Chapter 5
CHAPTER
FIVE
Cash couldn’t quite believe that Lark had agreed to go to dinner with him.
It had given him a second wind after spending almost an hour in the grocery store, trying to make sure he had everything necessary to feed them for the next couple of days and introducing Lark to the people he knew around town.
He still wasn’t sure he had everything, but Dog Valley had a small grocery store taking up half the space in the gas station, and he could get essentials in a pinch.
The ride back to Dog Valley seemed to happen in a blink, with easy, casual conversation about her finals, their family, and what he did to fill the hours in his day.
He told her that he liked to cook, and he’d taken a few classes along those lines, that he sat in the hot tub every night after it got dark, and that he had a boatload of cousins and aunts and uncles who he’d spent years away from and liked to go spend time with.
He tapped to open the garage door and waited for it to rise before he eased the truck inside. “I can bring the groceries in,” he said as a gust of winter Wyoming wind set things rattling in the garage.
“I can help,” Lark said.
“It’s breezy,” he said.
“Close the door behind us, then.” Lark nodded to the remote attached to his visor. “That’s what we used to do as kids when our momma made us bring everything in.” She smiled and dropped out of the truck while he closed the garage, joining him in collecting the bags from the backseat.
Once they had everything inside and set on the counter, Cash started unloading. He liked to get everything out, stuff the bags all inside one, and store them before he put away the groceries. But with Lark there, she started loading the fridge items in and separating out the cabinet items.
“What are you going to do when my parents come home?” she asked.
Cash pulled out his tub of yogurt and then the cottage cheese from the bag. “Boston and I have a place over on the east side of town.”
“You’ve got a house?”
Cash pressed his lips together for a brief moment and nodded. “Yeah. It’s not exactly habitable right now. I go out there a few times a week, check on the construction, meet with the general contractor or the subs coming to do the work.”
“Wow,” Lark said. “Is it a big place?”
“Seventy-seven acres,” Cash said. “Boston and I bought it together.” He finally looked at her. “We renamed it Cousins Creek Ranch, and I’m going to open a cutting horse operation there.”
“Oh, so you have a plan for your life.” She sure didn’t sound happy about it.
Cash grinned at her. “If you want to call it that.”
“Of course I’m going to call it that,” she said, and she picked up the raspberry jam and the apricot preserves, turned her back on him, and moved to put them in the pantry. “The man has a seventy-seven-acre property with plans for a cutting horse operation,” she muttered.
Cash wondered if she knew he still stood there, now still instead of unloading the groceries. She turned back to him and put one hand on her hip, cocking it out in the sexiest pose Cash had ever seen a woman take.
“That’s a plan, Cash, and a good one. One you’ve already started in motion and paid for.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“So you’re not just some lost rodeo cowboy.”
He chuckled. “Well, I’m that too.”
She shook her head, her disgust still palpable in the air between them. “What do you do with cutting horses?”
“You sell them,” he said, feeling foolish because of the way she frowned at him. “Train them up real good. Sell them to cattle ranchers all over Texas, so they can move their herds. It’s a big business if you can produce good horses.”
“I bet it is,” she said. “What’s Boston going to do?”
“Oh, he’s getting married in the spring,” Cash said. “His wife owns Silver Sage Lodge.”
Lark’s eyes widened. “Wow. Does she?”
“They’re not going to live there,” Cash said, shaking his head and going back to the groceries. He piled his candy near the sink, as he usually kept that in the nightstand on his side of the bed in the master suite.
“She wants to have a separate place,” he said. “There’s two houses on the property, so we’re each going to have our own.” He paused while he crinkled up the bags and shoved them inside one of their own.
“I’m getting barns and stables built,” he said. “And we’ve got to re-fence and re-pasture through the whole place. It’s been vacant for about fifteen years, so it needs a lot of work.”
“Wow,” Lark said.
“We can go out there and see it if you want,” Cash said. “Like I said, I go every few days just to see how things are coming along or to meet with people.”
“How long will you be in Vegas?” Lark continued to clear the counter as Cash finally got everything out of the bags.
“About a week and a half,” he said. “I’m flying home on the tenth, so just before you’ll be back from college.”
He didn’t dare think about being in the house alone with her for almost a month. In some twilight moment where he’d lost his mind, he’d held her hand for about ten minutes as they drove to the grocery store, but all of his previous bravado and courage had completely failed him after that.
He wasn’t too tired to go to dinner at The Branding Iron, but he didn’t want to upset Lark and her plans to watch something on her tablet and take a nap. And he certainly didn’t mind cooking for her.
That might be more romantic anyway, he thought, though Cash wasn’t sure if he could count a homemade dinner in her childhood home as a first date. Heck, maybe the grocery shopping was their first date, as he knew his momma and daddy did that every Friday night for their date night.
“I probably won’t mentor after this season,” he said.
“No?” she asked.
He shook his head and pressed his lips together. “No. An amateur needs someone who’s familiar with the circuit as it exists. I was already working with River for this season when I quit, but he’ll need a proper manager next year, especially if he’s going to go pro.”
“You don’t want to manage?” she asked.
“I’ve thought about it,” Cash admitted. “I’ve been in the rodeo for a long time, and my daddy rode the circuit for two decades.”
“So you have a lot of connections.”
“And I know a lot about it,” he said. “I know what it takes to win, and I know what a training schedule needs to look like for a champion. I could definitely manage cowboys. And hey, maybe I will. Boston says he only wants twenty acres, and that leaves me fifty-seven. I only need twenty for the cutting horse operation. So maybe I’ll build a rodeo training facility at Cousins Creek and bring on some guys. I don’t know.”
He wadded up the bags and moved to the cabinet beside the sink, where he’d found a stash of them when he’d moved in. He stuffed them in the sack there and turned to face the groceries on the counter.
“I’m only twenty-six, so I can pretty much do anything.”
“And you weren’t injured in the rodeo,” she said. “So you’re…able-bodied…and all that.”
“Able-bodied?” Cash looked over to her and found a delicious pinkness crawling through her cheeks. A chuckle rumbled in his chest as Lark turned away from him, taking an extraordinarily long time to put away the yeast and cornstarch he’d bought.
He let her have her privacy, because he wasn’t entirely happy to be in Coral Canyon, though he wasn’t sure why, as he definitely planned to live and work here long term.
“What about you?” He cleared his throat. “If you end up going to vet school, where will that be?”
“I’m looking at some places in Texas,” she said. “But honestly, I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’m going to finish this bachelor’s degree.”
Surprise shot through Cash and raised his eyebrows. “You’re not going to finish? You only have one semester left.”
“No one seems to think my grandmother needs help but me,” she said. “And I don’t know. I feel a responsibility to help her if I can. I’m going to go visit her tomorrow and see how she’s doing.”
Cash nodded, his fantasies of walking into church with the gorgeous Lark McClellan on his arm and causing a huge stir in the Young family evaporating on sight. “So you might not be around for the doughnuts tomorrow.”
She grinned at him. “If you’re making doughnuts, I’m going to be around.
” She gave him a coy look as she picked up the evaporated milk and turned to put it in the pantry too.
“Grammy goes to church in the morning, and she has a lunch potluck that she does with some other widows in her community. I was planning on going in the evening.”
She faced him again, and Cash nodded, hoping his delight at having the day with Lark didn’t show on his face. He couldn’t believe he’d almost blurted out in front of the frozen food section that he liked her and wanted to go out with her.
Of course, that had to be obvious from him asking her out in the truck. And as he started to put away more of the fridge items, his mind flowed through what Wade and Jet might think of him dating their younger sister.
Lark could only be twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. And while Cash didn’t think that was too young for him, her older brothers certainly might.
Once the groceries were put away, Lark sighed. “Do you mind if I go lay down for a little bit?”
“Nope,” he said, though he definitely wanted her to stay in the room with him. “What’s a good dinner time for you?” He checked the clock. “It’s three-thirty. The chicken pot pie is going to take about ninety minutes from start to finish. That puts me at five.”
“Do you eat dinner at five o’clock, Cash?” she teased.
He grinned and shook his head. “No. It’s a little early for me.”
“Me too,” she said. “I like to stay up until midnight.”
“Oh, midnight’s for lightweights,” he said. “I’m up until one or two, and I get up around ten.”
“So the pizza you had today was really more of your breakfast.”
“I have a protein shake in the morning,” he said. “And then yeah, I eat lunch in the early afternoon and dinner fairly late, usually around eight.”
“Eight’s a long time from the pizza we had earlier,” she said.
“Six-thirty?” he asked.
“Let’s do seven,” she said.
“A hot, flaky chicken pot pie at seven,” he confirmed. “With a really big green salad with homemade croutons.”
She smiled back, and Cash took a mental picture that he could store in his heart and call up at any time of the genuine way she looked at him with happiness. Not contempt.
So maybe she did like him.
She left the kitchen while Cash’s thoughts clashed, and he watched her go before he took his candy down the hall to his bedroom and returned to the kitchen to start on the various elements of dinner.
After all, the pie crust would need time to chill in the fridge, and he’d need the oven for the croutons and the chicken pot pie.
So he seasoned the croutons with a ranch dressing packet with a little olive oil to get it to stick to the bread, and put those in the oven so that it would be free for the pie later.
He hummed as he chopped vegetables, then chicken, and set everything back in the fridge for when he’d need it.
He wanted to know more about Lark and why she felt called home to take care of her grandmother when no one else did. He’d never heard Wade or Jet mention anything about their grandmother, and they’d lived out of state for years now.
If things were really that bad, why would her parents be on a church service mission, which was a choice, not a requirement?
He hadn’t pegged Lark as a drama queen, but maybe she was. He didn’t know her that well yet, but he really liked that that operative word—yet—sat there.
She seemed open to a relationship with him, and as he stepped out onto the back deck to tend to the hot tub, as he had planned to do that day as well, he stretched his arms high above his head and looked up into the brilliant blue winter Wyoming sky.
“What am I doing?” he asked the atmosphere and the Good Lord Himself. “She doesn’t live here. Lord, am I really going to start a long-distance relationship with my buddy’s little sister?”
He flipped open the lid on the hot tub and stepped back into the house to get the powder he needed to make sure the chemical levels were correct. Back outside, he poured in two capfuls and set the jets to run through one of their cycles, which would take twenty minutes.
He loved having this hot tub here, and he did sit in it every night around ten o’clock and watch the stars in their formations and the clouds move through the sky. Cash did a lot of his best thinking in the hot tub, and he’d spent hours there with his mind on Lark.
“So maybe it’ll be fine,” he said out loud. “She’s almost done with college.”
And as the jets moved the powder through the system so that the hot tub wouldn’t be scaly or the water green from iron, Cash sat on a bench on the deck and pulled out his phone.
He needed to know what someone with an animal science degree did with their degree, and if perhaps he could use someone with Lark’s skills at his cutting horse operation.