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“Nothing.”
“It’s something,” Spencer said, frowning. When she still wouldn’t say, he added, “Ginger.”
“Fine, I was thinking it would be nice to take them some cookies.”
“Yeah, so you can talk him out of hiring me.”
“No,” she said, but her voice sounded so false. “No one talks Wayne Cooper out of anything.”
Spencer said nothing, but he thought about Clarissa saying she was going to talk to her daddy about the job. He didn’t think she’d get her way, even if she was the youngest and a woman. Daddy’s little girl and all that.
“I don’t want you to go makin’ trouble for him,” Spencer said. “It’s me who’s made this decision.”
Ginger met his eyes, and Spencer pleaded with her silently. “Fine,” she said. “But you could take them some cookies from us and just say hello. Maybe they’d like to swap cowboys.”
“Cowboy swap,” Spencer said with a smile. “I doubt it, Ginger, but I will take them some cookies.”
* * *
So it wasthat Spencer carried a paper plate full of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies up to the front door of the farmhouse at the Cooper’s farm the very next morning. Honestly, they were lucky they’d gotten any at all, because Connor had done an amazing job, and Spencer had eaten exclusively cookies for the past two meals.
He knocked on the door, bypassing the doorbell in case Chrissy Cooper was asleep again. He didn’t hear anyone coming to get the door, though someone should be expecting him. “Not here,” he muttered to himself. He didn’t want to carry cookies around the farm like Betty Crocker, so he set them on the porch and went back down the steps.
His truck trundled down the dirt road and to the right side of the farm. Wayne had shown him a ranch office off the milkshed, and he parked beside a red truck, which sat beside a white one.
“Hello?” he called, his paperwork clutched in his hand.
A man stuck his head out of a doorway only a few feet inside the building, and a smile popped onto Lee Cooper’s face. “Spencer Rust.” He stepped out into the hall and shook Spencer’s hand. “This your paperwork?”
“Yes, sir,” Spencer said, though Lee was only a few years older than him. Maybe five or six. He glanced down as a boy came into the hall too. “This your son?”
“Yep, this is Ford.” Lee looked at the child with reddish-blond hair. All the Cooper’s had some shade of red hair, with Lee’s being some of the darkest. Clarissa’s was more a strawberry-blonde, and Ford’s barely had any red at all.
“Say hello to the man,” Lee instructed. “Shake his hand, son.”
“Good to meet you,” Spencer said, smiling at him as they shook hands. “How old are you now?”
“Eight, sir,” Ford said, glancing at his daddy.
“One of my very best friends has an eight-year-old,” Spencer said. “Connor Mulbury? Maybe you guys are in the same class?”
“He’s in second grade,” Ford said. “But not my class. He has Mrs. Bear.”
Spencer nodded, but he didn’t know one teacher from the next.
“I’ll take your papers,” Lee said, and he did, looking at them. “Daddy said you have a start date of June twentieth?”
“Yeah,” Spencer said. “I have to finish out at Hope Eternal first. Is he around? He said he’d show me the house where I’ll be staying, and then I can order things I might need before I move over here.”
“Sure, he’s right in here.” Lee indicated the office, and the three of them went into the office. Sure enough, Wayne sat on a small loveseat under the single window in the office, a bag of shelled pistachios in his hand.
“Spencer,” he said, leaning forward to shake Spencer’s hand without getting off the couch.
“Sir.” Spencer didn’t want to sit. He had work to do, and he’d only come by for a quick minute to drop off the paperwork and see the house. But Lee sat behind the desk, and Wayne certainly wasn’t going anywhere in the near future.
“Daddy.”
Spencer turned toward the man and recognized the second Cooper son—Will.
