“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 hasa 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 aplan, 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.
