She looked around the bedroom to be sure she didn’t need to do anything else and sighed. She was excited to get back to her own house, but she’d made friends here—no, she’d been part of a family. That was even better than making friends, and she would miss it.
Cody knocked on the frame of the open door and leaned on the jamb. “I thought we would grab some breakfast at the diner. We could call it our first date.”
“Or we could just call it breakfast,” she said.
“If I pay for it, and if I walk you to the door when we get to your house, then it’s a date,” he argued.
Date.
That was a word Stevie never expected to hear from Cody Ryan. She was happy that he asked her out, so why was she arguing with him?
Because I love the banter and the vibes it creates, she thought.
“You win,” she said, “it’s a date.”
He picked up her coat and held it for her. She couldn’t remember the last time she had a date. It had to have been at least a year before she came home to Texas. That would have been when she and Trenton, her second serious relationship, had broken up. He had been in advertising, was good-looking, and made a lot of money, but he was looking for a wife. When Stevie turned down the ring and the proposal, it was all over, and he had since married another woman only a few months later.
Wow! Can it really have been that long? she wondered as she picked up her go bag. She took one last look around the bunkhouse and made a mental picture of the whole place. She would miss being here with Cody and miss all the suppers and good times she had had with the whole Ryan family. She and Cody would date—that was a given—but things would never be quite like the time they had spent in the tack room and the bunkhouse.
“Ready?” he asked. “Need to get anything from the van or tell Dixie goodbye?”
“I’ll drive back out here later this evening or tomorrow morning and get what I need,” Stevie said around the lump in her throat. “I hate goodbyes, and I already kissed Dixie on the nose and told her to mind her mama.”
With his hand on her lower back, Cody ushered her out to his work truck, and opened the passenger door for her. “I made sure Tex went with Mia and Jesse this morning, or else he would have pouted when he couldn’t go with us.”
“I wondered where he was.” Stevie would even miss the dog lying on the sofa between her and Cody. “Are you and Jesse going after your truck today?”
“Soon as I get back,” Cody said and nodded. “I’m sure the insurance adjustor will tell me that it’s totaled. When they’ve made their decision, I’ll go shopping for another one. If you want to go along, that could be our third date.”
“What makes you think there’ll be a third date?” Stevie asked.
“Because the third one is the charm,” he answered as he drove around the side of the ranch house and down the lane to the road. “It’s like this. You’ve been in two serious relationships, so this will be the third one. And now you don’t have to measure me by me, because you know that I’m not perfect.”
“Aha.” She finally smiled. “A cowboy who admits he’s less than perfect is rare.”
“Then I’m a rare breed,” he said with a grin. “But I do have faults. I don’t do well if I have a nightmare. I like to argue and flirt, and…”
“You love your family,” she finished for him.
“That’s a pro, not a con,” he told her.
“Not necessarily. What if after the third date, your family doesn’t like me, or doesn’t think I’m good enough for you? What if you had to choose between them and a woman that you really like?” she asked.
“I’m not crossing that bridge until I come to it.” He made a left-hand turn. “Look at all the trees that have been pushed to the side. This area will take years to recover from this storm.”
Stevie just nodded, but she was thinking of all the years it had taken her to get from the crush she had had on Cody when she was a teenager to the way she was feeling that morning. Even though they had just left the ranch behind, she already missed it and the folks living there. In a little while Cody would walk her to the door of her house, and then he’d go on about his business, and she already missed him—even more than the ranch.
Going home to her own things and her own bed would be wonderful. But she began to mentally list all the reasons why she wished she could stay at the ranch a few more days.
The parking lot at the local diner was full, but then this was the time of day when the old ranchers gathered for coffee every morning. Stevie’s father had had a standing date for breakfast on Saturday mornings with some of his friends when he was alive. Cody made a couple of laps around the parking lot before he found an empty space. During that brief time, Stevie remembered being up early on a Saturday morning and asking her father if she could go with him when she was about six years old.
“No, you would be bored, sweetheart,” he had said. “We talk about politics and taxes and those kinds of things.”
“What’s taxes?” she had asked.
Her father had patted her on the head, and said, “You’ll find out when you are older. Now run along. Your mama has made pancakes for you.”
“You’re awfully quiet.” Cody turned off the engine and turned to face her. “You having second thoughts about this date?”
“Nope, just thinking about my father. When he was alive, he used to have breakfast on Saturday mornings with his buddies at this place,” she said.
“Dad used to come here a couple of mornings a week when he was able,” Cody said. “I often wonder if he misses the times that he spent with the guys his age. He never complains, but I can see how much it peps him up when some of those older men come to visit him at the ranch.”
“Ever think about driving him into town once a week so he could catch up with the whole bunch of them?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Cody answered as he slid out of the truck. “I even offered, but he told me he didn’t want to spend time away from Mama.”
He jogged around the front of the vehicle and opened the door for Stevie. “He said she was the most important person in his life, and he didn’t want to waste a single minute away from her side.”
“That is so sweet.” Stevie wanted that kind of lifetime commitment.
“Yep, it is.” Cody slung an arm around her shoulders. “It’s nice to walk beside a tall woman who can keep in step with me.”
“Well, thank you, Dr. Cowboy, for that compliment,” she said.
“Just stating the facts, darlin’,” he said with a broad smile as he opened the door into the diner.
The buzz of several conversations ended the moment they walked inside the warm diner and found a booth. Old men and a few ladies over at a side table stared at them for a minute, then the whispers began, and the telephones came out. Stevie swore that she could feel the breeze off their arthritic thumbs as they sent texts to folks in Honey Grove. She would have loved to be a fly that could flit from one phone to the other, read the texts, and then make another round to check out the replies.
The waitress came right over to the table. “Good morning. Want to start off with…oh, I just now realized that you are Cody Ryan. Mia Ryan’s uncle, right? I’m her friend Justine. I’ve missed getting to see her since the blizzard hit us.”