“Until I buy a place...if that’s okay with you.”
Max nodded and pulled the door open, but Jason had the distinct feeling that the wheels were turning in his head.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING when Jason showed up at the ranch wearing his new boots, with his new gloves stuffed in his back pocket and the tools he’d borrowed from his dad riding in the back of the truck, Allie was sitting on the porch with a mug of coffee cupped in both hands. As he walked up the path, her gaze traveled over his squeaky clean new work clothes, making him glad he’d left his hard hat in the truck. “You look well outfitted,” she commented.
“I’m hoping to be here for more than one day.”
“We’ll see,” she said, picking up a folder of papers sitting beside her. “I just need some signatures.”
Jason signed and then she gestured at the collapsed barn. “Have at it. I’ll be back from work by four. Do you need anything?”
“I don’t think so.”
Allie drove away not long after, leaving Jason to analyze the structure he was about to disassemble. It’d fallen into a heap after the roof had blown off, and the easiest thing to do would be to dismantle the roof, which lay several yards away in a crumpled mound. His dad had offered to send equipment and operators to dispose of the barn in a day or two, but Jason thanked him and said no. The purpose of his temporary job was to have something to do with his hands as he thought. Watching a guy bash the building with a front-end loader wasn’t going to be the same.
Jason went back to the truck, put on the hard hat, grabbed a crowbar and hammer and set off across the field to where the roof had landed. After circling the thing, he chose a place to start prying wood away from wood and began the dismantling process. Within a few hours, his shirt was soaked from the unseasonably hot May weather and he was getting hungry. He had a nice pile of salvageable two-by-fours, a pile of scrap, a bucket full of old nails...and a whole lot of work ahead of him. He ate while sitting on the tailgate of his truck, studying the ranch. All the buildings had been reroofed recently and most of the buildings had been freshly painted, with the exception of the big barn. There was a large building next to the big barn, canvas stretched over ribs, which had been damaged by debris from the building he was working on. Curious about what was inside, he opened the man door on his way back to the demolition site. There was sand inside. A lot of it. And judging from the barrels stowed in one corner and the tack hanging from the wall, the thing was some kind of a horse arena.
Did Allie ride?
He sorted through what he knew about her and came up with very little other than tying for valedictorian and both belonging to chess club. Not that she ever spoke to him there—not even when they played. They’d pretty much coexisted at Eagle Valley High without a lot of interaction. But he’d known who she was. Thought she was attractive in a cool and distant sort of way. She still was attractive, but he saw now that cool and distant hid a rather prickly personality.
What made Allie Brody so prickly?
Did he care to find out?
Better question—did he dare to find out? Allie was kind of scary.
Jason went back to work, putting in his hours without a break until Allie’s little white car turned into the ranch driveway. Then he grabbed the only tools he’d used that day—the crowbar and hammer—and headed back to his truck as Allie got out of the car. She shaded her eyes as he approached, a smile tugging at her lips. An amused smile. And then he realized he was wearing the hard hat.
“Once you get used to wearing a helmet, it’s hard to go without,” he said as he approached.
“I think legally you’re supposed to wear a hard hat.”
“There’s that, too.”
She started walking toward the rubble and he fell into step beside her as she passed the collapsed main building and walked to the roof, where she stopped to silently study his progress.
“This will take a while.” She nudged a truss with the toe of her shoe.
“I can haul in the big equipment. Just say the word.” Inwardly he was fairly certain she wouldn’t say that word. She was doing this to save money.
“No. It looks like you got a good start.” She brushed her hand over her cheek as if to push her hair back from her face, even though there’d been no hair in her face, and tilted her chin up to look him in the eye. “We’ll give it another day.”
He let out a soft snort. “Another day.”
She nodded as if working day-to-day on approval was a normal business practice.
“I assume then that you’ll be paying me daily?”
Her eyebrows lifted as if she hadn’t considered that. “That does make sense,” she said slowly. “Will you take a check?”
He exhaled. “Yes...you can pay me for two days tomorrow. Unless, of course, you wanted to go wild and hire me for an entire week.”
“Do you think it will take that long?”
He was about to explain to her exactly how long he thought it would take when he realized that she was kidding. “Why the day-to-day bit, Allie?”
“So I don’t overspend.”
“You’re just going to shut down demolition when you hit the end of your budget?”
“Something like that. I can’t afford to go into debt. Not when I have student loans.”
“You’re paying for this yourself?”
Her expression started to frost over. He was edging too close to personal. “Never mind. If you want to work day-to-day, fine by me. You can pay me at the end of the time.”
“I made up a time sheet.”
“Of course you did.”
She shot him a look, which he met with an innocent look of his own.
This was kind of fun.
* * *
ALLIE WAITED UNTIL Jason had driven away before checking on her stubborn calfless cows and found to her surprise that calf number one had been born. The adorable little black heifer peeked at Allie from the safe side of her mother, who was placidly grazing near the edge of the herd, so Allie assumed that all was well.
“See that?” she called to the other cows. “That’s what I want to see—healthy calves on the ground when I get home from work.”
Talking to the cows. No sign of insanity there.
Allie grimaced as she headed back to the car to get her purse. After the wild day in the library, staying home and talking to cows didn’t seem like a bad idea.
Be grateful that you have a job.
Allie was grateful, which made it all the more difficult to deal with the growing doubts she had about whether she’d trained for the right career. One week in and, while she enjoyed parts of her temporary job, she was becoming painfully aware of her shortcomings as a future elementary-level teacher. She liked little kids, found them entertaining and charming, but she had no experience managing them and no natural talent in that arena. High school kids...they were different. After completing a double major in elementary education and secondary art, she’d done her practicum teaching in high school, where she’d had no problem with discipline. Smaller children... Dani and Jolie would laugh their asses off if they knew that she was being taken advantage of by six-year-olds. Oh, they’d started off sweet and shy, like new puppies, then, the next thing she knew, they were practically chewing on her shoes.
Allie pulled her purse out of the car and shut the door again. She’d get better at managing the kids as time went on. If her friend Liz could do it, so could she.