Dammit.
Pretty sure that was coy.
No worries, though. This man is completely immune to whatever it is I can’t seem to stop myself from doing, if his flat stare and stubborn jaw set are any indication.
“Flint Jackson,” he says.
I make a noise that probably resembles something a dying cow would say.
This?
This is Flint Jackson? The man who rents the gatehouse and who’s been managing the ranch since my uncle died? The man who’s sent regular updates for the past few months about what’s broken, what’s been fixed, and what I owe him for his services?
The man whose emails suggest that he has the personality of a brick wall and likes to complain that those whippersnappers need to get off my lawn?
He doesn’t say anything else.
“Seriously, Mom?” Junie mutters as she slides off my back.
“Mr. Jackson.” I’m stuttering. On top of working as a handywoman since I was a teenager, always surrounded by men from all walks of life, I spent the past six years filming a television show and delivering lines and improvising as the comic relief under nearly every circumstance you can encounter when filming a home-repair show—except finding a bear eating a dead cow on set, that’s definitely new—and I have never stuttered the way I’m stuttering now. “I thought you were much older.”
I thought you were much older?
Someone please take my mouth away from me before it says something else stupid.
“He looks plenty old to me,” Junie says. She tilts her head, reaches into the window jamb, and pulls out an eighteen-inch-long one-by-two that’s propping the window up.
The pane slides shut on its own, landing with a thud hard enough to rattle the glass.
“Oh,” I say softly.
“Yeah.” The scorn in Junie’s voice says it all.
That’s the first thing I should’ve checked when the window wouldn’t move.
I knew to check that.
And Flint Jackson is standing on the other side of the window that might or might not have protected us from the bear, staring in at us like we won’t last four days here.
I pry the window back open, which takes more effort than it should, considering how easily it fell. There’s some baggage to unpack in this window.
Or possibly I’m sabotaging my own window-opening skills because I’m so mortified by all this.
“Sorry,” I say to Flint on a grunt as I hold the window open. “We’re still learning our way around, but don’t worry. Next time, we’ll be more prepared for the bear. We’ve been studying how to live out here. Intellectual knowledge and practical knowledge are two different skill sets. We’ll get there.”
“I’m moving in with Grandma,” Junie mutters.
“You can’t move in with Grandma, and you know it,” I mutter back.
“You know this isn’t the main house?” he says.
“Oh, yes. We know. We’re looking around. Seeing what needs to be taken out, what can be upgraded. Taking stock. As you do.”
His cheek twitches. “Taken out and upgraded,” he repeats flatly.
His doubt that I can handle this should alleviate this unwelcome attraction to his testosterone.
It does not.
Doesn’t matter, I remind myself. You are in control of your hormones, not the other way around.
I think.
I hope.
I smile at Flint again, and this time, I’m fairly certain my smile is pure friendly-neighbor smile. “Would you like to come in? Or join us at the main house for coffee and pastries? We can go over the accounts for the ranch, and you can fill me in on anything new since your last email. I hope you don’t mind if I ask a few questions. But just a few. Overall, Junie and I are ready to manage this little ranch on our own now that we’re here.”
“June,” my daughter says. “You can call me June.”
His gaze flicks to her once again. “High school?”
She rolls her eyes.
His lips twitch.
The man’s lips twitch at my daughter’s eye roll.
What does that mean? What does that even mean?
“I get to start junior year at a new school with total strangers,” she says. “Isn’t that awesome?”
“About as awesome as getting thrown off a horse that’s scared by a nonexistent mountain lion,” he agrees.
Junie snorts.
She snorts.
Flint looks back at me. “Gonna have to take a rain check.” He delivers it drier than the desert, which makes Junie snort again. “Got a horse to track down.”
He tips his baseball cap to us, turns, and strides away, and I’m too stunned by his abruptness, his crankiness with me, and his completely opposite good humor with Junie to do anything but—
“Don’t you dare stare at his butt,” Junie mutters to me.
Yeah.
Anything but stare at his butt.
And I wish I wasn’t staring. I truly do. But I can’t help myself, nor can I stop it now.
Flint Jackson, who I thought was at least sixty-five years old and computer illiterate, based on his emails, who probably knew my uncle Tony better than I did, at least in recent years, who just saved my daughter and me from a cow-eating bear, and who clearly thinks I’m nothing but a nuisance, hands down has one of the best butts I have ever seen in person.
Junie makes another disgusted noise.
It takes everything I have to ignore it. “Great job finding why the window was stuck. Want to head out to the barn with me and see if we can find a shovel? Pretty sure there’s not a dead-cow pickup service out here, so we’re gonna have to bury it. Oh! I wonder if Uncle Tony still has his tractor. You can practice driving until we get your permit switched over to Wyoming. Doesn’t that sound great?”
The brown eyes she got from her father look me up and down, then up and down again, and I’m pretty sure it’s not that she’s adamantly opposed to ever driving in her life after that little fender bender she had with a tractor during the single driving lesson Dean tried to give her on a backcountry highway before she was old enough to apply for her permit two years ago. “You chose this life, Mother. I didn’t. Good luck. Don’t get eaten by a bear.”
I beam at her. She doesn’t want me to get eaten by a bear. This feels like progress after the silent treatment I’ve gotten for most of the past two weeks since I told her we were moving to Wyoming.
She knows all of why we had to move. I know she does.
And I know she’s probably glad in a lot of ways to be here, too, even if it hurts that none of this is her fault.
None of it.
But she gets the consequences anyway.
Lost friends. Getting cut from the soccer team back in Iowa. Side-eyes anywhere we went in town.
I’ll do my damned best to make this a good new home for us, but we’re here out of desperation more than anything.
We couldn’t stay in Cedar Rapids.
Not after all the scandals.
And honestly?
Uncle Tony’s old hobby ranch wasn’t tempting merely because it’s away. It was everything I needed in the event that I have to homeschool Junie while we grow our own food and I work on changing her legal name so no one will ever know who she’s related to, so she can at least start college on a positive note.
This ranch holds so many happy memories for me. I loved visiting when I was a kid.