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“Yes,” Gina said. “I hope long past the wedding.”
“Really?” Becks asked, glancing behind her. Gina twisted to look too, expecting to see Blake loitering there. No one stood in the doorway, and she twisted back to Becks. “How long?”
“Did someone ask you to ask me this?” she asked.
“He just wants to know if you’ll be here for a month or a year,” Luke said.
“No,” Becks practically yelled over him. She gave him a dirty look and added, “You’re ruining it.”
Gina looked back and forth between them. “You can report back to your master that I’m planning to stay.” She closed the folder and tucked it under her arm. “I’ll take this with me and study it after I eat and am tucked in bed.”
“It’s three-thirty,” Becks said as Gina stepped through the doorway.
She knew what time it was. Every inch of her body knew. She glanced further down the hall, catching sight of Blake’s open door. He was probably in there, maybe hovering just out of sight as he eavesdropped on the conversation.
No, Gina decided as Becks and Luke started to bicker behind her. Blake was a lot of things, but an eavesdropper wasn’t one of them. She did wish he’d just asked her himself if she was planning to stay at the lodge and Chestnut Springs.
With the fresh image of Luke and Becks in her mind, all Gina could think about on the way back to her parents’ house was that maybe she and Blake could have their second chance turn into happily-ever-after too. Blake had even said he wanted her to be happy at the lodge.
It wasn’t until the full twenty minutes had passed that she realized her face hurt from all the smiling she’d been doing.
CHAPTEREIGHT
“So this is where I live,” Blake said as his cabin came into view. The Stewart family had a private lane with their own cabins, away from the guest cabins, and away from the other cowboys who got housing as part of their wage.
His stomach lurched, mostly from hunger, but also because today was the seventh day in a row that he and Gina had met for lunch. They’d walked down the road once, talking and eating until her timer went off. They’d sat on the picnic table. He’d taken her over to Becks’s cabin, and they’d eaten with Luke and Becks.
Today, he’d brought her to his personal space. The one refuge he had from everyone and everything else. If things weren’t going well on the ranch or in the lodge, Blake could always come home. Todd was his very best friend and his closest brother in age, and Todd would always come over after a long, terrible day.
They’d sip coffee and eat frozen pizza instead of dining at the lodge. All staff and family members could eat breakfast and lunch in the dining hall at the lodge, but they were on their own for lunch. Sometimes Blake got a grab-and-go lunch, and Gina had paid for the monthly plan.
Rather, Blake had paid for Gina’s lunches for a month, a fact she hadn’t discovered yet. She’d never been terribly great at math and budgets, though she could measure things and do complicated fractions in her head. She said it didn’t make sense, and it sure didn’t to Blake.
“I’ll make coffee,” he said, letting her pass in front of him to enter the cabin first.
“Can I have tea?” Gina glanced at him, her smile reaching all the way up into her eyes.
“Don’t reckon I have tea,” he said, frowning.
“That shocks me,” she said, clearly teasing him.
“Why would I have tea?”
“For the women you bring home,” she said.
Blake’s face heated as he went inside and closed the door behind him. “Haven’t brought anyone here in a while,” he said. “Heck, I can’t even remember the last time I went to town.”
“You don’t buy your own groceries?”
“No,” he said. “Todd goes to town and gets what I need.”
“Ah, yes, I did run into Todd in the grocery store parking lot.” She walked all the way to the back of the house, where the kitchen and dining room took up the space. She looked out the window in the back door and then faced him. “It’s nice, Blake.”
“It does the job,” he said. “When it’s cold outside, it’s warm in here. When it’s hot outside, it’s cool in here.” He smiled at her and started making coffee. “I really don’t have tea.”
“All right,” she said, taking a seat at the bar. “What are you going to make me for lunch? We left our grab-and-go’s at the lodge.”
“Grilled cheese sandwiches?” he offered, his pulse rattling against his ribs. He could admit he had feelings for Gina, at least late at night when he woke up in midnight darkness. He hadn’t asked her out, and they hadn’t gone hiking. They ate lunch together, because they worked in the same building.
