“Is he coming today?” Emma ran to the front door for the fourth time in the past ten minutes, her blond ponytail flying. “With his horse? The one that’s blonde like me? Maybe it could stay overnight, or even live with us!”
Darcy had left the vet clinic when it closed at noon, picked up Emma at the sitter and had been trying to settle the little girl down for lunch, to no avail. “No horses, not in town. Not even briefly, because horses need a very good fence, and ours needs lots of work. That’s why Dr. Maxwell is coming.”
Emma’s face fell. “Could we go see it, then? And ride it?”
“Um...maybe someday. Two more bites of your sandwich. Then we’ll go outside and get things ready for him. All right?”
Emma dutifully clambered up onto her chair and took two miniscule bites, then raced for the back door. “Then can we get a puppy? You promised, after Elsie died.”
Keeping up with Emma sometimes made Darcy’s head spin. “Yes, I did. But not until our fence is completely done. We always had to take Elsie for walks, but a nice safe yard would be much better than taking those walks after dark.”
“Can you ask Hannah? She has lots and lots of puppies. Cats, too. And a pony.” Emma’s face brightened with excitement. “A pony could stay in our yard!”
Emma asked about horses and ponies every day, from morning ’til night. “When you turn five, we’ll look for a pony and a place to keep it. Right now, let’s think about a puppy. One thing at a time.”
She grabbed a hammer from the utility closet by the back door and followed the little girl out into the yard. She breathed in deeply, savoring the scents of the neighbor’s fresh-cut grass and the spring perennials Aunt Tina had planted along the borders of the yard years ago.
Yellow crocuses, grape hyacinths and daffodils nodded cheerfully in the light breeze. Soon the sweet scent of lilacs—her favorite—would fill the air, followed later by the heady scents of the heirloom roses planted on three sides of the tiny brick gardening shed.
All of them brought back bittersweet memories of her aunt and those carefree days of childhood when everything seemed possible and nothing bad had ever happened. Yet.
“Can I help you, Mommy?”
“Why don’t you play on your swing set for a while? I’m going to start taking down the broken pickets, and nails are very sharp.”
She’d just pried off the first splintered picket when Emma shrieked. “He came—he really came!”
Her heart in her throat, Darcy spun around...and saw Logan saunter through the backyard gate with a stack of boards in his arms and his tool belt slung around his hips once again.
Every time she saw him, she felt a little frisson of awareness, and her traitorous heart seemed to skip a beat. It had to be the jeans and cowboy boots, and that casual cowboy grace suggesting he could drawl yes, ma’am and then vanquish her foes with no effort at all.
If only he’d met her late husband, Dean, she would have loved to see him try.
Emma raced to the gate. “Are you a real cowboy?” she asked, looking up at him with adoration she rarely showed to anyone except Darcy anymore. “Did you bring your horse? Mommy says no, but maybe you did anyway.”
He chuckled and grinned down at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling and that dimple deepening in his cheek. “Your mom is right, but someday you can come out to my place and we’ll see about letting you ride. Would that be okay?”
Darcy strolled over. If only the man knew what he had just started with that little offer.
“Thanks for coming,” she called out. “I’m sure you had other ways you wanted to spend your Saturday afternoon.”
“No problem.” He stacked the pickets on the wrought iron table under a shady oak. “I have more in my truck, but what do you think so far?”
She ran her hand over the smooth, one-by-four pressure-treated slats that the lumberyard guy had promised would hold up for years. Each swoop and curlicue along the edges was exactly right; the little heart cut-outs near the top of each pointed tip were a perfect match to the originals.
“They’re beautiful,” she said with awe. “How in the world did you do them so fast?”
He shrugged. “Having the right equipment helped.”
Emma looked up at him, her eyes hopeful. “Could you make a playhouse, like Sienna has?” she breathed. “Her daddy made it. It’s pink and white and has a purple roof. But I don’t got a daddy.”
“Dr. Maxwell only has enough time to help with the fencing and fix some things in the house, Emma. We need the fence before we can think about your puppy. Remember?”
“But—”
“Let’s help him fetch the rest of his things. He and I need to get to work. Okay?”
Emma dutifully followed them out to the black pickup parked in front of the garage, where Logan gave her a single picket to carry. Then Darcy and Logan took the remaining pickets and his tools to the backyard.
Emma watched for a while, then wandered back to her outdoor slide and swing set and played on the upper deck with her dolls.
With Darcy removing damaged pickets and Logan using an electric drill to set the new ones, they were finished with the front yard and backyard a couple of hours later.
“I could’ve painted them before bringing them over,” he said, stepping back to assess the overall job. “But I figured it would be better to do the entire fence all at once, after the peeling paint is scraped. Do you want me to do that or start something else?”
“This is just beautiful,” she said fervently. She bit her lower lip, thinking about all of the work he’d done back at his shop. “I can do the painting later on. I’m not even sure how much of your time I have left, though, given what you’ve done already.”
“Eighteen hours would be fair enough.” He shrugged. “Does that work for you?”
“But you spent more than two hours just putting it up today. And what about all of the time you spent making the pickets? That isn’t fair to you.”
“It was simple, and I like woodworking. It was a nice break from working on the barn at home and the one at the clinic. Gave me an excuse to avoid unpacking boxes in the house, too,” he added with a grin. “Just forget about it.”
He’d been gruff and cold when he’d arrived two weeks ago. She’d been prepared to dislike him completely after that first awkward encounter. But she’d started to see a different side of him now, and it was getting harder to keep up her defenses. Especially when he was so sweet to Emma and being such a good sport about this whole arrangement.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “This means a lot to me.”
He glanced at his watch. “Let’s go inside and figure out the next project before I head back home.”
He and Emma followed her into the kitchen, where he leaned a hip against the counter and surveyed the room. “Not sure how far you want to go with this. The material costs will add up. Do you have a budget in mind?”
“Not really. I can’t afford a lot right now, though.”
“Are you planning to take out any walls?”
“No. I want a separation between the living room and kitchen. And the layout is fine.”
“Do you want to replace the cabinets?”
She laughed at that. “I’ve spent a lot of time pricing cabinets. No way.”
“You could just install updated cabinet fronts at a fraction of the cost.” He ran a hand over a cabinet door and opened several of them. “You could add new veneer over the exposed sides and then add new doors. Or you paint or stain the ones you have. These are outdated, but they’re well made. You could add nicer hardware, too. Once you decide that, you could consider new countertops.”
“They definitely need updating. These are nicked and faded—and that big burn mark by the stove drives me crazy.”
“Granite would be nice.”
“In my dreams,” she said ruefully.
“Sometimes you can find nice pieces of granite that were ordered for a larger kitchen and didn’t work out but would fit in a small space, and that could save you a lot of money. You could call some suppliers to see if there’s anything you like. Then we’d measure carefully, and it would be cut and delivered. I could install a new sink and faucet.”
Excitement over the possibilities started bubbling up in her chest. “Or should I do the lighting instead?
He studied the ceiling. “You have an attic up there, so there should be good access into the ceiling for can lighting. If this were my place, I’d go ahead and do it myself, but I’m not a licensed electrician. That’s who you need to call. A wild guess is that it would cost between five hundred and a thousand, depending on how many lights you want and where you buy them. Then again, I have no idea what the going rates are around here.”
“What about the floor?” she asked.
“Are you sure there’s hardwood underneath the vinyl?”
“I’ve pulled up some corners of the carpeting in all of the other rooms and also pried up a corner of the vinyl,” she said. “It’s all narrow-plank oak.”
“It wouldn’t be hard to rip out the carpet and vinyl and refinish the floors. That needs to be a priority, given Emma’s asthma. But if you help, we could get that done and maybe do the counters and sink, as well.”
Incredulous, she looked up at him. “Really? Wow. So many options.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, envisioning what these changes would mean. How pretty the cottage could become, inside and out. She took another look around, and the possibilities nearly took her breath away.
A smile twitched at his lips as he watched her consider. “No rush if you want to think it over. But if you can decide fairly soon, we can tackle the work before I start getting busy with clients.”
“Okay—the floor. Definitely the floor.” She grinned up at him. “I think you’ve just made me the happiest woman in Aspen Creek, bar none. When do you want to start?”
“Tomorrow is okay, or some night after work.”
“We have church, and Sunday school for Emma tomorrow morning.” She gave him a tentative smile. “Aspen Creek Community Church, if you’re interested. The service is at nine.”
“No.” He drew back a little. “Maybe another time.”
“Of course,” she murmured. “We’ll be home all afternoon and evening if you want to stop by. Lunch is around noon if you want to join us.”
* * *
Logan spent Sunday morning finishing up his work on the small horse barn behind the vet clinic and regretting his surly response to Darcy’s invitation.
He’d been raised in the church. His parents had made sure of that.
And he was a believer, even if he and God had gone through a major falling-out a few years back when Dad passed away from a heart attack and Mom died shortly after. Two of the best people he’d ever known, gone in the blink of an eye. Logan had prayed night and day that they might survive, but God hadn’t seen fit to answer those prayers.
Where was the justice in that, when truly evil people could spend their entire lives loose in society?
His prayers sure hadn’t helped with the situation in Montana, either. Since God didn’t seem to find his prayers worth answering, Logan had simply...stopped praying.
He stepped back and studied his handiwork. The barn had originally been divided into four fourteen-by-fourteen box stalls, with an exam area with stocks to restrain horses during certain procedures, and a space for hay, bedding and feed storage. He’d repaired and replaced boards, painted the interior white, and installed long banks of fluorescent lights over the stalls and exam area. In time he would add a surgical room with a hydraulic table and more stalls, but this would be a good start.
He glanced at his watch. Grabbed his truck keys and headed out the door. His work commitment at Darcy’s place was just that—a business agreement and nothing more. Once he finished those eighteen hours, he would be back to concentrating on his career and the work he was doing on his place in the country. Back to enjoying his life alone.
So why did he find himself whistling as he drove off toward Cranberry Lane? Or fidgeting with his keys like some nervous teenage boy after he knocked on her door?
It made absolutely no sense at all.