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“Well, what did you think?” asked Sandy, who appeared at their table with a tray to clear their dishes and a smug grin because she knew exactly how good it was.
“Please tell the chef that he’s a genius,” Sawyer said, having never been better fed in his entire life. Sandy laughed.
“Tell him yourself,” she said and nodded at Luke, who was ducking his head, the tips of his ears pink from the praise.
“You?” Sawyer asked, stunned.
Luke nodded once, bashful as always whenever it came to himself and any sort of compliment, but Sandy continued on for him.
“We have a bunch of cooks on rotation for us. They’re all great, but Luke’s the one who comes up with all these new recipes. He’s a very talented chef. Once the ranch sells, he might have enough time to actually do something about it.”
Sandy looked at him with so much pride she might accidentally burst, while Luke ducked his head even further, trying to turn invisible.
Sawyer, meanwhile, felt a wave of cold guilt wash over him. He never knew Luke liked to cook. He didn’t know hecouldcook. Even today when he’d been poking around the kitchen, he’d assumed all those fancy knives had belonged to Sandy. The words Luke had uttered when they’d first sat down suddenly hit home in a new way… If he’d been here more over the last ten years, he might have known. What else had he missed out on?
CHAPTER 6
JOSIE
Josie intended to keep her distance from Sawyer from here on out. Sure, he was nice to look at, so what? Birds were nice to look at, but she wasn’t looking to get involved with a parakeet. And what did it matter if he was a gentleman to her? He was a known playboy, so of course he had charm. She wasn’t going to start swooning like some love-drunk middle schooler with a crush on the captain of the football team. More importantly, she didn’t want to make the Butler family’s messy dynamics even worse by throwing a crush into the mix. Especially after what Luke had said. She had enough on her plate, thank you very much.
So on Wednesday morning, Josie drove up to the farm in her truck, mentally slapped herself and vowed to keep clear of the guy. Which was all great, but she was swiftly reminded that the best-laid plans could take a wrong turn when she realized their next task was to paint the barn. So, physical distance wasn’t an option. She was five feet tall, barely. She couldn’t paint a barn all by herself, not in the amount of time they had. It was going to have to be a more metaphorical sort of distance. But she could do that.
She strode over, boots scuffing up the dirt path beneath her and stopped in her tracks. Luke had said Sawyer was lazy, that he’d shirked responsibility whenever he could and had no interest in the farm. Luke had said that it was a miracle Sawyer had turned up to help at all. But Lukesaida lot of things that didn’t always pan out to be true…
Sawyer was already at the barn, setting up a wall of complicated-looking scaffolding against the building, paint cans and rollers ready to go in a pile at the bottom.
“You building a pyramid or something?” Josie asked, shielding her eyes as she looked over it all. Sawyer finished tightening a bolt with a wrench.
“Just figured we should make our lives as easy as possible,” he said, unceremoniously putting the tool back in the toolbox.
“I can feel my stress levels going down by the second,” she said, only half joking. This was going to make the day a lot more bearable than she’d anticipated. Sawyer grinned.
“Good,” he said. “Then it’s already doing its job.”
Josie couldn’t help herself and had to ask the question that had been nagging her since she saw the contraption.
“How much did all this cost?”
Sawyer shrugged, shaking one of the poles to check that it was sturdy. “It was only eighty bucks for the day, so I rented them for the rest of the week, just to be sure.”
He said that as if eighty bucks a day was nothing… Josie just blinked at him.
“You went to the hardware store, didn’t you?”
Sawyer gave her a funny look. “Yeah, why?”
“Because you got charged probably double of what this thing’s worth. Mr. Mathers still owns the place.”
“I saw the old scarecrow there,” said Sawyer, divvying up brushes and rollers between them. “Kind of surprised he’s still running the place, honestly. I don’t think he’s ever been young.Wasn’tsurprised to see that he still overcharges wherever possible, but I couldn’t be bothered looking anywhere else for a better deal.”
He shrugged as if it were as easy as that.
Oh, yeah… Josie reminded herself.The guy’s super rich.
It was one thing to know that someone was rich, but then to see them blow a few hundred dollars on equipment without batting an eye… It made Josie feel like a little swamp creature that had crawled out of a drain somewhere.
This is a good thing. Distance, remember? What business have you got getting friendly with a guy who thinks nothing of blowing eighty bucks a day while you work two jobs?
