“How do you know that?” Glory Rose asked.
“Because I’ve known him for years, like you said,” Elaine said. “And he’s never once asked me out. In fact, I talked to him yesterday at the church potluck, and he acted like a psycho.”
“A psycho?” Clara Jean asked. “What happened?”
“Oh, it was just this thing with his son,” she said, waving her plastic fork again. “But he just stared at me like I was speaking another language, or I’d grown a second head, or something.” She looked at Ruby and Camila, and then finally Glory Rose again. She was the only one smiling. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Colt’s a little bit awkward,” Glory Rose said. “Especially aroundreally prettywomen who helikes.”
Elaine could only stare at her sister-in-law.
“Oh, I see what’s happening,” Clara Jean said gleefully. “Coltalreadylikes you.That’swhy he was acting a little weird.”
“She said he was acting like a psycho,” Camila said. “That’s different thanweird.”
“I guess it was just weird,” Elaine said. “He, like, barked a few words and said he had to leave, and then tried to go the wrong way, and then practically steamrolled me and Lila Mae. It was like he couldn’t get away from me fast enough.” She shook her head. “No, he doesn’t like me.”
“All right,” Glory Rose said airily. “Try Brandt. If he doesn’t work out, maybe we just try to get Colt pinned down a little bit more.”
“I don’t know,” Elaine said. “I don’t want a man who’s tongue-tied around me. I want someone to say, ‘You’re being headstrong and stubborn, or you’re being too loud, baby, or you’re being rude, or you’re being unreasonable about this.’ I don’t need someone who’s just going to bow to everything I do and say.”
“I’ll add that to the list,” Clara Jean said, and they all laughed, even Elaine.
The interaction with Colt yesterdayhadbeen a little bit weird, and she’d never once thought he was looking at her with any sort of desire at all. So either he was really good at hidingit, or Elaine had lost the ability completely to tell if a man was interested in her.
She hoped the first one, because while she did have a very specific idea of who she wanted to be with, she didn’t want to miss out on a perfectly good cowboy prince because she couldn’t tell if he was interested in her.
7
Lila Mae breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped into the chilled interior of her tiny home. She’d been playing it safe and restricting her activity outside during the heat of the day, as recommended, but she’d had to make the half-mile walk from the Intake Center to her tiny house in the afternoon temperatures.
She’d heard the growling and gurgling of construction machines all day from within the farmhouse-slash-office where she currently ran Feline Friends, but she hadn’t run into Trap or Jason or Sawyer, and she didn’t actually know which of them had come to work on the property that day.
Thankfully, someone had brought in two kittens that had been abandoned in a field, and that brought their rescue count to fifteen. “You won’t have any problem adopting out kittens,” Lila Mae told herself as she opened her fridge and pulled out the jug of sweet tea. Texans loved it more than Georgians, and that was a happy change from Lila Mae’s life in Baltimore.
In fact, Lila Mae missed very little about Baltimore—or Atlanta, for that matter.
She let herself think about the life she’d had back East only for the amount of time it took for her to pour herself a glass ofsweet tea and sink onto her couch. The beautifully cool liquid coated her mouth and throat with all the tang of tea and lemons that she loved.
No, Lila Mae did not miss working in a corporate office or her stuffy CEO-businessman boyfriend who’d been all wrong for her. The reinvention phase of her life had been going quite well since she’d made the move to Texas, because she didn’t have to answer to anyone but herself.
She enjoyed a few minutes of simply sitting and sipping, and then she checked the time. She had another interview in about a half-hour, first with someone for the general manager position, and then a vet tech. Lila Mae needed someone to run intakes, answer phones, handle adoptions, and basically run the office. She didn’t want to be completely hands-off, but she definitely needed an assistant.
She needed a certified veterinarian, and she’d like to have a house manager over each feline area, but those could come as the construction got completed and the houses got equipped with bedding, supplies, and toys. She had emails to send to various businesses for donations, as she was a nonprofit, and she had paperwork to review for the new intakes.
She’d told Trap the hospital facility was the next priority, and they’d chosen an old stable as the location for it. Lila Mae loved the idea of recycling buildings and making them new and functional again, and she’d helped with the demo of the stable, getting it cleared out and down to its bare bones. Then Trap and his team could make an assessment on the building and draw up plans to renovate it.
It would only be the third structure finished here on the ranch, as they’d built Lila Mae’s tiny home from the foundation up, and they’d renovated the best structure on the property—the family farmhouse—into the administration office and Intake Center for Feline Friends. That was where people parked andwhere they entered when they had cats they wanted to drop off, or if they came for adoptions.
The kitchen and dining room area functioned as a staff break room, with the front living room as their foyer and reception area, and the bedrooms along the right side of the house operating as their sanctuary for now.
They could expand up to the second floor, but Lila Mae really wanted to have separate cat houses where she could place different personalities and ages of cats, different breeds, and the felines would be able to live in smaller groups in a more natural, indoor and outdoor setting.
The property had sheds and barns, and they just needed to be cleaned out and converted. Lila Mae wanted working heat and air conditioning in every building, as well as running water, and that required an infrastructure that Trap said the ranch didn’t currently have. They’d worked through all of that, too, digging trenches and laying pipe, and dealing with city electricians to get the power where it needed to go.
That work was done now, and Trap claimed that renovation would hum along nicely now that the foundation had been done. She certainly hoped so.
She found herself tracing around each of her fingers—up and down into the creases—with the tip of one finger, as if she could feel Trap’s hand in hers. Frustration filled her that they’d been interrupted that morning, though she didn’t really believe he would’ve asked her to breakfast. Neither one of them had time for that.
