get dessert first?” Bailey asked, and that brought his attention back to the table instead of deep inside himself.
“Sure thing, honey,” the waitress said. “Did you want to go look at our pie case? You can do any of them à la mode. It only takes a second to heat them up.”
“I do want to look at the pie case,” Bailey said, and she looked at Reeves with glittering sapphires in her eyes. “Don’t you want to look at the pie case, hon?”
His eyebrows went up, because never in a million years would he have anticipated Bailey calling him a nickname on their first date, and though he was a grown adult, he wasn’t sure he’d ever had dessert first.
“Yeah,” he said, something new coming to life inside him. “Let’s go look at the pie case.”
The following afternoon, Reeves loaded up Pansy and Sir on the back of the four-wheeler and said, “Let’s go see what the situation is at Bailey’s.”
Their first date last night had been absolutely phenomenal, and since neither one of them had been east of the Mississippi River, they’d both deemed the pie and Spoons and Spurs the best on the west side of it.
Bailey had gotten peach, warmed, with vanilla ice cream, and he’d opted for strawberry rhubarb, cold, not à la mode.
She’d ordered the chicken-fried venison, and he’d gotten the double cheeseburger with onion rings.
They talked and laughed, and the short hike out to the wildflower field had told him that it was still too early to see much. Sure, they’d seen a little bit—some of the earliest yellow sagebrush blossoms and a couple of tiny purple flowers—but nothing like what he wanted to show her.
He told her they’d have to wait until July or August, when the low mountain and even mid-mountain meadows would be full of wildflowers.
He’d seen them, and for some inexplicable reason, he wanted Bailey to experience them too.
His hiking videos up to the wildflower meadows were some of his most popular and brought in more female viewers than Reeves normally got.
Bailey had texted this morning to say she needed his help with the duck pond on her property, and so he drove down his driveway to the highway, looked left for a long time to make sure no cars were coming, and then pulled out and headed the three-quarters of a mile down the highway to her driveway.
He knew the duck pond on her property sat behind the line of evergreen trees that blocked most of the sound from the highway in front of her house, and sure enough, he found her standing on the far bank of it with yet another cowboy.
“How many men does she know?” Reeves growled to himself, recognizing his jealous, possessive streak only seemed to apply to Bailey. He reminded himself that she had called him too, but he didn’t want to be second.
As he parked the ATV and cut the engine, he chastised himself for not kissing her last night.
At the same time, she’d worn fear in her eyes on the front porch, and Reeves had known that it was not an appropriate time, despite the goodness of their date.
He wasn’t even sure he remembered how to kiss a woman, and he needed more time too.
“Go on,” he told the dogs. “Go say hi to Bailey.”
They took off, and though Sir did his best to keep up with Pansy, he simply couldn’t do it. The blue heeler loved to run, and she streaked across Bailey’s front lawn toward her and the man with her.
As Reeves got closer, he realized that he wasn’t a man at all, but a teenager.
He was skinny and tall, with brown hair curling out of the bottom of his cowboy hat, and he laughed and grinned, getting right down on the ground with Sir and Pansy with no fear in him at all.
He scrubbed their faces and let them lick him, and Bailey gazed fondly at the three of them before she also reached down and patted Sir.
“He looks good,” she called as he drew even nearer. “No swelling at all.”
“No, he’s all healed up,” Reeves said.
The teenager stood and dusted grass clippings from his clothes, vibrancy and sunshine radiating off him in every direction.
Bailey glanced at him, and then to Reeves, and her easygoing nature had changed.
Her eyes held an edge of something that Reeves couldn’t quite identify, but which made his pulse stutter through his veins.
“You should go get your stuff,” Bailey said. “Your momma and daddy are going to be here any second.”
“But we’re not done with the pond yet,” the teenager said as he looked at Bailey, pleading in his eyes.
“You’re going to Wolf Creek with your family,” she said. “We can’t make it harder for them, remember?”
They’d clearly had a conversation similar to this before, and Bailey tucked both hands in her back pockets and raised her eyebrows as the teenager continued to stand there.
Reeves finally arrived, and he took in the bags of dirt that had been delivered, along with the boulders, which lay in a pile he didn’t think he and Bailey would be able to move by themselves.
He had no idea what she’d been doing with the teenager, and he glanced over as a single mallard duck drifted through the pond.
“OJ,” Bailey said, plenty of warning in her voice. She nodded over to Reeves. “This is Reeves Durham. He’s my next-door neighbor, and I promise you, we’re not going to finish the pond today.”
OJ looked at him, and Reeves knew the instant he’d been recognized. It didn’t happen often, but it wasn’t hard to spot, and panic reared up through him, turning his vision blurred and then white.
“Hey, you’re—”
The sound of a horn honking covered anything OJ might have said, and all three of them looked back toward the driveway, where a great big black truck now stood. Yet another cowboy dropped out of the cab, and he called, “OJ, we gotta go, bud.”
Bailey stepped over to the teenager and pulled him into a hug. “Don’t forget that bag of treats we made for them, and your suitcase is right next to the couch.”
He nodded, and as he pulled away, he faced Reeves again and took the few steps to him. He pumped Reeves’s hands with both of his and said, “It’s great to meet you. Really great.”
Then the horn sounded again, and OJ jogged past him, yelling, “I’m coming!”
Reeves moved and took the boy’s position next to Bailey, facing the house and the driveway. A preteen girl, probably nine or ten, emerged from the sunroof and waved both hands to Bailey as she yelled, “Heya, Bay!”
Bailey waved back, her smile absolutely huge now, but Reeves noticed it didn’t meet her eyes.
The tall cowboy waved as well, and then he met his son on the front sidewalk and took his suitcase from him.
They spoke, but Reeves and Bailey remained still and silent until OJ had been loaded in the back seat of the truck and it started to back out of the driveway.
Only then did Reeves look at her. “Who was that?” he asked, assuming it to be an easy question, because OJ had been at her house and spoken to her in an ultra-familiar way, and he’d had a suitcase.
Bailey wouldn’t meet his gaze as she turned toward the pile of rocks. “That was OJ,” she said.