“You be careful with her, then.”
“Yes, Daddy,” Cash said, because he’d grown up with Bryce down in Kentucky, his biological son being raised by Uncle Otis.
Daddy groaned as he got to his feet, and he wrapped one arm around Cash’s shoulders and said, “Thank you for bringing the doughnuts, son.” Then he moved toward the living room. “Grace, you can go get your art now and show it to Cash. He and Lark have to get going.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Lark shimmied into her Care Bear swimsuit for the second night in a row, shivering because it wasn’t quite dry from last night’s soak in the hot tub.
“How does he do this?” she muttered to herself.
They had been back from Coral Canyon for about an hour. Cash had spent the majority of that time in his bedroom, while Lark lay on the couch and texted her mother in Costa Rica. When he had sent his inaugural text:Do you want a hot tub a little bit early tonight, before your brothers get here?Lark had immediately said yes and gone to get changed.
She left the cover-up hanging in the bathroom, and instead grabbed the towel she’d used yesterday and headed down the hall, taking short, clipped steps, as if that would somehow warm her up.
As she approached the sliding glass door, she saw the colorful glow from the hot tub lights change from teal to blue, and that told her Cash had already gotten in.
Lark pulled open the sliding glass door, every part of her dropping ten degrees as she stepped outside into the wild winter Wyoming night. “It’s freezing,” she complained, and she quickly whipped off the top of the towel warmer, plunged her towelinside, and replaced the lid before stepping around the corner. Steam filled the air, and she could barely see Cash in the far corner.
“My swimming suit is still wet,” she said. “How do you do this every night?”
“I’ve got more than one suit,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’ll have to get you another one.”
Lark practically dove into the hot tub, and embarrassment ran through her as the water swished and sloshed around. “Sorry,” she said.
She took the corner he’d sat in last night, but after only a few seconds, she said, “I don’t like these jets,” and she moved to the seat in front of the waterfall.
“You can sit here,” he said.
He moved over to the corner right in front of the living room window, and Lark gladly took his corner.
“This one has the best jets,” she said.
“Yeah, it does,” he said. “It’s my favorite corner.”
“I feel bad I’m taking it from you.”
“Do you?” He grinned at her. “You seem really upset.”
“Okay,” she said, barely rolling her eyes. “I don’t know how you sat in that one last night. Those jets are like needles.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely the worst corner,” he said.
“Then why did you sit there?” she asked.
“Because it was closest to you, Songbird.”
Lark was not used to men paying attention to her like this, and certainly not someone as handsome and as talented as Cash Young. She didn’t know what to say, and the bubbling silence settled around them.
“So, we survived today,” Cash said a few moments later.
“Yeah,” Lark said. “It was a busy day.”
“You never really said what you thought of the sermon.”
“I really liked it,” Lark said. “And I thought what you said at lunch was really poignant.”
