Abruptly, she looked like the kind of kid who might climb trees and catch frogs or come home with grass stains on her knees and not care.
Better.
"How do I look?" She posed in the driveway with her hands on her hips, one boot cocked to the side, chin tilted up.
He smiled. "Like you belong in a barn."
The grin she gave him in return hit somewhere around his solar plexus.
Tessa appeared on the porch behind her daughter. She looked at Makayla posing in her new clothes, and her expression went through pride, pain, and something that might have been gratitude if she'd let it land long enough for him to name it. She nodded once at Dillon and went back inside.
He returned to Biscuit's hocks and told himself his eyes were getting blurry because of the cold morning air.
They settled on a schedule. Tuesday and Friday mornings, with the occasional unscheduled day when Tessa texted him about something—Chairman Meow's glucose reading was off, June was acting lethargic, Loretta had eaten something suspicious and was making concerning noises. The texts were clipped and professional. The conversations at the farm were . . . less so.
"You're administering the bute paste wrong," he told her on Friday, watching her try to wrangle the dosing syringe into Biscuit's reluctant mouth.
"I'm doing it exactly how you showed me."
"You're squeezing too fast. Give him time to taste it."
"Taste it? It's medicine, not a wine pairing."
Grinning, he replied, "Horses are particular about mouth feel. If you squeeze it all in at once, he'll spit half of it out and you'll have to start over. Trust me. I've cleaned more horse slobber and paste dewormer off my shirts than you've had silk blouses eaten by donkeys."
"That is a very specific and oddly competitive metric."
"Welcome to veterinary medicine."
She gave him a look that, in a fancier setting, would have preceded her throwing a drink at his head. But she eased the plunger down more slowly, and Biscuit worked his jaw and swallowed the full dose without protest.
"See?" Dillon said. "Patience."
"If you say 'I told you so,' I will put this syringe somewhere creatively unpleasant."
He bit the inside of his cheek. Hard. "Wouldn't dream of it."
This was the part that was getting dangerous. The banter. He and Tessa settled into a rhythm of verbal sparring that had nothing to do with friction and everything to do with the fact that she made him laugh. Really laugh—not the polite chuckle he offered at social functions, but the kind that snuck up on him and burst out before he could catch it.
And she laughed, too. A lot. And she sounded surprised every time. As if she’d never expressed humor honestly and openly before. He started going out of his way to crack her composure and get her to throw her head back, exposing the elegant column of her neck, and flashing her perfect teeth as she laughed.
She was deliberately, wickedly funny in a way he suspected most people never got to see because she kept it hidden behind impeccable manners and careful composure. She had a gift for precise, devastating observations delivered with a straight face and perfect timing.
Fern had always said Tessa was scary smart. She'd undersold her daughter-in-law considerably with that observation. Tessa was scary smart, scary observant, and scary funny, a combination that was proving considerably more dangerous to his defenses than her beauty alone ever could’ve been.
The real Tessa kept slipping through cracks in her armor. And he had no business noticing her, let alone enjoying her so much that far too many of his thoughts were starting to revolve around her.
Fridays were the only day of the week that Makayla didn't have an activity after school that lasted until Tessa closed her store. When Makayla mentioned that she was always home alone on Fridays, he immediately offered to pick her up from school and let her ride with him on his calls. He made the offer because it was practical—Makayla could learn about animals, and it gave Tessa a few hours to work on the gown business or the store without worrying about her daughter. Yep. Purely practical.
Tessa said yes the first Friday because she had an emergency reshoot of a wedding gown for a big New York sale she and Charlotte were hoping to make.
He picked up Makayla after school, and he was surprised to see she'd changed into her jeans after school. She sat in the passenger seat, her new green boots propped on the dashboard, watching the valley roll past with the same wide-eyed wonder she'd had the day she first touched June's neck.
"Can I please change the radio station?" she asked without warning.
"Uhh, sure." So much for his beloved classic rock. He braced himself for a bout of Beethoven that threatened to bore him into a coma.
She leaned forward and scrolled through the dial until she found a country station and sat back with a contented sigh as a twangy voice crooned about back roads and Friday nights.
