Emmy and Teddy were sitting on the bed behind me, watching me try on yet another outfit in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door. I’d stopped counting after the tenth. Apparently, Wes had let it slip that we were going out tonight, and apparently, that meant that Emmy and Teddy had to help me get ready. At least, that’s what they told me when they showed up with Diet Cokes and extra outfit choices in hand.
I just went with it—I didn’t know the friendship rules, but I was happy they were here. I missed Cam, though. She and I talked pretty regularly now, and I was starting to feel I could call her my friend.
“I think you should wear the skirt we bought last weekend,” Teddy said. It was a long black suede skirt covered in layers of fringe—very Western, but maybe too on the nose.
“You haven’t tried that on yet, have you?” Emmy asked.
I shook my head. “No, but I don’t know if that’s the vibe for tonight.”
“Fringe is always the vibe,” Teddy said. She stood up and went for the shopping bag on the floor. Even though I wasn’t living out of my suitcase, putting away my purchases with my other clothes made things feel too permanent. I wasn’t quite ready for that.
Teddy pulled out the skirt, and Emmy made an “oooh” noise. “That’s good,” she said. “You have to wear that.”
Teddy thrust the skirt at me. “Go.” She shooed me with her hand. “Just try it on. What have you got to lose?”
“Fine,” I agreed, and went into the bathroom. I slid off the jeans I was wearing and replaced them with the skirt. I didn’t bother to look in the mirror before opening the bathroom door and walking back into the room. Emmy and Teddy paused their conversation, stood up from the bed, and started to hoot and holler. The two of them could get jobs as professional hype women. They felt so genuine.
“Ada, you are hot, hot, hot,” Emmy said. She fanned herself for good measure.
“Never take that skirt off,” Teddy said. “I’m not kidding. It literally looks like it was made for you, and coming from someone who actually makes clothes, that’s saying something.” Teddy turned me to look in the mirror.
It was perfect.
The skirt hugged my wide hips without being too tight. The fringe followed my every movement, even the smallest ones. It was like a slight breeze was blowing on me at all times.
It made me feel confident.
“It looks awesome,” Emmy said with a smile. She was standing behind me, but Teddy had gone back to the bed.
“Now we just need the right top,” she said, sorting through a pile of shirts she’d brought. “If you had to pick your favorite feature from the waist up, what would it be?”
I had to think about that for a second. No one had ever asked me that before, and I’d never thought about it before. “Honestly,” I started, “my boobs.” As far as boobs went, I thought they were nice. “And my tattoos.”
“Excellent choices,” Teddy said. “And you feel most comfortable wearing black?” I nodded, not sure how I felt about her noticing that. Teddy pulled a top out of the pile and tossed it to me. “This one.”
I went back into the bathroom and put it on over the lacy pink bra—bold for me—that I was wearing tonight. With matching panties.
You know, just in case.
This time I looked in the mirror before I went back out to Emmy and Teddy. The shirt Teddy had chosen was a tight black short-sleeved shirt. There was a seam down the middle of the front that cinched the top, making the neckline lower than it looked when it was hanging up. It was simple—the skirt remained the statement piece.
I opened the bathroom door and was met with applause. I couldn’t help but smile. I didn’t know if Emmy and Teddy treated everyone this way, but that didn’t matter, it made me feel special anyway.
“I wore these here, and I’m taking this as a sign,” Emmy said, holding out a pair of black cowboy boots. “Try them on.”
I grabbed a pair of socks from the top drawer of the dresser and slid them on, and the boots right after.
I’d never worn cowboy boots before, not even the ones made for fashion over function like these, but I loved them.
“This is our best work,” Teddy said to Emmy before looking at me. “You look amazing. Seriously, Wes better keep you close tonight because you’re going to attract every cowboy within a thirty-mile radius.”
I took in the entire outfit in the full-length mirror. The last time I’d really looked at myself in a mirror was in that motel on my first full day in Meadowlark. I didn’t look very different than I did then—a few freckles had appeared because I was spending more time in the sun, my bangs had grown out more, my cheeks looked fuller—a sign of life—but I felt like an entirely different woman.
The woman I saw in the mirror was comfortable. She still enjoyed solitude, but she didn’t feel lonely anymore, and for someone who’d felt lonely her entire life, that was worth everything. It wasn’t that I grew up feeling like I didn’t belong, but like I didn’t belong where I was but might belong elsewhere.
Maybe I could belong here.
With Wes.
And Emmy, and Teddy, and Cam. With Amos too.
There was a knock at my door. “Ada,” Wes’s voice filtered through. “Are you almost ready?”
Before I could answer, Teddy and Emmy shouted “Go away!” in unison, which Emmy followed up with “She’ll meet you in the entryway.”
“And she looks fucking hot, so prepare yourself!” Teddy called.
I could hear the smile in Wes’s voice when he said, “Can’t wait.” Then I heard his steps depart from the door.
“Jacket. Bag.” Teddy handed me my worn leather jacket and my purse. I took both. Suddenly I felt nervous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone on an actual date.
“Deep breath,” Emmy said, sensing my nervousness. She made a show of breathing in loudly, and I followed her lead, exhaling at the same time too. “Tonight is going to be great.”
With that, I walked out of the bedroom and down the hall. Wes was waiting for me in the entry. He didn’t hear me approach at first. I saw him run his hands through his hair and adjust the flannel shirt he was wearing over his T-shirt. His jeans looked new, and he was wearing a pair of boots I hadn’t seen before.
Weston Ryder was the most beautiful man I’d ever known—inside and out.
When he saw me, his dimples appeared with a big smile, and he made a show of bringing his fist up to his mouth and biting his index finger, as if looking at me frustrated him—not in a bad way, but in a way that showed me how much he wanted me. “God, you’re pretty,” he said. He leaned in and kissed my neck. “How am I supposed to keep my hands off of you?” he growled, and it sent heat through me.
“Who said you had to keep your hands off me?” I said.
“Good point,” he said with a kiss at my jaw. Then he tilted my chin up and kissed me hard and hot until we heard an “Ahem” from the hallway.
It was Emmy. She was beaming. Teddy gave us a wave and said, “Have fun, kids. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Good thing for Wes and me, that left things pretty open.
“What are we supposed to do with twenty pieces of pie?” I asked as Wes and I walked back to his truck. He was carrying a bag full of to-go boxes that literally had twenty pieces of pie in them. Wes had ordered a slice of all twenty flavors of pie from the Meadowlark Diner.
“Eat them, obviously.”
“That’s a lot of pie, Wes,” I countered.
“I have faith in us,” he said simply. “Are you okay to hold them while I drive? If that coconut cream pie touches the cherry, I can’t lie to you, I might cry.”
“Not a fan of foods touching?” I asked.
“Not a fan of anything ruining the perfect flavor of my coconut cream pie,” he said. Huh, I didn’t have him pegged as a coconut guy. I was going to store that information for later.
“I’ll do my best to keep these boxes stable,” I said, and gave him a mock salute. He opened the truck door for me and I slid in. He put the boxes of pie on my lap and placed a quick kiss on my temple before shutting the door.
“So, where are we headed?”
“You’ll see,” he said with a small smile. “Tell me about the rest of your week.” I assumed he meant tell him about my week since Wednesday, which was the day of the storm and the power outage and the day that we…you know…banged.
We hadn’t seen much of each other, but we’d seen enough of each other for me to know that he was busy on the ranch with the aftermath of the storm, but I didn’t know the specifics.
Honestly, the last few days had been the most eventful of the renovation. Before that, everything had gone mostly smoothly. That meant there was some overdue chaos, and it started after the storm.
“The storm blew off a shit ton of shingles and revealed some damage on the roof that we hadn’t noticed, so a new roof is on the agenda, but luckily the roofers can come next week. The cabinets for the kitchen came, but they’re the wrong color, so that’s also on the docket.” I shook my head. “Oh, and we also ran out of flooring because the measurements were off, and I dropped and broke an entire box of tile.”
After I’d finished giving him the rundown of the week from hell, I wondered if I should’ve downplayed it. For a second, I worried that I was too comfortable with Wes, that I’d crossed the line even more than I had already. I wanted so badly to tell him about my week that I’d forgotten what we were: an employee and her boss.
A new roof—even a partial one—was a big deal. So was openly admitting that a measurement was off. I’d taken care of all of it, of course. I’d expected to replace the roof before I got here, so it was covered by the budget, but I did have to make sure I didn’t put that money anywhere else in the meantime. The additional wood flooring would be there Friday, cabinets were semi-easily painted, and the box of tile was an extra I was taking down to the basement. Plus, I had my two-week buffer, and at this point, I knew I was going to have to use at least some of it—mostly for the cabinet painting.
I held my breath as I waited for Wes to respond.
Wes let out a low whistle. “One of those weeks, huh?” Yeah, definitely one of those weeks. And the weird thing about it was that shit like this only seemed to happen at the site when Wes wasn’t around.
He was a good luck charm.
“Are you worried at all?” I asked, trying to gauge whether or not he was as calm as he seemed.
“Are you?” he responded.
“No, I’m not,” I said, and I meant it. I could do this.
“Okay, then. I trust you to do your job, Ada. If you’re not worried, I’m not worried.” Wes shrugged his shoulders. “And if you were worried, we’d figure it out together. This project is both of ours.”
I let out a small sigh of relief, which he must’ve noticed because he reached his hand across the bench seat to where mine was resting, grabbed it, and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
“Where have you been this week?” I really hadn’t seen him since Thursday morning. After we’d spent the night in his bed, we made breakfast early when the power came back on. Amos came home while we were cooking, and the three of us ate together before both of them left to assess any damage that the storm had done on the ranch. He still came by the site at the end of the day so I could drive his truck back to the Big House, but later than normal, and he left again once we got back to the Big House.
“The storm did a lot of damage,” he said with a sigh. I knew that already. “We already had some weather damage from the winter”—I remembered how he had talked about cabins flooding on my first day, which is why I was staying at the Big House—“and we haven’t gotten around to fixing all of it, so some of it got worse. Plus, storms like that can spook cattle, and they can end up in places they shouldn’t, so we’ve been having to drive a bunch of them back. We have to clear fallen trees and stuff too. There’s always a lot to do after a weather event like that.”
“Is that why Emmy’s and Brooks’s trucks have been at the Big House every morning when I leave for the job site?”
“Yeah. Emmy is still on the ranch at least four days a week because she does horse training in addition to lessons, but both she and Brooks have had to pitch in on other ranch work this week too. Brooks has always been our handyman—he can fix almost anything—but this week he’s had his work cut out for him.”
I thought back to when I first met Emmy—I wondered if he’d fixed her truck up yet. I’d have to ask.
Even though I’d been at Rebel Blue for a few months, I still had no idea what it took to run a ranch day-to-day. One thing was for sure, I was in awe of the Ryders. All four of them were different, but one thing they had in common was that they loved their ranch, and they all worked fucking hard to take care of it and everything that that encompassed—cattle, sheep, horses, stables, ranch hands, everything.
I admired them. I thought it was a special thing to love something that much.
Wes turned onto a winding dirt road that led us up a mountain. It got steep enough that he had to downshift a couple of times. “Seriously, where are you taking me?”
“We’re almost there,” he said, “I promise.” The road was surrounded by dense trees, almost like a tunnel. I’d never seen anything like it before. “In about thirty seconds, we’re going to break out of these trees,” he said. “And you’re going to see the best view that Meadowlark—maybe even all of Wyoming—has to offer.” Wes’s thumbs were tapping on the steering wheel—like he couldn’t contain his excitement—and it honestly looked like he was holding his breath.
Just as he’d said, we soon broke through the trees, and even though we were much closer to the edge of a cliff than I ever wanted to be, he was right. I was utterly wonderstruck by the view. I think my mouth literally dropped open. I didn’t think I’d ever been this high up before. I felt like I could see the whole state of Wyoming laid out before me. The sun was setting, and the sky was painted purple and pink above the tree-covered mountains. I saw a few doll-size houses amid big patches of land and bodies of water. Wildflowers dotted the meadows like paint splatters.
Before I could take it all in, Wes flipped the truck around. He put his arm on the seat behind me, looked over his shoulder, and started backing toward the cliff edge. If I hadn’t been terrified that we were going to drive right off it, I would’ve thought a million inappropriate thoughts about the way he looked backing up the truck so smoothly.
“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded just as the truck came to a stop.
“C’mon,” he said. “I’ll show you.” He took the pie boxes off my lap and got out of the truck, and I had no choice but to follow.
When I got out, I realized the truck wasn’t as close to the edge as I thought, which was a relief, but it was still pretty close. Wes hadn’t outright told me this, but I felt like he had a thing for triggering his own fight-or-flight.
I wasn’t afraid of heights, but I had some sense of self-preservation, so looking over the cliff made my stomach flip a little.
Wes popped the tailgate and set the pie boxes on it. He hopped into the bed effortlessly (I was going to be playing that little jump on a loop in my mind for the foreseeable future), lifted the lid of the silver storage box behind the cab, and started pulling out blankets and pillows and lining the truck bed with them. He’d gotten all of this ready…for me?
I was reeling over that when he offered me his hand. “Use the tire to step up, and I’ve got you the rest of the way,” he said with one of his soft smiles.
At his core, Weston Ryder was gentle, and I thought that was the best thing that a man could be.
I grabbed his hand and stepped up onto the truck tire as gracefully as I could, which wasn’t graceful at all, and then he pulled me the rest of the way up and I was in his arms. We stood together in the truck bed for a minute, and I looked up at this man, this cowboy who had been a stranger to me just months ago.
Now I was wondering if I could ever live a life that he wasn’t a part of.
The thought petrified me, so I pushed it out of my head. I didn’t want to think about that. Not tonight.
We settled onto the blankets, and Wes started popping open pie boxes. There were three of them, eight pieces in two and four in one.
“So,” he said, “you might not know this, but Meadowlark is the pie capital of the western United States.”
“Really?”
“No,” Wes laughed. “But should be.” He handed me a fork and took me through the options. I couldn’t remember them all, but there were, among others, strawberry, blueberry, peach, banana cream, pistachio cream, sweet potato, pumpkin, pecan, key lime, cherry, and Wes’s favorite, coconut cream. “Which one are you going to try first?” His excitement was rubbing off on me. I wouldn’t say I was a fan of pie—I didn’t hate it by any means, but it wasn’t something I ate or thought about eating often—but Wes’s energy for the things he loved was contagious.
So the possibility that I would become a pie enthusiast after tonight was quite high.
I studied the slices for a minute before settling on the key lime. I scooped some up with my fork and slid it in my mouth.
Holy shit. I felt my eyes widen, and Wes beamed at me. “I told you so,” he said.
“That is seriously the best pie I’ve ever had in my life.” And so the pie eating began. Wes even pulled one of his small sketchbooks out of the truck so he could draw up a pie bracket for us.
As he flipped through the pages, I could see some of his drawings. He was good. Really good, actually.
We ate, we laughed, and we talked.
“Do people come up here a lot?” I asked.
“They used to. In high school, this place was known as Makeout Point,” he said with a waggle of his eyebrows and a mischievous grin that made my heart flutter. “But I don’t think it is anymore—or we’d be surrounded by foggy-windowed trucks right now.”
That made me laugh. “Were you a frequent flyer up here?”
Wes shook his head. “Not really, but when I turned sixteen, Gus and I shared a truck for a while. One night, I was lying in the truck bed just outside the Big House, looking at the moon and the stars, when I heard Gus sneak out of the house. I was curious about what he was doing, so I stayed down and quiet. Then he got in the truck and started driving.”
“With you still in the back?” I asked, giggling.
“Yes! And then he stops to pick up this girl—Mandy Miller—and at that point, I’m like shitting myself, but I felt like it was too late to say anything. He drives her up here, and instead of making out inside the truck like a normal person, they get out and pull the tailgate down.”
A laugh bubbled out of me—the kind that comes from your belly—at the image of a teenage Wes ruining his brother’s night because he got stuck in the back of a truck.
“And when Gus sees me, there’s practically smoke coming out of his ears.”
“What did you do?” I asked, still laughing.
“I waved.” Wes shrugged. “What about you?” he asked. “Any embarrassing stories?”
“Plenty, I’m sure,” I said. “But not as good as that.”
Wes reached up and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “Then tell me something else,” he said.
“What do you want to know?”
“You,” he said simply. “Tell me something no one else knows.”
I took a bite of pecan pie and thought about it.
Honestly, I thought there were a lot of things that no one else knew because I didn’t know if anyone actually knew me, or if anyone ever actually wanted to.
And if that was true, I was happy that Wes would be the first.
“When I was little, I wanted to be a Price Is Right model,” I blurted. Of course that’s what I went with. “I loved the idea of getting to drop a Plinko ball, show off a new blender, and drag my fingers across a brand-new Volvo.”
Wes was smiling so wide that his cheeks had to hurt. “Ada Hart,” he said earnestly, “you would’ve made one hell of a Price Is Right model.”
I laughed and shoved his shoulder. “Shut up.”
And that’s how it went for the next couple of hours. We traded stories and anecdotes, and I carefully added new pieces of Wes to my growing collection of things about him that I was holding close to my heart.
