Page 27 of Eighteen Bowties and Counting

As if Preacher didn’t love the drama and gossip as much as everyone else. Beau chuckled and shook his head as he joined everyone at the dining room table. “It so happens that she’s my new Stable Manager.” He pulled out a chair beside Ace and sat down. “And she, uh, we didn’t have anywhere for her to stay, so she’s living with me.”

Beau picked up his napkin and snapped it open, aware of the complete silence around him. No one even moved, and only Ace had sat down. He laid his napkin in his lap and looked up to find Holly Ann frozen only a couple of feet from the table, a large bowl of salad in her hands.

Charlie had been buckling Hank into his booster seat, and Preacher had his hand on the back of his chair, as if he’d pull it out at any moment. But none of them moved. Or spoke.

Betty, the five-year-old, didn’t get the memo, and she loudly scraped her chair over the tile as she pulled it out and started to climb up to the table.

Beau chuckled, glad he’d caused such a reaction. “What are y’all most surprised about? That I met someone new? That I got a great Stable Manager? Or that we’re sharing a cabin?”

Only a beat of time passed before Preacher said, “I’m only surprised about the cabin thing.”

“Three bedrooms, two baths,” he said. “It’s not scandalous or anything.” Words he’d said to his mother too. She’d had a lot more questions for Beau, and to be fair, he hadn’t told her he had sparking feelings for Charlotte. He wasn’t going to use those words tonight either, and thankfully, Holly Ann put the salad on the table.

“I think it’s great you met someone,” she said as she took her seat on the other side of Ace. “Now, tonight, Ace said he needed brain food to get through the inner sanctum, so I’ve made a kale, apple, and cranberry salad as a starter.”

Preacher and Charlie sat down too, both of them looking at him. “I’ll say grace,” Preach said.

“And we won’t ask any more questions,” Charlie promised.

“Tonight,” Preacher said. He cocked one eyebrow at Beau, who only grinned back at him. Then he bowed his head for grace, the start of a hopefully great evening of food, friends, and games ahead of him.

As the night unfolded into exactly that, Beau found that he couldn’t wait to get back to the cabin and tell Charlotte about his friends. As he made the turn after the ninety-minute drive back to the ranch, he wondered, “Maybe she could come with me next time.”

He didn’t go to Shiloh Ridge often, because it was a long drive, and he was a busy man. They played online, which he could do from the comfort of his own cabin, any time of day or night.

But maybe next time, when he did go to Preacher’s or Ace’s for dinner and gaming, Charlotte could come with him.

“You better tell her about your live-streaming and your gaming then,” he told himself. He’d lost girlfriends over his video games in the past, so it could be an issue for her. Of course, he hadn’t asked her out yet either. They simply spent time together in the place where they both lived, and he’d been getting to know her.

Perhaps it was time for things to change, and Beau searched for his next move to get the future he wanted.

Chapter Ten

Charlotte woke early in the morning, the way she always did. No matter how early she got up, Beau’s bedroom door stood open. This morning was no exception, and she glanced across the hall and then went into the bathroom.

She didn’t know where he went in the morning, but she’d never found him in the kitchen. His dogs were never there either, and she hadn’t found a spare moment to ask him. She’d been at Three Rivers now for two weeks, and there always seemed to be fifteen hundred things happening on this ranch.

When she’d asked Beau about that, he’d chuckled and said, “Yeah, about.” They weren’t the biggest ranch in the Panhandle, but coming in second meant they were quite huge indeed. Charlotte had over forty horses to care for, and she’d gone through the notebooks and files for each of them, then started adding to them.

She felt it important to build a rapport with each and every equine, and that took copious amounts of time. She had to learn their personalities; they had to learn hers. They had to learn to trust her; she had to learn to trust them.

With so many horses, she couldn’t spend significant time with each of them every day, so she’d put them on a schedule where she got at least a half-hour with every horse every third day. Some of them obeyed instantly, but some had a stubborn streak that would take a bit more time for her to overcome.

They were working horses for sure, and that meant any cowboy or cowgirl should be able to swing into the saddle and get the job done.

Charlotte finished brushing her teeth, and she returned to her room to get dressed. Sure enough, the kitchen held a half-pot of coffee, and she poured herself a cup and added cream and sugar as she looked out the window above the sink. Movement caught her attention in the pre-dawn light, and she thought it was Ruby’s bushy collie tail.

It could also be a fox or a coyote, but they didn’t usually venture so close to humans—and out of cover, where they could hide. Feeling adventurous—and she’d get to see the sunrise this morning—Charlotte left the cabin through the back door.

Looking left, she found Ruby trotting along behind cabin row. Alone. “Odd,” she said to herself. Ruby never went anywhere without Pepper, and both of them stuck to Beau like glue.

The dog went around the corner of a cabin, and Charlotte went down the steps, her curiosity off the charts. Then Pepper came tearing out of the gap, a ball flying ahead of him and bouncing in the field, where he dashed to retrieve it.

Ruby didn’t reappear, and once Pepper had returned the ball, he didn’t get to chase it again.

Charlotte went past cabin after cabin, realizing that Beau and his dogs had to be on the lawn of the homestead. When she finally made it past the last cabin, she found him sitting in a lawn chair at a firepit, both dogs lying beside him.

And he had a tripod set up with his phone on it, all four of them facing the rising sun. No one else seemed to be anywhere in the vicinity, and Beau lifted the lid of his thermos to his lips and took a sip.

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