Chapter 2 #2
She turned off the flame and stepped down the counter to her coffee maker, quickly measuring grounds and pouring cold water in. “I can put your jeans in the dryer.”
“They’ll be fine there.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“No, I just ate lunch,” he said.
Bailey nodded. “I was just taking a break from my paperwork and getting ready to feed my rescue cats.”
“Do you work from home?” he asked.
“On Tuesdays, I do,” she said, keeping her back to him as she pulled out a sleeve of saltines and a snack-sized bag of shelled pistachios. “I’m in the clinic the other days, including until noon on Saturdays.”
“Wow,” Reeves said.
“We try to do all of our ranch and farm calls on Mondays and Thursdays, so I’m out-of-office then too.” Bailey smiled in the general direction of the living room without meeting Reeves’ eyes. “It’s a pretty decent schedule.”
“Sounds like it,” he said.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m a farmer,” he said, and Bailey remembered the high-end finishes and extreme craftsmanship of his house.
There was no way he’d accomplished that on a farmer’s salary.
After all, the growing season in Wyoming only lasted for a couple of months, and unless he was growing gold leaf next door, Bailey highly suspected he actually did something else.
Or maybe he comes from money, she thought. No matter what, there was way more to Reeves Durham than farming.
“Has that little stream in the back flooded before?” she asked.
“Yep,” Reeves said. “It’s a bit of a mess, but it usually just flows out fifteen or twenty feet and then sinks back in. It does ruin your fields back there.”
Bailey nodded, because she didn’t have any fields back there. The coffee finished, and she got out cream and sugar and offered them to Reeves.
“Just sugar,” he said. “Can you do a couple of spoonfuls?”
“Sure,” she said, and she doctored up his coffee the way he liked it and took it to him in the living room. She handed it to him and then perched on the edge of the love seat adjacent to the couch, several feet of space between them.
He took a sip and sighed. “Ah, you make good coffee, Bailey.”
“Thank you,” she said, not sure why that compliment made her feel so accomplished. A wild idea struck her, and she cleared her throat. “Hey, listen,” she said, and Reeves’ gaze came back to hers. She swallowed as he watched her.
“This might be kind of bizarre,” she said, trying to find and latch onto the words she needed. “But a friend of mine is getting married next weekend, and I’m getting hammered on all sides about bringing a date.”
Reeves cocked his eyebrows, and Bailey heard how crazy the invite was.
“It wouldn’t mean anything,” she said. “I’ve just been too busy with the clinic to meet many people, and I only have one man who works for me, and he’s married.”
“So you want me to go to the wedding with you,” Reeves said.
“We could just go as friends,” she said.
“But we’re not friends.”
“We could be,” Bailey said. “We live right next door to each other in a tiny Wyoming town. Don’t you want to be friends?”
Reeves sighed. “Yeah, of course I want to be friends, Bailey.” He took another sip of his coffee, his dark eyes never leaving hers. “If you don’t have time to meet people, how do you have time to go to the wedding?”
Bailey didn’t want to get into all the complexities of the Young family. No one in the world had time for that, and she didn’t want to go to Boston and Cora’s wedding at all.
Yes, she knew them, but they weren’t her close friends. And though she had been asked by Bryce and her mother if she would be bringing anybody to the wedding, Bailey hadn’t truly given it any serious merit.
“Tell you what,” she said. “If you tell me what you really do for a living, I’ll just go to the wedding by myself.”
Reeves blinked almost lazily. “I already told you what I do for a living.”
“Yeah, but I’ve seen your house,” she said. “And I’ve known farmers my whole life. There’s something else going on there.” She grinned at him and got to her feet. “And you know, if we’re going to be friends, I’m going to find out anyway.”
She moved into the kitchen, pulled open her cupboard, and got down a bag of orange essence herbal tea. “In fact, I bet I could look it up online.”
“Don’t do that,” Reeves growled, and Bailey lifted her eyes back to his.
“Okay,” she said. “The wedding’s off the table.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know why I thought to ask you.”
She poured the kettle water into her favorite mug and started to unwrap the tea bag. “You can just tell me what you do—what you really do—and we’ll call it good.”
He said nothing, and Bailey peeked up at him from beneath her eyelashes.
“I mean, if we’re going to be friends.” She let the words hang there, and then told herself to stop talking, as Reeves seemed like the type of cowboy who would stay silent until forced to speak.
Bailey had plenty of experience with cowboys and “farmers” like him, and she simply smiled sweetly at him, determined to wait him out.
I really like Reeves already.