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“The horse thing?” Shaking my head, I start stomping through the ankle-deep grass toward an open area where I can lay down the blanket. She follows, still talking about imaginary dates.

“Yeah. But you’d have to be in all the pictures, obviously, Hot Hunky Horse Guy. You know, clickbait.”

I blow out a breath. “I don’t know what any of that means.” My brain does snag on the nickname, however. I shouldn’t be affected by her compliments, but I can’t help feeling gratified that she seems to find me attractive.

Callie taps her lip, thinking. “Actually, we need to emphasize that angle—city girl meets cowboy, he takes her riding, introduces her to the barn life.”

“The barn life?”

“You know, where the hot cowboy takes the scantily-clad cowgirl up against a hay bale in the barn?”

My throat goes dry, and my voice sounds like sandpaper. “You want to…those aren’t the kind of…I’m not sure…” I struggle so hard to articulate what I think she’s implying that I don’t realize she’s laughing at me.

“Relax, cowboy. I don’t think the courts want to see that. We can spice things up on our own time. No cameras allowed.”

I’m not sure if she’s kidding, and I don’t have time to ask because Callie takes off at a run, her tangle of blond waves like a flag whipping in the wind. Her shirt billows and rides up, revealing a sliver of tanned skin at her waist. Taut muscles in her legs flex as she covers the stretch of grass in under a minute and stops at the water’s edge. She picks up a small stone and skims it across the top of the water, where it hops twice before falling to the depths below.

I put the grocery bag down on the blanket and join her at the water. “You’ve got a good arm,” I say.

“Thanks. I played my share of softball. The underhand pitch is remarkably useful when it comes to rock skipping.”

I pick up a rock and huck it toward the water. It skips three times and disappears. “I did this a lot as a kid,” I explain.

“Oh, is that how it’s gonna be?” she asks. “Someone gets a little competitive when he’s throwing against a girl?”

She picks up another stone and skips it three times. I do the same. Same three skips.

We continue like this, our stones silently skimming across the surface of the lake, neither of us getting more than three hops.

Before I realize she’s doing it, Callie has her phone set up on a tripod, and apparently, it’s filming our continued competition. She holds up a little device. “It’s a remote. I can switch between video and photos.”

She nudges me with her hip after her next toss. I move to position us for a better view of the phone and tug her toward me, planting a kiss on the top of her head. She looks up at me adoringly. The whole time, I hear the click of the remote in her hand, capturing our cute coupledom.

It gets easier once we’ve broken the ice and given in to the charade of being together like this. I let myself pretend we actually are a couple, and it feels more natural to joke around with her. I kick my foot through the water, splash her legs, and then run. She chases me up the grass, and I run a little faster, and then I turn. She crashes into me, hair flying everywhere, her hands flush against my chest. But then she backs away and looks at the phone, which is pointed in the wrong direction from where we are.

“Darn, we didn’t get any of that. Oh, well. Should we switch to Christmas mode?” she asks, all business and focused on the task at hand. Just the way I should be.

She struggles into a hideous Christmas sweater with a menacing snowman on the front and hands me a Santa hat, which I accept with a groan.

“Sure. I’ll get the food out, and you can set up the shot.” When I look over at her, she’s grinning. “What?”

“Look at you, thinking about camera angles.” She puts a hand on her chest and shakes her head like a proud parent. “My baby has left the nest.”

The scowl returns to my face because I feel like she’s making fun of me for not understanding camera angles, which, to be fair, I haven’t thought about once in my life.

Watching her as she goes to retrieve her phone and the collapsible tripod from where it’s anchored near the shore, I try to wrench my focus from her legs and how good they look in those cutoff shorts. With her hair blowing like a wild storm and her cherry-red lips pulling my focus like a damn blooming rose, I’m having trouble remembering that this is all for show.

She’s exactly my type, at least, back when I had a type. Now, it’s too dangerous to let my attention wander anywhere beyond keeping my ranch running and keeping my son happy. That’s the beginning and end of the thought process.

So why do you keep pausing in the middle to think about her?

I’m not forced to answer that question because Callie comes bounding over with the tripod and plunks it down in the grass next to the blanket, where I’ve done exactly nothing to unpack our picnic. She looks down at the empty plaid space and laughs, that same gentle laugh that sounds like wind chimes and gets me every time.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” she remarks.

Ignoring her jab, I start pulling items from the grocery bag as she improvises some photos and snaps them with her little remote.

Standing behind me, she grins over my shoulder. Snap. Pulling a hand-painted valentine heart from her bag and holding it up. Snap.