Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
Cash stowed his binder of recipes above the microwave just as the door to the garage slammed closed behind Lark. “Guess I don’t need to protect this.” He grinned to himself as he started toward the garage exit as well.
He wove his arms into his jacket, a prayer already running through his mind. Lord….
Not knowing quite how to continue, he simply let himself stand still for a moment as he tried to hear God’s will for him. He put his hands in his pockets to get out his own gloves just as Lark burst back into the house.
Cash startled away from the door lest the corner of it hit him in the face. “Hey, now.”
“What’s taking you so long?”
“I didn’t even have my coat on, sweetheart.”
Her eyes darted up to his cowboy hat at the same time a frown creased her eyebrows in the cutest way possible—but Cash didn’t want to see that distasteful look on her face again, at least not because of him. “Don’t call me sweetheart.”
“Okay,” he said easily, now following her into the garage. “What should I call you?”
She threw him a death glare over her shoulder when she reached the bottom of the steps. “How about my name?”
“Oh, that’s no fun.” He reached for the door handle and pulled, which unlocked his truck. He got in at the same time as Lark and quickly pushed the button to start the ignition. “You don’t like a pet name? Something your boyfriends call you?”
“You’re not my boyfriend.” Lark pulled the seatbelt across her body and clicked it into place. She looked at him, and Cash swore she was challenging him on purpose.
He grinned at her. “Yeah, but it’s Lark or nothing?”
She looked out the windshield, and Cash put the truck in reverse and expertly backed out of the garage.
“You’re going to hit my car,” Lark said.
“I am not.” He eased past it just fine, though he probably only had a couple of inches to spare, and got them on the country lane headed south toward Coral Canyon. “See? Plenty of room.”
Lark folded her arms, then unfolded them, then reached to fiddle with the heat vent in front of her.
Cash let his mind flow freely through pet names he could use for Lark that wouldn’t bring that frown to her face. A lark was a bird, and he started mentally going through things that might work with that: little bird, sparrow, high flyer.
She was feisty—he could use that. A real firecracker—also good. Cash also had a distinct feeling that both of those would earn him the frown and a fist flying toward his nose.
“What do your girlfriends call you?” Lark broke the silence with only a hint of the usual bite in her tone.
Cash glanced over to her. “I’ve had a variety of nicknames.”
“Really? For Cash?”
He released the smile he usually gave to reporters. “Oh, you know. Moneybags. Pretty Boy. Big Spender. Black Stallion.”
Lark’s eyes widened with each nickname he said. A scoff fell out of her mouth. “Black Stallion?”
“Because I’m so dark.” He shifted in his seat and focused on the road in front of him. “That all comes from my daddy, by the way. I’m a shade lighter than him, thanks to my blonde momma.”
“Did she teach you to cook?”
“No.” Cash cleared his throat. “She lives in Utah. It was my step-mom who taught me.” He came to a stop at an intersection and looked at Lark again. “She used to own Hole In One, the doughnut truck. You grew up in the area; maybe you’ve heard of it?”
A tiny smile touched Lark’s mouth. “Yeah, I have. Jet loved the one with the peanut butter and bananas.”
Cash chuckled and got the truck moving again. “That sounds just like Jet.” His truck warmed quickly, and Cash adjusted the setting back to seventy degrees for his half of the cab. “You can fix yours with that knob right there.”
He nodded to it, and Lark reached for it, turned it up to seventy-three and then back to seventy-two. Her fingers then moved to his infotainment screen, where she scrolled through his radio stations, glanced at him, and then tapped to change it from the country he’d had it on.
“Is this okay?”
Christmas music piped through the vehicle now, and Cash nodded.
“I can change it,” she said. “I just like Christmas music, and it’s so snowy here.”
“I said it was okay,” he said.
“You technically didn’t speak at all.”
“Are you always this much trouble?” He gave her his version of her frowny-face-glare.
“You’re my trouble.”
“Maybe I’ll use that as your nickname.”
“You won’t if you value having two seeing eyes.” She pierced him with a cocked eyebrow and looked out her side window.
Cash chuckled again, because this woman. Yeah, just that. This woman. She invited herself along on a grocery run, after challenging him to make a complicated dish for dinner. Then she changed his radio station as if she owned the truck, and now she was going to give him the cold shoulder?
He had half a mind to change the station back, right before he turned around to return her to the house.
Cash gripped the steering wheel, his pulse bouncing through his whole body. “Do you cook?” he managed to ask.
Lark looked over to him. “I get by.”
He sighed and took his turn looking out his side window. “You wanted to come. Are we going to ride in silence the whole time?”
“No,” she said. “The radio’s on.”
Cash looked over to her and watched as her shoulders loosened up and dropped as she exhaled. “When we get there, I’m going to need a few minutes to make a list.”
Lark pulled out her phone. “I can do it.” She tapped a couple of times and looked over to him expectantly.
“Chicken bouillon,” he said, his mind moving through the recipes now. Anything to keep himself occupied and away from pet names for Lark, or personal questions he could ask her. “Frozen peas and carrots. Puff pastry. Ranch dressing. Salad mix. Grape tomatoes. Day-old br—”
“Slow down, Speedster.”
Cash burst out laughing at the nickname. Lark’s fingers flew as she continued to type. “Let me read it back to you, so we can make sure I got it all.”
She started reading back the ingredients, and Cash said, “Puff pastry. You missed that one.”
“You’re not going to make the dough?” She shook her head and really played up her disappointment.
“Yeast,” Cash said, because he needed that for the doughnuts. “Fresh raspberries. Bittersweet chocolate, unsweetened chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate.”
Lark looked at him, and he nodded to her phone.
“I can repeat those if you need me to.”
“For chicken pot pie?”
“We’re driving an hour to the grocery store,” he said. “I’m getting everything I need for the next several days.”
She blinked. “For Thanksgiving too?”
“Maybe,” he said.
She sighed. “I didn’t know I was signing on for a marathon shopping trip.”
“Hey, you’re the one who wanted to come,” he said. “Which, by the way, you must not have eaten at The Branding Iron for a while, because they took the chicken pot pie off the menu.”
Lark opened her mouth as if to say something, but nothing came out but a puff of breath. For some reason, that drove a vein of satisfaction through Cash.
“We could go shopping,” Cash said. “And then go there for dinner. No cooking required tonight.”
She scoffed. “Now you’re just trying to get out of making me dinner.”
“Not true,” he said. “We can have the chicken pot pie for lunch tomorrow after church.”
“Maybe I don’t go to church.”
“Then you can put it in and babysit it while I’m gone,” he said without missing a beat. He also didn’t believe for a single second that Lark McClellan didn’t attend church. Her brothers both did, and her parents were currently serving a church-sponsored mission in Costa Rica.
She went to church.
“I need milk,” he said, continuing with his grocery list. “Half-and-half. Frozen corn. Mini cucumbers.” He paused while her fingers tapped across her screen.
“You’re not even giving me these in any type of order.” She looked up at him, but Cash kept his eyes on the road, as they’d entered the curvy part of the Apple Highway, and he didn’t want to end up wrapped around a tree trunk.
“Order?”
“I make my lists in order,” she said. “The mini cucumbers go with the salad mix and the grape tomatoes.” Her voice trailed off into something quieter as she kept typing on her phone. “The frozen items go together. Dairy, eggs, cheese….”
Cash tried to hide his smile, and he mostly managed. “What are you studying in school?”
Lark sighed like he was the most insufferable man on the planet, but when he looked over to her, she watched the landscape out the windshield and not him. “Animal science.”
Cash had not been expecting that. Maybe teaching, or English, or something more…feminine. “Oh. What are you going to do with that?” He had no idea what kind of classes would even be offered in an animal science degree.
“I don’t know.” She exhaled again, then drew in a deep breath. “I thought I wanted to be a vet, but now I’m not so sure.”
Cash flicked a glance in her direction. “Why aren’t you so sure anymore? You don’t like what you’re studying?”
“It’s not that. It’s just…so much longer to get the DMV, you know? And my grammy isn’t well, and I don’t know. I just feel like maybe it’s not the right thing to do right now.”
Cash nodded, his own uncertainty swirling through him. “I get that.”
“Do you?” Lark sounded like she really wanted to know.
“Yeah, sure.” He rolled one shoulder in a faux shrug. “I mean, I quit the rodeo—mid-year, mind you—for no discernible reason.”
Silence filled the cab of the truck, and Cash wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Well, there must’ve been a reason,” Lark finally said, her voice about half its previous volume.
“It felt like the right thing to do,” he said simply. A nervous laugh followed. “I don’t know why, only that the Lord kept callin’ me back here, and I couldn’t ignore Him any longer.” He pressed his lips together and kept going. “So I’m here, and housing opportunities have kept me here.”
Lark let several seconds go by before she said, “You call house-sitting for my parents a ‘housing opportunity’?”
“Yeah.” He completed the last curve in the highway, which straightened from here. “What would you call it?”
“Squatting?”
Cash tipped his head back as a big, full, belly laugh came flying out of his throat. To his delight, Lark joined him, and something twisted and thawed between them. He grinned over to her, really enjoying the way her pretty pink lips tipped up into a smile too.
“That was a good one.” He shook his head. “You’re quick, sparrow.”
“Sparrow? Really? You’re just going to go with another bird species?” She scoffed and shook her head. “Nope. That doesn’t work.”
And yet, Cash couldn’t stop smiling. “So no falcon?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Eagle? No, a bald eagle. They’re majestic, Larky.”
She giggled and looked at her phone as it chimed. “Larky is what Wade calls me.” She looked at him and their eyes met for one blazing moment before he had to turn his attention back to the road.
“So not Larky,” he said, as he certainly didn’t want a brother-sister relationship with Lark.
“Not Larky, cowboy.”
“Nope,” he said, popping the word out of his mouth. “You can’t call me cowboy. That’s so generic and lame.”
Her eyes once again traveled to his cowboy hat. “But you’re a cowboy.”
“And you’re a fast-witted woman with a bird name. Falcon should fit perfectly.” He glared at her, eyebrows raised. “Cowboy? Please. Have some creativity and originality.”
“Oh, like, Cash-money-honey?”
Cash grinned and grinned and didn’t think he’d be able to stop grinning anytime soon. “You know what? Cash-money-honey is pretty good.”
“I just threw up a little merely thinking about saying it again.” Lark smiled at him again, and Cash counted that as a huge win.
“Come on. Say it. Cash-money-honey.”
“No. Stop it.”
Cash laughed again, and without thinking, he reached over and took Lark’s hand in his. He realized what he’d done when she pulled in a sharp breath, and then…her fingers melted between his as they settled into place.
And just like that, Cash was holding hands with the woman he’d been thinking about for months now. He finally knew what he wanted to say in his prayer: Dear Lord, please don’t let this cause my ultimate demise.