There wereplenty of things Wade Holbrook would rather be doing than hanging curtains. But here he was with lilac patterned fabric draped over his shoulder and a cast-iron curtain rod balanced in his hand.
“A little to the left,” Grams directed, light dancing in her eyes at the nearly finished guest room. That smile. It was the only reason Wade was cooped up inside, doing what his very pregnant sister couldn’t. “There.”
Wade lowered the curtain rod and, using a pencil, marked the spot to drill the wall anchors into place. Grams went almost a year after losing her husband before she smiled again, and as ridiculous as this whole retreat scheme was to Wade, he wouldn’t kill that smile of hers for every last acre in Wyoming.
“These are just beautiful, don’t you think?” Wade’s German shepherd, Shadow, wagged her fluffy tail in agreement.
“Yep.” Wade couldn’t care less about the curtains, or how cozy this room was for the unwanted guest. It was one thing to host a retreat using the extra cabins on the property, but it was certainly another to host one of the writers in their home. All Wade needed was some annoying scribbler following him around like a lost puppy. But Grams had been most excited at the prospect of offering one lucky writer a personal cowboy chaperone for the week.
“I wish we had enough time to have Kate take some photos of this room.” Grams fidgeted with a framed painting of the Bighorn mountains, straightening it.
Wade patted her shoulder. “She’s not climbing those stairs, Grams.”
“You’re right,” she agreed. “And I suspect our guests will be arriving soon.”
Wade’s cue to hurry. Grams had wrangled him into some meet and greet around the fire pit tonight, but until then he’d be out on the ranch. Safely away from all romance writers. “Anything else to do in here after the curtains?”
“I’ll grab a broom and clear that drywall dust,” Grams said. “Just make sure you’re clean and presentable tonight.” She moved around him toward the doorway but stopped halfway through. “And on time.”
“Yes, ma’am.” After Wade finished hanging the final set of curtains, he stood back, as close to the door as he could get. If he didn’t make a quick escape once Grams approved, he might trap himself into meeting some of those writers. He wasn’t a fan of being made a spectacle, liked the idea of being ogled by romance authors even less. Hopefully Grams would be satisfied enough after one retreat to never hold another.
“Thank you, Wade.” Grams caught him in a hug before he could back into the upstairs hallway. “You’ve no idea how much this means to me.”
Tears brimmed her eyes, and Wade squeezed tighter. Losing Grandpa last year had been hard on all of them. They all lived on the ranch, together in the main house: his grandparents, him, Kate until she married two years ago, and an aunt and uncle who were currently in Europe for six months. Their grandparents had raised him and Kate from a young age after their parents passed. The amount of grief he endured at the loss was nothing compared to the grief he’d watched Grams suffer at losing the love of her life.
Lately, Wade had sworn never to let anyone close enough to cause that kind of pain. Better off alone, on what would someday officially behisranch, along with a couple of cousins. Wade was the foreman and ran operations now that his uncle was away, but Grams still held the ownership.
“You going to be okay to welcome the guests without me?” He needed to check on the herd in the north pasture. While he was out that way, he also hoped to steal a couple of hours to work on the base camp cabin that overlooked that same pasture.
“The writers will be so disappointed that they won’t get to meet you until this evening,” Grams said. “But they’ll understand.” She pushed him toward the hallway, the clicks of Shadow’s claws following in her excitement. “Go on, get your work done so you can charm them over s’mores tonight.”
Wade hurried down the log staircase that opened into the central living room, Shadow shooting down the stairs in front of him. The guest suite upstairs had once been Kate’s sanctuary. But even though she spent some nights out at the ranch with her husband, Ty, deployed now, Kate refused to climb stairs. “I’m due in less than a month,” she’d said to Grams a week ago, when the idea of using the downstairs guest room had been thrown around. “Make the writer climb the stars, not the pregnant woman.”
“It’ll be so nice to have noise here again,” Grams said from the top of the stairs, dust pan in hand. “Don’t you think so?”
Wade was saved from answering when a knock echoed. Shadow’s oversized ears perked.
“I’ll get it.” He tried not to grumble on his way to the door, certain with that curtain rod task he’d not escaped in the nick of time after all.
Hand on the knob, he inhaled deeply and forced a smile. Grams would smack him upside the head if he greeted her guests with a scowl. “Hello, and welcome—” But all that froze as his mouth fell agape.What a sight!
A slender woman stood barefoot on the porch. Flip-flops with some kind of sparkly flower ornament on them dangled from fingers completely caked in mud. Blonde hair that curled around her jawline swished as she raised her lowered head. A raised hand forestalled the obvious. “I’m a mess, I know.” It was the sight of a woman covered in mud that caught him off guard. Certainly that and not her soft hazel eyes that lit up at the sight of Shadow shimmying out the crack of the door.
The sound of her voice brought him back to his surroundings, and he stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind him. Shadow leaned against the visitor’s legs, her tongue hanging off to the side and her tail thumping in happiness at having a new friend scratching her behind the ears. Grams would want Wade to be hospitable, but she’d flip if her guest tracked muddy footprints on her freshly polished wood floors. “You okay?”
“Yeah, fine.” She shrugged. “Just a little hurt pride.”
“What happened?”
“Your driveway tried to swallow my car,” she said mostly to Shadow. The dog’s big brown eyes looked back at Wade as if in apology for so quickly becoming a traitor under those scratching fingertips.
The graveled driveway into the property wound through clusters of trees. Most of the puddles were insignificant. He’d meant to put up a traffic cone by the one that wasn’t. Mud must’ve filled it worse than he thought from last night’s rare early autumn rain. Wade ducked his head. Those curtains distracted him longer than expected.
“Tried to swallow you too from the looks of it.”
Her cheeks turned a deep red as her eyes traveled from her muddy hands and jeans to the mess she was tracking onto the porch. “I’m sorry. I can clean this up. I didn’t know what—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Wade could take her through the back door, into the kitchen. “Follow me.”
