Page 49 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“Mr. Foster, you got yourself a ranch hand.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jonah Linton held a pitchfork the way a man held a snake he’d just discovered in his boot.
Both hands clamped around the handle at mid-shaft, elbows locked, the tines angled toward the ground like he planned to stab the earth rather than move hay with it. Logan watched from the stable gate, worked his jaw, and decided, for the third time that morning, that patience counted as a virtue and he could stand to practice more of it.
“Lower on the handle.” Logan stepped forward and adjusted Jonah’s grip. “Left hand at the base, right hand about halfway up. You ain’t fencin’ with it, you’re scoopin’.”
Beside him, Grace leaned against the corral fence with both arms hooked over the top rail, watching her brother wrestle with hay as if it owed him money. She’d left Miriam with Pa on the porch, and the old man had taken to the job with a smile hiding beneath that mustache of his.
“Here.” Mason jogged over and grabbed a second pitchfork. “Watch me. You drive it in at an angle, like this, then scoop up and toss. Smooth. One motion.”
The hay arced through the air and landed in the trough in a clean pile. Textbook. Even Logan had to admit the kid threw a decent forkful when he bothered to do it right.
Jonah tried it.
Drove the tines in crooked, yanked up too fast, and sent hay spraying in every direction, including his own face. He sputtered and spat out a piece of timothy grass.
“That’ll happen.” Thomas drifted over from the water pump, drying his hands on his trousers because the man had never used a towel in his life. “Took Mason about a week before he stopped feedin’ the hay to himself instead of the horses.”
“It didnottake a week.”
“It took eight days. I counted.”
Grace pushed off the fence. “Let me try.”
Logan pinched the bridge of his nose.
He appreciated the enthusiasm. He did. Really. But the next twenty minutes played out like a demonstration of everything that could go wrong between a city-raised woman and a working ranch.
She tried the pitchfork. Same result as Jonah, except she also managed to step on the tines and catch the handle across the bridge of her nose when it swung up. Then she moved on to filling the water trough, which involved pumping the wellhandle, which she did too hard on the upstroke and popped the lever clean out of its housing.
Mason fixed it in five minutes while Grace apologized four times.
After that, Thomas handed her a brush and pointed her to one of the geldings in the near stall, because grooming a horse ranked about as simple as ranch work got. Except the gelding, a wall-eyed gray named Captain, who spooked at everything, including his own shadow, took one look at Grace approaching with the brush and sidestepped into the water bucket, which flipped and soaked her boots and the bottom six inches of her skirt.
“He don’t like new people,” Thomas shrugged. “Give him a minute.”
“Aminute? He just drenched me.”
“That’s his way of sayin’ howdy.”
Meanwhile, Jonah had graduated from pitchfork disaster to attempting the grain buckets, and, credit where it landed, the man poured straighter than he forked. Mason walked him through the feed schedule, which bin held which grain, how much each horse got based on size and workload, and Jonah nodded along with the focus of someone who genuinely intended to remember all of it.
Good. Fine. Logan could work with that.
Grace, though. Grace squared up to Captain again with the brush raised like a weapon, and Captain rolled his eyes and pressed himself against the far wall of the stall.
“Easy, bud.” She inched forward. “I’m just gonna brush you. Just a nice, gentle...”
Captain sneezed on her.
Full blast. Right in the face. The kind of sneeze that came with a spray of horse snot and bits of grain, and Grace froze with her eyes shut and her mouth clamped into a line so tight it nearly disappeared.
Mason doubled over laughing. Thomas covered his face with both hands. Even Jonah, who’d given up on the pitchfork and sat on a hay bale eating an apple, shook his head and grinned.
Logan handed her his handkerchief.
