“Exit coming up in one mile,” Miles told him.
“Thanks, Miles.”
After thinking of himself as Bubba for a few days, his real name sounded strange in his ears. “No problem. I need to stretch my legs and get a snack. We’re about a third of the way.”
“I’m not sure I would have agreed to do this if I’d known it was that far,” Elijah said. “I haven’t been more than fifty miles from the Circle C in more’n thirty years.”
“Then thank goodness you didn’t realize how long it took to drive three hundred miles. But I guarantee when you see this land, you’ll be glad that you did.” Miles took the exit and pulled into the nearest truck stop-slash-convenience store. He parked out at the far end of the lot and checked on Star before he went inside.
Elijah had already filled the biggest cup in the place with sweet tea and was looking at the doughnut display when Miles arrived. The wrinkles around his mouth and eyes deepened when he smiled. “I thank you. My butt thanks you. And my stomach will as soon as I decide how many of these I can eat in the next two hundred miles. There is a stove in the bunkhouse, isn’t there? It’s going to be dark when we get there, and I’ll need to whip us up some supper. I brought a cooler full of steaks, so it won’t take long to cook a couple. First person we had better look to hire is a good cook. I can wrangle a steak, but my biscuits are weapons of mass destruction, and I can’t bake worth a damn. With this sweet tooth we both got, we need us a cook.”
“Sounds good,” Miles said, and thought about the meal Lula Ann put on the table two nights before.
Too bad she couldn’t be coerced into working for me, he thought.But a geologist wouldn’t ever consent to being stuck in a kitchen every day. Who would have ever thought such a little lady like her would be working for an oil company?
“Boy, where is your mind?” Elijah nudged him on the shoulder.
He hurriedly bought a bag of chips, one pack of beef jerky—even though it wouldn’t be as tasty as what Elijah made—and half a dozen maple doughnuts. He grabbed two bottles of water and one of sweet tea on his way to the cash register.
“So, you’re a little hungry yourself, are you?” Elijah chuckled as he put his tea and pastries on the counter.
“Yep.” He nodded and added an apple from a basket of fruit to his purchase. “Star might like a treat, too.”
“He’ll appreciate it, I’m sure, but what he wants more is to get out of that trailer and into a corral where he can stretch his legs,” Elijah told him.
Three hours later, Miles backed the truck up to the corral behind the barn. Once his horse was in the corral, he checked the water in the trough and made sure there was plenty of food for him in the feed bin. “Welcome home, old boy. You’re going to love it here. Tomorrow, we will ride around the border fence and let you see the whole place.”
Elijah folded his arms over the top rail of the corral fence and nodded. “Looks like a pretty nice ranch. Maybe later you can buy up some of the land around it and make it grow to be as big as the Circle C. Now, where exactly is the bunkhouse?”
“You can stay in the house with me. There are three bedrooms, and I only need one,” Miles told him.
Elijah shook his head. “Nope. The house is for the boss. The bunkhouse is my kingdom. I can’t keep an eye on the hired help if I’m not living with them. Just point me in the right direction, and before that sun gets full set, I’ll have some supper ready. But don’t drag your feet when it comes to hiring us a cook. I ain’t intendin’ to work all day and cook supper every night.”
“Drive around the house, and you’ll see a path that leads back to it,” Miles answered. “And I’m hungry enough to eat two of those steaks.”
“After all that stuff you bought on the way down here?”
“I didn’t eat all of it. Saved some for a midnight snack.” He followed Elijah back across the land to the house. “Seems like I should be unpacking my things in the bunkhouse, too.”
Elijah laid an arm on his shoulder. “No, son. From now on you are the boss, and it’s about time. You’ve learned all that your dad and I could teach you. It’s time for you to stand on your own two feet and make this ranch famous.”
“I won’t ever be as smart as you and Dad,” Miles said.
Elijah got into his truck. “Depends on who you ask. See you in an hour. Bring a big appetite, and if you’ve got any of those doughnuts left, we’ll have them for dessert. If not, then it’ll be a can of peaches and store-bought cookies.”
Holly picked up a book, read three pages, and tossed it aside. She took a glass of wine out to the porch to watch the sunset, but she couldn’t sit still. She paced back and forth and finally decided that she was going to pack her suitcase, call an Uber, lock up the house, and go back to her apartment.
“I’m acting like a teenager,” she scolded herself. “Waiting for a man to call me is not who I am. I can go back to the city and be at work tomorrow morning.”
A rush of cool air met her when she opened the door to go inside and reminded her to adjust the thermostat before she left. She rolled her suitcase out of the hall closet and into the bedroom she had been using. Before she unzipped it, her phone rang.
“I’m not in the mood to talk to you, Darlene,” she grumbled. “And you are not going to talk me out of leaving.”
The noise stopped after the sixth ring, but a few seconds later it started again. “Okay, okay, but you can talk until you are blue in the face, and I’m still not staying in this house another day.”
Seeing Bubba’s picture on the screen in the FaceTime call didn’t even soften her mood. Two days with no call had not made her heart grow fonder. “Hello,” she answered.
“Hello, beautiful. I just got back with my horse and all my stuff,” he said.
