Page 75 of Risking it for the Cowboy

Relief rushed through her when…

“I thought you were bringing her to the farm. Where’s your place?”

“The farmhouse belongs to Ty and his fam. Just keep going past it and stay on the main farm road where it winds up through the pine trees. I’m in the cabin at the top of the ridge.”

“Cabin?”

The knot in her chest unraveled. She jumped back in her Rover and continued up the gravel road, winding into pine trees and switchbacks until she spilled out onto an escarpment that spanned the horizon in an arc.

And the view!

The road split here, the main stretch continuing down into the back acreage upon which sat a defunct oil grasshopper. A tangent road forked off along the ridge to a cedar cabin in the distance where a mint-green truck was parked in a detached garage.

She turned at the fork, bobbed and dipped over the gravel, as the cabin nestled into the pine trees with a beautiful wraparound deck and “A” window that overlooked the western horizon, loomed bigger.

She held her breath … she’d always dreamt of a house like this!

A matching cedar shed sat with the doors propped open, a pristine shop on display, where lumber, pavers, and other building supplies were neatly stacked. An old playset? Maybe a previous foreman had had a family here before? And lilacs planted around the perimeter? Spilling about in a gorgeous fluff of lavender. His truck was pulled into the tidy garage, devoid of anything other than a generator and a canister of gas.

Voices filtered from behind the cabin as she got out and hauled her banjo with her.

Humming. A deep baritone reverberating on the wind to a soft radio playing tunes.

This was where he lived? Her heart clenched so tightly with years of yearning she’d poured into her scrapbook as a little girl wanting so badly to escape. She circumvented it, gazing up at the stone chimney touching the sky, and followed the mulched path, followed the sounds of T.R.’s calm voice and Daisy’s incessant chatter to a patio decked out in lawn chairs, firepit, smoker, and grill, when her eyes landed on them.

Among the tree line at the back of his yard. An entire chicken coop framed in.

A toolbelt slouched around his hips below his buckle. His old boots were scuffed and dusty. His bare, tan arms in that old tank he’d worn earlier, his work shirt tucked into his back pocket like a rag, his cowboy hat shielding his eyes as shards of light cast rays through the fragrant pine boughs.

And there was Daisy. Happy as could be. Framed within his powerful arms as he hummed soft and low, a palm braced on the plywood desk lying across two sawhorses, while he showed her something with the other.

Chapter Twenty-Three

What were they looking at? Charlie hurried forth, wanting to join the little sunset scene.

T.R. looked up from their makeshift desk, those wire-framed glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose.

He looked downright scholarly, despite the chunky contractor’s pencil between his teeth like a buccaneer’s saber. And then, his dimple popped as his eyes softened, gaze dipping to her banjo case. She’d pleased him.

He returned his attention to Daisy and their task, pointing to a paper.

“Twisht de compassh like … that … prrfect.” He whipped the pencil out of his mouth to mark something as she rotated a compass, and he guided her with a gentle correction. “Look at that perfect ninety-degree arc … keep pressure on the needle—up here.” He tapped her fingers with a reminder, and she tightened her loosening hold. “Hold the knob on the hinge. Nice, girlie…”

Charlie eased up behind them and took in the framed-in coop. Looked down to see drafting paper, a measuring triangle, a protractor, laid out neatly as he helped Daisy pick up the compass and place it down on another penciled dot, rotating it.

She’d never seen Daisy concentrating so hard. And the blueprint?

“Incredible … it’s going to be a chicken mansion,” she breathed, leaning around them to see the detailed drawing.

“Hi, Mommy!” her daughter chirped, glancing up.

Mommy? She hadn’t been mommy in a couple years now.

“T. Rex is showing me how to find the radian of an arc!”

“A what?”

The compass hopped off step in Daisy’s distraction. The pencil line went askew and skid across T.R.’s precise design.