I smile at Flint again, and this time, I’m fairly certain my smile is pure friendly-neighbor smile. “Would you like to come in? Or join us at the main house for coffee and pastries? We can go over the accounts for the ranch, and you can fill me in on anything new since your last email. I hope you don’t mind if I ask a few questions. But just a few.Overall, Junie and I are ready to manage this little ranch on our own now that we’re here.”
“June,” my daughter says. “You can call meJune.”
His gaze flicks to her once again. “High school?”
She rolls her eyes.
His lips twitch.
The man’s lips twitch at my daughter’s eye roll.
What does that mean? What does that evenmean?
“I get to start junior year at a new school with total strangers,” she says. “Isn’t thatawesome?”
“About as awesome as getting thrown off a horse that’s scared by a nonexistent mountain lion,” he agrees.
Junie snorts.
Shesnorts.
Flint looks back at me. “Gonna have to take a rain check.” He delivers it drier than the desert, which makes Junie snortagain. “Got a horse to track down.”
He tips his baseball cap to us, turns, and strides away, and I’m too stunned by his abruptness, his crankiness with me, and his completely opposite good humor with Junie to do anything but—
“Don’t youdarestare at his butt,” Junie mutters to me.
Yeah.
Anything but stare at his butt.
And I wish I wasn’t staring. I truly do. But I can’t help myself, nor can I stop it now.
Flint Jackson, who I thought was at least sixty-five years old and computer illiterate, based on his emails, who probably knew my uncle Tony better than I did, at least in recent years, who just saved my daughter and me from a cow-eating bear, and who clearly thinks I’m nothing but a nuisance, hands down has one of the best butts I have ever seen in person.
Junie makes another disgusted noise.
It takes everything I have to ignore it. “Great job finding why the window was stuck. Want to head out to the barn with me and see if we can find a shovel? Pretty sure there’s not a dead-cow pickup service out here, so we’re gonna have to bury it. Oh! I wonder if Uncle Tony still has his tractor. You can practice driving until we get your permit switched over to Wyoming. Doesn’t that sound great?”
The brown eyes she got from her father look me up and down, then up and down again, and I’m pretty sure it’s not that she’s adamantly opposed to ever driving in her life after that little fender bender she had with a tractor during the single driving lesson Dean tried to give her on a backcountry highway before she was old enough to apply for her permit two years ago. “You chose this life, Mother. I didn’t. Good luck. Don’t get eaten by a bear.”
I beam at her. Shedoesn’twant me to get eaten by a bear. This feels like progress after the silent treatment I’ve gotten for most of the past two weeks since I told her we were moving to Wyoming.
She knowsallof why we had to move. I know she does.
And I know she’s probably glad in a lot of ways to be here, too, even if it hurts that none of this is her fault.
Noneof it.
But she gets the consequences anyway.
Lost friends. Getting cut from the soccer team back in Iowa. Side-eyes anywhere we went in town.
I’ll do my damned best to make this a good new home for us, but we’re here out of desperation more than anything.
We couldn’t stay in Cedar Rapids.
Not afterallthe scandals.
