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Walter chuckled. “Boy, I feel that deeply in my soul.” They all laughed as the two cowboys came up the steps, where Beth met them.
“Go on, now,” she said, realizing how very much she sounded like Trey when she tacked that “now” on the end of her sentence. “I heard you talking. Something not simple going wrong?” She looked between the two of them.
Marc cleared his throat, exchanged a glance with Walter, and said, “You’ve got a pipe leaking somewhere. There’s a sheet of ice just past the chicken coop for the third morning in the row.”
“That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not,” Marc said. “Because we don’t know where it’s coming from. Could be a sprinkler pipe going out to your units. Could be something in the coop—that would be the best option. Could be coming from the barn on the other side of the pasture, or the pump that feeds the pasture, or—”
“The stable,” she and Marc said together. “I get it.” She pulled in a breath and ran her hand through her hair. She needed to shower and get dressed. Pull her hair up and get to work. “I’ll call Jake.” She smiled at Marc and Walter. “Thanks, guys. For everything.”
They nodded, and Beth turned to go into the house. She showered quickly, dressed in her usual ranch clothes—jeans, undershirt, sweater, thick socks—and dried her hair partially before pulling it into its customary ponytail. She’d probably still regret only drying her hair halfway, as the temperature wasn’t supposed to get above forty today.
She’d cover her head with one of the beanies Kait had given her for Christmas, and she hurried down the hall to the kitchen. She knew better than to go out on the ranch and work without eating, so she grabbed a breakfast bar from the cupboard, pulled on her steel-toed boots, and shrugged into her jacket.
Outside, she dialed Jake Harguss, the best plumber in Dreamsville.
“Beth Dixon,” he said with a smile in his voice.
She couldn’t help smiling too. “You always sound so happy to hear from me,” she said. “Because you know I’m going to pay your mortgage for the next six months with my plumbing problem.”
He belted out a laugh, and Beth joined in with him. In the past, she’d be on the verge of tears with a plumbing problem, and while she felt slightly sick, it was nothing like the tension and terror she’d experienced in the past.
The last time she’d called Jake, it had cost her thousands of dollars to fix the problem, and she quieted as a bit of trepidation filled her.
“What’s the problem?” Jake asked.
“I’ve got an ice skating rink behind my chicken coop,” she said.
He exhaled, and Beth didn’t like the sound of that. “I can come this afternoon and bring the cameras.”
“Really?” Beth had expected him to say he was booked for the next two weeks. Jake was always busy, because he was fair and extremely good at his job.
“Yeah, I just had Penelope Sykes call and say her husband fixed their issue, and she was on my schedule for this afternoon. Let’s see…”
Beth waited while he tapped and muttered, said something to his secretary, and then said, “How about one-thirty or so?”
“That would be great,” Beth said.
“The sun’s supposed to be out today,” he said. “Take some pictures so I can see what I’m dealing with on the largest scale possible.”
“Okay,” Beth said, heading down the steps to the back sidewalk. “I’ll go do that now. My cowboys told me of the problem. I haven’t actually seen it yet.”
“Text me,” Jake said, and the call ended.
With a mission now, Beth kept her strides long and quick, arriving at the chicken coop only a few minutes later. Around the back, she found the ice skating rink she’d spoken of, and it was bigger than she’d like.
She tipped her head back and looked up into the bright blue sky. “Really?” There were only a couple more weeks until the Sweetheart Classic, and she already had enough problems. “Don’t I have enough to deal with?”
She did, but that didn’t matter. Life threw curveballs whether she was ready to receive them or not. She pulled out her phone and got snapping the pictures Jake wanted, then she got on the four-wheeler and made the rounds through the fields, taking notes on what she’d planted last year.
Then, right on the seat of the quad, underneath the winter sun, she made notes of what she’d plant in each field in another month or two, and which fields she’d leave for a year or two to rest and rejuvenate.
She still had sixteen cows that needed to have their babies, and with her notes taken, she buzzed over to the field closer to the house where they were. They were all standing, munching happily on the grass they could get to through the snow. Tad had fed them already this morning, and as Beth’s stomach growled, she remembered the breakfast bar in her pocket.
She took it out and unwrapped it, finishing it as she returned to the shed and put the four-wheeler back in its place. She was on chicken duty, and that meant her birds hadn’t been fed yet, nor had their eggs been collected.
Completing jobs she’d done hundreds of times in the past didn’t take a lot of brain power, and Beth once again found herself thinking of Trey. She hadn’t called him or texted him yet, and she got her phone out to do that.
