Page 62 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
He glanced at Grace.
Grace—who stood four feet away with dirt on her face and a rake in her hand—opened her mouth. Logan’s brain froze for about three full seconds as he prepared for shock or offense or that tight-lipped silence his mother used to get when Pa said something coarse at the table.
Instead, Grace squeezed her eyes shut and erupted with laughter straight from her chest that hit the clearing like a cannon shot. The chickens scattered, and Miriam startled on Pa’s knee. Thetill forkvibrated where it stood in the ground.
She bent at the waist. Grabbed her knees. The laugh kept rolling, and her face went all red as if she couldn’t breathe.
“Ten—” She gasped. “Ten a—”
Another wave hit her. She sat down in the dirt. Just dropped, right into the garden bed they’d spent two hours preparing, and laughed until tears cut tracks through the dust on her cheeks.
Up on the porch, Pa shook his head and looked at Logan with both eyebrows raised high enough to wrinkle his whole forehead.
Logan…
Logan just stood there.
Because she was laughing. At his dirty joke. In their half-tilled garden patch, with the dirt under his nails, the smell of fresh-turned earth, and the baby squawking on the porch. Everything,everythingabout this moment was so far from the simple, boring, predictable life he’d planned that...
He looked down and burst out laughing.
Grace wiped her eyes with both hands. “Logan Foster, you areterrible.”
“I—look, I forgot you—I mean, that joke ain’t—it’s aranchjoke, you tell it ‘round the hands after supper, I didn’t mean to—”
“Oh, stop.” She waved him off. “I grew up in the slums of New York Harbor. You think that’s the worst thing I ever heard?”
She pushed herself up from the dirt and brushed off her skirt, still grinning wide enough that the freckles on her nose crinkled together.
“My brother’s friends used to tell jokes that’d make a sailor turn red. That one’s practically a church hymn by comparison.”
“But—”
“Butnothin’. Tell me another one.”
“I ain’t tellin’ you another dirty joke.”
“Why not? I liked that one.”
“Because it ain’t—I mean—there are—” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It ain’t proper.”
“Logan.”
She stepped closer. Close enough that he could count those freckles if he had the nerve to stare, which he did not, becausestaring led to other things his brain kept circling like a horse on a lunge line.
“You tell me another dirty joke right now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Chapter Eighteen
Grace balanced the tray on one hip and shoved the barn door open with her shoulder. She’d loaded it heavily. Biscuits, eggs scrambled with wild onion she’d pulled from the edge of the creek bed, a jar of blackberry preserves, bacon, and coffee so strong a spoon could’ve stood upright in the pot without leaning.
“—I’mtellin’you, a bowline’s stronger than a clove hitch for a gate tie.”
“AndI’mtellin’ you, a clove hitch releases cleaner. You ever try untyin’ a bowline after a steer’s pulled on it all day?”
“No, but—”
