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“All right. I’ll probably see you before Saturday, in fact...” He opened his mouth, hardly daring to believe the words were coming out. “I usually take a ride at sunrise along the lake. You want to come with me tomorrow?”
“I’d love to.” She didn’t hesitate.
And then he remembered. Nora was there. He and Nora always took sunrise rides.
“Uh... I forgot. Nora is here. She’ll want to go.”
“All right. Never mind.” She shrugged her shoulders like it didn’t matter. “You come with a daughter too. I just come with double that.”
She understood. He appreciated that he’d messed up and asked her to do something he couldn’t follow through on, and she was totally cool with it.
“How about a sunset ride?” he asked. He was more likely to have his horses rented out at sunset and sunrise, but he had two available tonight. “Tonight?”
“All right. I’m helping your mom, but I’m pretty sure she’s not going to tell me I can’t go for a ride, if we go back down and I work until almost dark.”
“My mom’s not a slave driver. She’ll actually be happy to see me going with someone. And unless I miss my guess, she’ll be thrilled it’s you.”
“If you say so. You should know better than me.” She shrugged her shoulders like she wasn’t sure whether that was actually true or not. Like she couldn’t believe that his mom would actually want him to be with her. He could assure her that that was the case, but he didn’t.
“All right. I’ll be there to pick you up. You don’t need to worry about wearing anything special or...getting dressed up or anything.”
“In other words, I can work until it’s time to go?” she said with a laugh.
He nodded, surprised that she understood what he was trying to say, even though he didn’t say it in such a great way. “Yeah. That.”
They stared at each other for just a bit more before he started to walk away. Smiling. Waving a bit before he turned fully toward the dunes and strode toward his boots and socks.
He just met her yesterday, but he had such a great time when he was around her. He almost felt like he was a teenager, where he wanted to spend every waking second with her. Was that crazy?
Chapter 9
Rodney held himselfvery still and pretended to be asleep.
The scratching on the window had gotten to be very familiar over the last eight weeks. Pretty soon the door slid open, slowly and quietly, and then a soft footstep, another, and the door slid shut.
He smiled to himself. He’d taken to leaving a pillow and a blanket on the comfortable chair that sat in the corner of his room.
