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Driving back from town, Sawyer pulled into the ranch and saw a simple sign, no bigger than a few feet high, with the wordsFOR SALEwritten on it in red paint and the realtor’s phone number beneath. He idled the car and turned off the engine, staring at the sign. It wasn’t even standing up straight, not fully, so he got out of the car and wandered over to it, hands in his pockets.
Maybe he did need to get back to the city, back to normality, because surely it wasn’t normal to stand there staring down abadly made sign like it was your mortal enemy. But the sign meant that things were official. People would drive past and know that this place could be theirs. It meant that it would no longer be the Butlers’ family home. It would just be some land and a house that they wouldn’t have access to. Stepping foot there wouldn’t be going home; it would be trespassing.
Sawyer rubbed a hand over his face as if he could rub all these stupid thoughts out of his brain like an old-school chalkboard. He wished he could blame jet lag or something for his weird mood, that he had a hangover maybe, but he hadn’t even had a single drink since he’d been back in Willow Ridge. He just needed to go inside, have breakfast and a barrel full of coffee, and he would snap out of it. That’s all it was.
Sawyer kicked the sign with his foot in a halfhearted attempt to straighten it out. It didn’t really do anything except knock it too far in the other direction, but his mood had gone south so fast that Sawyer just climbed back into the car and started the engine. Breakfast. If he just had breakfast and caffeine, everything would start looking brighter. Maybe Josie was already here for a shift? That would certainly make things brighter.
As he drove up the dirt road and through the iron gate, he saw theFOR SALEsign topple over in the rearview mirror as a slight breeze came through, landing face down in the dirt. Sawyer kept driving… He had no intention of turning around to pick the thing back up.
Sawyer found Josie in the barn, because she was always in the barn, even when she wasn’t being paid to be there. She washauling bags of horse feed that had been delivered into a corner, some of the bags almost as big as she was.
“Do you need a hand?’ Sawyer asked, keeping his distance from the chaos.
“Nope!” she said cheerfully, not even bothering to turn around. “Beats having to pay for a gym membership.”
“Willow Ridge doesn’t have a gym.”
“Exactly. Imagine the fuel costs to get to one, never mind the membership fee.”
She turned around, sweaty and breathless with more chaff in her hair than usual, and Sawyer felt himself smile, an automatic response now. He’d put everyone else’s breakfast in the kitchen and then made his way out here.
“I brought you cake,” he said, holding out the small paper bag to her. Josie lit up like a Christmas tree and scurried over, taking the bag from him in awe.
“You got me cake?” she asked, peering inside the bag as if she couldn’t believe her luck.
“That’s what I just said,” laughed Sawyer as she looked like she was making a very difficult decision.
“My hands are dirty,” she said with a sigh eventually. “I’ll eat it inside, but thank you. You got yourself cake too, right?”
She said it so earnestly, with so much concern that Sawyer could only laugh again.
“I got everyone cake, don’t worry.”
“Good.”
He watched her place the bag carefully on a shelf, out of the way of nibbling horses’ mouths, then eyeing him with a small, shy smile. Sawyer looked over his shoulder at the barn door that was still slightly wide open. But Sandy had still been asleep from her late shift at the diner, and Luke had said he was taking a shower and cleaning the place up before he’d sit down and eat the breakfast Sawyer had brought home, so…
“Come here,” he said.
Josie wasted no time, practically catapulting herself into Sawyer’s arms, wrapping her own arms around his waist and burying her face in his shirt.
“You’re like a little squirrel or something,” he said, kissing the top of her head and breathing in the scent of her. “You’re always burrowing into things.”
“There’s nothing wrong with squirrels,” Josie said, voice muffled against his chest.
“I never said there was.”
She looked up at him with a grin, eyes bright, and Sawyer leaned down to kiss her. He was always so scared of breaking her as if she’d shatter and disappear forever. He cupped her face in his hand, running a thumb down the side of her cheek.
“You’re too tall,” she said, standing on tiptoes and still barely reaching his chin.
“You’re too short,” Sawyer retaliated and picked her up. Josie stifled a squeal as she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, now less of a squirrel and more like a koala bear.
“That’s better,” he said, and she closed the gap between them, kissing him and holding on tight as Sawyer thought about how he never wanted her to let go.
When he’d first come home for this extended stay, Sawyer was sure that he was going to be bored out of his mind during the nights, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. But he was so exhausted from working outside all day, a whole different sort of exhaustion than training in the confines of a gym, that as soon as the night descended, he was happy to crawl up to his room, into his own bed no matter how small it was and lay back ready for sleep.
He was on his laptop, doing his best to scroll through the web pages with the patchy internet that they could get on the ranch. Out of morbid curiosity he’d looked up the ranch’s listing on the real estate company’s website and was reading through it with a sour taste in the back of his throat. And he hated to admit it, but painting the barn red had made it look really good, even if it was a cliché.
