Page 66 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“She found it. It’s hers.” He looked at his brothers. Then at Jonah. Then back at Grace. “Finders keepers. Whatever she wants to do with it, that’s her call.”
Mason opened his mouth.
“Hercall, Mason.”
Mason closed his mouth.
Grace looked down at the silver in her hand.
Two dollars. Three, maybe. Back in New York, three dollars covered a month of candles and soap. Two weeks of bread. The difference between eating on Saturday and going hungry until Monday. She and Jonah had fought over pennies, literal pennies, counting them out on the kitchen table every Sunday night to figure out which bills got paid and which ones got an apology and a promise.
Yet the money shouldn’t matter anymore. The ranch provided.Loganprovided. She ate three meals a day and slept in a bed with clean sheets.
But twelve years of counting pennies didn’t juststopbecause the counting stopped.
Three dollars. Saved. Set aside. Tucked away for the day when everything fell apart because everythingalwaysfell apart. That was the one lesson poverty taught better than any other. Good times ended, and the only question that mattered concerned what you’d stored up before they did.
Rainy day money.
Her mother’s phrase. Whispered over the kitchen table in the hut, pressing coins into a tin box hidden under a loose floorboard.Always keep something back, Gracie. For the rain.
It had rained a lot after Ma died. Poured, actually. And the tin box had gone empty inside of two months.
“I wanna save it.” She closed her fingers around the nugget. The metal dug cool into her palm. “Put it away somewhere safe. For... you know. Just in case.”
Logan knelt beside the rock where she sat. Eye level now. Close enough that she caught the cedar smell of the soap he used.
“When we get back, I’ll put it in the strongbox in the study. Same place I keep the deed and the cash reserves.” He held her gaze. “It’ll be there whenever you want it.”
“You sure? In with your important things?”
“Grace.” He smiled. “Itisan important thing.”
She slipped the nugget into her apron pocket. Right next to the folded harvest-fair flyer and the handkerchief that still smelled faint of brandy from the day Rafe had taught her about teething.
Three keepsakes now. All earned. All hers.
“Alright.” Logan stood up and offered her his hand. “Let’s check that north fence before we lose the light.”
She took his hand. He pulled her up. She didn’t let go right away, and he didn’t pull back right away, and the second stretched the way seconds kept stretching between them. Then Mason cleared his throat, Jonah coughed, and Thomas muttered something about poetry and walked away.
Chapter Nineteen
The crib had taken him nineteen days to make, which, for context, ranked as roughly seventeen days longer than any reasonable crib should take a man who’d built fence rails and feed troughs. A crib had four sides, a bottom, and some slats. Basic joinery. Straight cuts. Logan could’ve knocked it out in an afternoon if he’d approached it the way he approached every other piece of woodwork on this ranch.
But he hadn’t. He’d done it the way a man did things that mattered more than he could explain to himself. Not without his brain scrambling anyway. So, he’d had to start over. Three times.
The first attempt had gone crooked at the headboard because the grain ran wrong.
The second had come out structurally perfect, but the wood had a knot near the top rail that looked like a face. As ridiculous as it sounded, once he’d seen it, he couldn’tunseeit, and Miriam didn’t need to spend her nights staring at a knot that bore an unsettling resemblance to Mr. Henley from the general store.
The third try, he’d sanded until the oak had smoothed out under his fingers like glass. Rounded every edge so nothing could catch or scratch. Carved a row of small flowers along the headboard. Nothing fancy, just a repeating pattern of five-petal blooms that he’d copied from the roses growing along the porch.
He’d oiled the whole thing twice. Let it cure in the barn under a canvas tarp for three days while the finish hardened. Then spent an entire Saturday afternoon building the frame for the nursery itself, which he was going to put in Ma’s old sewing room. Shelves along the back wall, pegs for hanging clothes, a small window seat under the east-facing window where a person could sit and rock a baby in the morning light.
Nineteen days.
Now, he stood outside the nursery door at eight-thirty in the evening with his palms sweating like a sixteen-year-old at a barn dance.
