AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes. Yours. They were the first thing I could slip on to come and rescue my machine before you went and broke the needle—like you almost did last week when the new equipment first started coming in,” I remind him.
He smirks at me. “You’re gonna hold that over my head for a while, huh?” With a light chuckle, he pitches his little labor of love at the stool where it lands in a soft bundle. “I’ll go make us some breakfast before I start my day. You want your usual?”
My voice softens. “Yeah. Usual sounds perfect.”
Off Chad goes with his tight, naked buns and his breathtaking, muscular frame. He leaves the door open behind him. Soon, I hear the clutter of plates and pans and things in the kitchen, and then the whistling of some cute country song as he entertains himself.
I glance at the stool. A pang of emotion rings the bell of my heart as I gaze on the thing he left there. After sucking my lips in, I pick it up off the stool and stretch it out to give it a look.
It’s an old heather gray t-shirt of his. Across the chest in big block letters, he’s sewn the letters “LGD”. There’s a decorative sort of shape that appears to be underlining the three letters, but they are stopped halfway across—likely at the point in which I came in and so rudely interrupted him.
A soft laugh escapes my lips as I stare at the silly shirt. I run my fingers over the threads of those three big letters. They are all out of proportion. They’re askew and misaligned. He changed the thread color between the G and the D for some reason. It is a total mess of a design.
I smile.
And it’s kind of perfectly adorable.
When I leave the studio and head to the kitchen, Chad—now sporting nothing but an apron—looks up from his pan of eggs.
A smile crashes over his face. “So you liked it, then?”
I run a hand down my shirt—the LGD shirt, his little project—and give the ends of it a tug. “It’s kinda stylish. Don’t you think?”
“Uh, yeah, if you mean in that third-grader-art-project kind of way,” Chad decides, snorts, then shakes his head. “You don’t gotta wear it if you don’t want to, Lance. My feelings ain’t hurt.”
“No. I love it.” I sit at the stool across the counter from him and watch him make our breakfast. “It’s charming.”
He smirks. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I mean, we are still trying to design a proper logo, Cassie and her team and I. Eventually, we’ll come to a consensus on how to represent my fashionable countryside brand, but …” I give the silly, mismatched letters another tracing of my fingertips. “I think with a little bit of a touching up, this could inspire a few ideas.”
“Fashionable countryside brand, huh? I like how you say that. I wonder if your old boss, that stuck-up Andrews lady, would feel the same way.”
“Ms. Andrews isn’t stuck-up. She’s just got a very refined taste, and maybe disagreed greatly with my choice of career path, but … I think in the end she respected my decision.” My eyes are pulled to the windows at the sound of the wind picking up, stirring the hanging chimes and pulling whispers from the tall grass. “In fact, I swear I even saw a glint of envy in her eyes. I wonder if she faced a similar decision years ago … and wonders what her life might have been like, had she chosen the other path.”
“Maybe she’d have less of a stick up her butt,” Chad suggests, and the way he says it sounds oddly less rude than the words do.
I chuckle, then look up into Chad’s pretty eyes as he focuses so intently on his cooking, tossing bacon into the pan and letting it sizzle. “Maybe she would,” I agree with a soft smile.
We eat a peaceful breakfast in our little “morning sunshine nook”, we call it, which is a tiny table with two benches squeezed into a bay window of sorts, a lot like a specialty booth at a quaint diner. And every morning around this time, the sun shines in it in such a way that it’s never blinding, never too hot, and always gorgeous to gaze upon while eating my favorite egg and bacon scramble with a side of toasted English muffins.
I maybe shouldn’t have said fuck off with that diet Salvador put us both on. I’ve gained about five pounds since my move back out here to Spruce, but I think with all my running around town, occasionally lending a hand with Chad’s ranch, and hauling work back and forth from the Evans’s estate, I’m very likely to work off the weight.
Chad says it’s muscle weight I’m putting on.
