Page 17 of Worth the Trouble

Jason: Hey beautiful.

She stared at the message. So simple, yet she couldn’t stop scrutinizing it. In an attempt to keep herself from overthinking things, she responded as casually as she could.

Cecelia: I was thinking you could take me to see some of your favorite places.

The text bubbles popped up then disappeared. She waited for long moments and nearly sent him another message before he responded, but thankfully the bubbles appeared again. She held her breath as she waited for his message to come through.

Jason: It’s a date.

She could have screamed. Perhaps on the inside, she did. She didn’t have much time for dating back home so she didn’t exactly have a lot of experience when it came to spending time with men. At this point, she could only assume that she was willing to take a risk because there wasn’t much of one. If things didn’t work out, she’d be leaving soon anyway.

But what if something did work out?

What then?

She wasn’t ready to delve too deep into what she wanted to do at that point. For now, she was content just with having fun. And if that meant she could have fun with a handsome cowboy, then so be it. She’d take full advantage of the opportunity.

Cecelia: Name a time and place, and I’ll be there.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jason ran the lesson schedule through his head while he mucked out Sage’s stall, and the math came out the same as it had every day lately. Too many clients, not enough hands.

Tate and Rylee were back from the honeymoon, tanned and useless.

That wasn’t fair. Rylee wasn’t useless. She’d sent over a casserole and taken the one-eyed rooster back off his chore list. But Tate had been hauling boxes into the farmhouse next door and standing in the doorway of his new life grinning as if he’d won a prize, and every day he said the same thing on his way past the barn.

“I’ll be back in the swing of it tomorrow.”

Tomorrow kept moving.

Jason didn’t begrudge his brother the happiness. He’d stood beside him at the altar and meant every word of the toast, all nine of them. What he minded was quieter than that. Nobody had asked. The lessons, the feed orders, Brent’s overtime, the client in Billings who wanted a call back. It had all just slid onto Jason’s side of the ledger, the way things always slid, because Jason would catch them.

He always caught them.

A truck rolled up the drive while he was topping off water buckets. Rylee’s. She climbed down with two pizza boxes balanced on one arm and lifted the other hand in a wave.

“Please tell me you haven’t eaten,” she called.

“I haven’t eaten.”

“Good. Because I owe you about forty dinners and I’m starting today.” She set the boxes on the workbench by the tack room and looked around the barn she was checking it for damage. “Tate says you’ve got everything under control.”

“Tate would know. He drives past it twice a day.”

Rylee winced. “That bad?”

“It’s fine.”

“Jason.”

He set down the bucket. His sister-in-law had a way of saying his name that his actual sisters could take lessons from. “It’s two men’s work and one man doing it,” he said. “I’m not complaining. I’m telling you what it is.”

“That sounds like complaining. You’ve earned it. Complain away.”

“I just did. That was it.”

She laughed, and he eased a little. They ate standing up, as barn meals went, and she told him about the pig Tate had brought home from auction, who had opinions about the goats, and about the boxes still stacked in her hallway with no plan behind them.