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It was excruciatingly difficult to not look at him with complete disdain, and Nicole tried very hard to keep her thoughts from her face. She knew some rich city guy wasn’t going to be completely on top of how a farm was run, but he couldn’t actually be serious right now, surely? Had he not even realized that he was buying a dairy? Did he seriously just watch a couple of old John Wayne movies and decide to go buy a property?
Maybe she wasn’t doing that good a job of keeping her face blank after all. Brendan cleared his throat again and scratched his neck.
“Oh,” he said. “Just thought that was how you rounded up the cows, you know?”
“We use ATVs,” Nicole said slowly. “You know, like motorbikes with four wheels. They’re in the main equipment shed.”
“Right.” The guy laughed, his smile annoyingly bright even though he was clearly embarrassed, and he shrugged as if he’d just had a bout of forgetfulness. “ATVs, of course. That was stupid of me.”
“Uh-huh. Anyways…”
Keep walking, Nicole. Just keep walking.
“I’ll show you back to the house, and I guess I’ll be on my way,” she said over her shoulder, another fake smile plastered on her face. She had wanted to spend every extra minute she could here, stretching her departure out as long as possible, but this Brendan Greenwood guy had her wanting to get into her truck and drive away as fast as possible.
CHAPTER4
BRENDAN
Well, this was bad. This was very, very bad.
Brendan tried not to let the panic set in as he followed Nicole around the farm, feeling like a lost puppy that was hoping someone was going to take him home. He had no idea what he was doing, and the naïveté of his past self thinking he could just learn it all in an afternoon and be on his merry way was so astronomically stupid that Brendan really couldn’t blame Nicole for giving him the looks she had for the last half hour of their tour.
He couldn’t just quit now. He didn’twantto quit now. As blind and stupid as he had been, he still loved it here. The second he’d set foot outside his car and looked around to find it just like the photos, he had loved it. And, yes, he was panicking, no matter how hard he tried to deny it, but there wasn’t that dread that had taken up residence in his chest every time he’d thought about going back to the office. So he could figure this out. He had to.
In a last-ditch attempt to figure out what the hell he was going to do, Brendan tried to get a little more information out of Nicole about how the place ran. Animal husbandry was clearly his weakness, but numbers, statistics,thathe could do.
“So, how many employees do you have helping you run the place?”
“None.”
“None?”
“Yeah, none. It’s just me.”
“Oh, wow,” he said, genuinely shocked. “That’s really impressive.”
Nicole shrugged again, as if it weren’t that big a deal. “It’s part of the reason I sold it. Couldn’t keep doing it on my own.”
She sounded sad saying it, but that was none of his business. Mostly he was impressed that she had this whole operation running by herself. The question that sprung up, though, was couldherun this place by himself? Absolutely not — it was pretty obvious. He didn’t need to think hard about that at all.
In fact, a particularly awful sense of dread was working its way into his stomach as he took in everything she was telling him. It was a lot of information to try and absorb, but from the looks she was giving him and then trying to smother out of a sense of politeness, he was getting the impression that not knowing this stuff was the same as getting a job as a librarian and not knowing how to read.
He had known it was a reckless decision to buy this place, and Tina had said the same thing straight to his face — but that was kind of the point. He wanted something so different to the life he’d been stuck in, and it had seemed like the perfect solution. Now it just seemed like the perfect storm, one entirely of his own making. It wasn’t really like he could just do this at his own pace and figure things out, not when there were actual animals that needed looking after. The cows looked kind of sweet, like big friendly dogs that lumbered here and there; he didn’t want them to get sick or something because he didn’t know what he was doing. But seeing them in person, they weremuchbigger than he’d thought cows could be. He’d kept that comment to himself after he’d joked about never seeing brown ones before — that had gone down like a lead balloon. If he had been subconsciously running away from his responsibilities, then he’d run face-first into a whole different set of them.
So he’d need to hire help, obviously. But he wouldn’t even know where to start advertising for that sort of job. Even if he found someone, Brendan hadno ideawhat he was doing, so how was he supposed to vet the skills of anyone he hired?
Except… he knew the woman standing right in front of him knew what she was doing. If she’d been handling the entire farm on her own, then there was no better proof than that. So, here was his dilemma; he could try and find help further afield with zero contacts and less than zero knowledge, or he could throw himself deeper into the pool of embarrassment he was already swimming in and ask if Nicole would consider staying at the property she hadjustsold.
Asking the previous owner to stay on as an employee was maybe a reckless decision, especially because he was about to have this conversation in the middle of a field, but the whole thing was reckless and strange and honestly kind of deranged. So what was one more little piece of crazy added into all of it? Sometimes the best strategy was to admit defeat, regroup, replan and forge ahead. It was still going to sting,a lot,and Brendan would probably be able to add it to his private list of most excruciatingly embarrassing moments. But he was a good enough businessman that he knew there was no other way out.
As they wandered back towards the house and Nicole mentioned her needing to get a move on, he realized he was out of time and needed to make a move before he was entirely screwed. Steeling himself with a deep breath and straightening his shoulders, he got ready to humble himself. If he could control the landing, then maybe falling flat on his face would be a little less humiliating. Hopefully.
“Hey.”
Nicole turned to look up at him, her bright blue eyes pinning him down. He didn’t think he’d ever met someone quite so ferocious as her, not in all of his years in business, and she was certainly holding back and being polite to him — he was smart enough to figure that much out. She probably thought he was just some idiot from the city who didn’t know what he was doing, and… well, she wasn’t wrong.
“So,” he said, “I’m maybe in a little bit over my head.”
