Zane’s text had come out of nowhere.
Then we stayed up until three in the morning texting back and forth.
Rose said it meant he was in love.
Kelly said he was horny.
I hoped it was a mix of the two.
When I climbed out of my SUV at his place the next day, I turned in a slow circle taking in the land around me.
I hadn’t known what to expect, but this was nicer than anything I’d imagined.
“This is all yours?” I asked.
“All of it.” Zane came to stand beside me, close enough that I could catch the scent of his soap on his skin. “One hundred acres.”
The forest had been logged, but then replanted.
There were careful rows of saplings stretching all the way back to the hills.
And I could see where he’d done selective logging, leaving the biggest, oldest trees in place, mighty oaks standing tall over the young trees around them. This was what responsible land management looked like.
The farmhouse itself was nothing fancy.
It was an old two-story with white clapboard siding. But it had an inviting front porch, and it sat on the land like it had always meant to be there.
I loved it immediately.
I turned to look at Zane. “How does it work? You buy land and log it?”
There was a big logging operation in town, but Zane ran a small, private logging company with just a handful of men who reported to him.
“More or less.” He nodded toward the replanted sections. “Buy a property, log it clean, replant for the next generation, then sell and move on to the next one. That’s the model my father set up. And it’s the same model I use today. Although I keep a little more old-growth intact than he used to.”
“That’s impressive,” I said, eyeing the man.
Zane was a quintessential Red Oak Mountain man. Tall, dark, and handsome with thick, strong arms that could protect me from anything.
“Been thinking lately that I might not want to sell this one,” he rumbled. “I took a liking to this old farmhouse.”
Then he smiled in a way I’d never seen before, soft and a little sideways. It landed deep in my chest.
“It looks like the perfect place to raise a family,” I mused, getting lost in a dream for one short minute.
“I never took you as a family woman, Mallory.”
Then I shared something that had been a pinch in my heart for a long time. “Wade didn’t want kids.”
His brow furrowed. “Makes it hard to have kids if your husband doesn’t want them.”
“Ex-husband, thank you very much. I prefer to keepthatman in the past.”
“Point taken. Well, here’s to the future, Mal, wherever it takes you.”
Then Zane led me out to an old oak tree standing guard over a small field behind his house. It had a perfect view of his old, red barn.
He spread a picnic blanket out on the grass under the tree with the kind of easy confidence he brought to everything, shaking it open with one snap of his wrists, and I thought that was probably the most Zane thing I’d ever seen him do.
