Page 86 of If You Loved Me

Miles watched Callie Rose saunter into the kitchen and take one of the seats at the island. I was inherchildhood home with her brother who I knew she was wildly protective over. There was no telling what she might be thinking of me right now.

“What’re we having?” she asked. My shoulders slumped, releasing the tension. Maybe I’d passed the test and she approved.

“Blueberry muffins and bacon if that’s okay with you.”

Miles clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Alright! That sounds like my kind of breakfast.”

I smiled and noticed that the edges of Callie Rose’s lips tilted upward too. “It’ll be nice to not have to cook for these two buffoons every day. I’m glad to pass that torch over to you, Sarah. When you’re here that is.”

Ranger poured his sister and Miles a cup of coffee, sliding them each across the island counter. “Buffoons is a little harsh, Cal.”

“Yeah,” Miles chimed in. “I like to think of us as charming men. Hard workers. Studly even. You know”—he nudged her with his elbow—“all the wonderful qualities that speak truth to who we really are.”

Callie Rose snorted and rolled her eyes. But that didn’t stop her from leaning towards Miles. It was almost like she couldn’t help that gravity pulled her toward him.Interesting, I thought. Not that I’d touch that with a ten-foot pole, but I wondered if Ranger saw that his little sister had feelings for his best friend. Or maybe he was too oblivious to notice.

She made some retort towards Miles and Ranger while I put the muffin mix into a pan and slid it into the oven before starting on the bacon.

Their banter filled the space for the remainder of breakfast until all the plates were cleaned and placed in the drying rack next to the sink. I loved it. All the noise in the house. The teasing and poking at one another. It felt like how a home should feel, I realized. It was never something my parents, Theo, and I did. Most of the time we hardly talked to one another when I lived in their house. Or when we didspeak, it was usually them telling me I was doing something wrong.

Watching Ranger with his sister and Miles showed me that family was what you put into it. And they certainly had a lot of love to share.

I took the day off and had Stephanie bring in one of her friends to help run the front while she kept the kitchen running. I wasn’t quite ready to risk going in public where my mother might bombard me again. So, I’d made myself a small picnic and packed a blanket to bring with me to watch Ranger and Miles work the cows. They were in the field today. I’d found the perfect spot to watch on top of one of the hills overlooking the valley.

Ranger looked hotter than ever on top of his workhorse, Phillip. His face was mostly hidden from the brim of his cowboy hat, but I loved watching him move in the saddle, his strong arms spilling out of his rolled-up sleeves. How the man still only wore a t-shirt and flannel in this weather was beyond my comprehension, but I didn’t mind it too much it it meant I got to see his muscles more easily.

“Hey,” Callie Rose greeted me, a basket of flowers hanging on her arm. There was an arrangement of violas, dahlias, marigolds and chrysanthemums.

“Hi,” I replied, moving to the left of the blanket so she could sit down.

“They’re working hard today.” She paused, looking out at the field of cows Ranger and Miles were herding.

“Yeah, they are.” Shielding my eyes from the midday sun, I looked up at her as she sat down. “What’re the flowers for?”

She set the basket of flowers in front of us and started laying them out one by one in a row. “When I was little, my mother would gather a basket of flowers at the turning of every season. We’d sit together and make flower crowns. Afterward, we’d dress up really nice, put on our crowns, and dance. I thought it might be nice to bring that tradition back, now that I have another woman in the family to do it with.”

My heart nearly burst when she handed me a dahlia and smiled at me. “I’d be honored to do that with you, Callie Rose.” I didn’t hide the tears that started to well in my eyes. I wondered if she had some idea of what had happened with my parents. If Ranger had made a comment to her. But I also knew that pain recognized pain. She’d lost both her parents too and even though our experiences were different, we’d both experienced the sorrow of losing them.

She showed me how to thread the long stems of the flowers together and before long I had the beginning workings of a flower crown.

Callie Rose was working a flower through the stem crown as she said, “I wasn’t too sure about you at first. I thought you might be just like most of the other blue bloodsin this town. Elitist. Snobby. Mean. But you brought my brother back to me, Sarah.” She looked me in the eyes. “That’s a debt I’ll never be able to repay.”

I placed my hand on her knee. “I wouldn’t want you to. Loving your brother has been the most incredible thing to ever happen to me. He’s shown me that there is so much more to life than I ever thought possible. He’s shown me that I can be loved even when I don’t think I deserve it.”

Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I’m so happy we have you in our family now.” Her lips quivered with each word.

I hugged her tight. She was stiff in my arms for only a moment before I felt her shoulders sag and her body loosen. Then her arms came to wrap around me. “Me too,” I whispered, rubbing her back up and down.

When we pulled apart, she wiped the tears from her face and said, “They’ll never let us live it down if they catch us crying together.”

I laughed. “Oh, I know. They’d make fun of us for years.”

She reached for my flower crown. Holding it close to her face, she looked around the edges of my handiwork. “This isn’t half bad for your first time.”

When she handed it back to me, I took it and started threading more flowers through. “Thank you.”

When we finished the crowns and the boys wrapped up their work for the day, Callie Rose let me borrow one of her dresses. With our hair and makeup done up, we paraded around the house, cooking dinner side-by-side until duskturned into night and Ranger brought out his guitar. This time he played a happy melody—one filled with joy and mirth while Callie Rose and I danced. I laughed until my belly hurt and my heart was near bursting.

Chapter 37

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