Page 85 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“She’s three months old.” Logan pressed his lips together. “She don’t need no new faces.”
“She needs stimulation.”
“She’s got stimulation. Mason makes faces at her every mornin’ that’d stimulate a corpse.”
“Thank you…?” Mason squinted. “I think?”
Grace turned to Logan. Full turn. Hip cocked, one hand still holding Miriam steady, the other planted on the table edge. Those honey-brown eyes locked onto his.
“Logan. One evenin’. Three hours. We eat supper someplace I don’t have to cook it, we walk around, we come home. That’s it.”
“Grace—”
“When’s the last time you did somethin’ just for the sake of doin’ it?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried to think of a single occasion in the past two years that qualified as recreation and came up blank, unless you counted the time he’d re-organized the tool shed by function and then by size, which he’d found enormously satisfying but which Mason had called “the saddest Saturday in the history of Colorado.”
“See?” Grace tilted her head. “You can’t even remember.”
“I remember plenty.”
“Name one.”
“I took you to the pond.”
“That’s the only one, and it happened last week.”
“We carved the garden—”
“That’s work, Logan. That’s you doin’ work in a slightly different location.”
Mason snorted into his stew.
“Fine.” Logan exhaled through his nose. “Fine. Three hours. We eat, we walk, we come back.”
“And a drink at Hannigan’s,” Thomas said.
“One drink.”
“Two.”
“Thomas.”
“One and a half. I’ll nurse it.”
“You ain’t never nursed a drink in your life.”
“I’m turnin’ over a new leaf.”
Logan looked at Grace. She smiled at him.
“Alright.” Logan exhaled. “Two drinks. But we leave by eight.”
“Nine.”
“Thomas Edwin Foster—”
“Eight-thirty.” Grace smoothed the tablecloth. “We leave at eight-thirty.”
