Page 33 of Swift and Saddled

Before I had time to revel in that, I caught a glimpse of Wes coming through the front door, leaving my favorite ball of white fluff outside.

“No dogs inside the active construction site” was a necessary rule, but every time I saw Waylon’s pouty eyes, I wanted to break it.

I knew Wes hadn’t been planning on coming by until the end of the day, so I wondered why he was here. He had his own uniform when he came to the job site, but today, since he wasn’t coming to work, he was still in full cowboy mode, wearing a large work coat and leather chaps.

Damn.

I looked down at my watch. It was already half past four. How the hell did that happen? I needed to look at my notes.There were things that had needed to get done today that hadn’t, and that was going to put us behind.

“Hey, Evan,” Wes said as he made his way toward us. “Ada.” It was annoying how much I liked the sound of my name when it fell from his lips. It always sounded…reverent somehow.

“Hey,” Evan and I said at the same time.

“How was today? Everything go smoothly?” Wes asked. He was looking at me.

“Good,” I responded. “I actually have some questions for you.” I looked back at Evan. “Tell the crew they can head home, but that we need them here at seven instead of eight tomorrow.” Evan nodded. He knew we needed to tear out the ceiling the next day. “Follow me,” I said to Wes, leading him toward the powder room.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. Damn him and his stupid cowboy charm. Since when did the word “ma’am” make my cheeks heat? Nothing made my cheeks heat. I wasn’t a blusher.

We walked, and he was a little too close to me, and I reveled in it.

After the whole shower incident and after he agreed to teach me to drive a stick shift, I figured I could stand to be marginally nicer to him. Which had nothing to do with the fact that I thought about him all the time, the fact that he was the best-looking man I’d ever laid eyes on, or the fact that he seemed to be a genuinely good person.

Obviously, it had nothing to do with any of that.

“So,” I started, “I wanted to talk to you about a few of thebathrooms.” We were outside the powder room now. Its door had been removed, so we could see inside. “What would you think about keeping the tile?” I asked. “We would obviously replace the toilet and the sink, and update the paint, but it’s rare to see this type of tile work in such good shape, and I think the more elements we can preserve, the more cohesive our final product is going to be.”

I was nervous while I waited for his answer. I didn’t know why.

“I love it,” he said after a few beats.

“Really?” I asked, kind of shocked. It was usually a fight for me to get someone to agree to keep something that felt dated. Everyone wanted all new, all sleek, all modern, all the time.

“Yeah. I love this tile, and the blue tile in the other bathroom too,” he said, smiling. “As long as the appliances and pipes can be upgraded to handle the demands of guests, I’m all for it.”

“Okay, excellent,” I said. “That was easy.”

“Were you expecting it to be hard?” A million inappropriate jokes came to my mind, but I pushed them down. This was myboss.

“Sometimes it can be,” I said. “Most people prefer shiny new things.”

“Not me,” Weston said. “This place has history. I don’t want it to feel like everyplace else.” I knew that—it was one of the first things he’d said in his initial email to me—but now that I was here at Rebel Blue, and now that I knew the man behind the emails, I understood more deeply what he was looking for.

“While we’re on that subject, I was thinking aboutfurniture. We have enough old doors to make a few bookshelves, and there’s probably a lot of salvageable wood here that we could repurpose. Is there a carpenter in Meadowlark?”

Weston’s eyes were bright. He liked that idea too. “Several,” he responded. “But I think you’ll like Aggie.”

“Can you reach out to her? Or do you want me to?”

“I’ll do it,” Wes said. “Aggie is an old family friend.” Of course she was. “And Gus just convinced her son to come back to Meadowlark, so I don’t think she’ll tell us no.”

“People leave Meadowlark?” I said jokingly, but immediately regretted it. I didn’t want it to come off snobby, but Wes just smiled again.

“Dusty did,” he said. “He’s been a cowboy all around the world.”

“That’s a thing?” I asked. All of this was new to me.

“It’s a thing,” he said. “If anyone but Gus had asked him to come back, I don’t think he would’ve.”

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