Page 32 of A Cowboy's Convenient Marriage

“I sure have. Over the last ten years, I’ve probably spent more time in the house than I have outside with the animals, but as a teenager growing up, I loved working outside. I still do.”

He could tell. She just seemed to glow. It was obvious she was happy.

“You strike me as the kind of person who is happy wherever you are.”

“I try to be.” She paused for a moment as they headed toward a building that he assumed was the shed she talked about, where they kept the shots and medicine. “But I realized last night as I was thinking about how I should answer you, that maybe I was happy because my life was good. You know? It seems like when trials come along, they can really get us down, and it’s not as easy to be.”

“Marrying me would be a trial?” He didn’t like the sound of that. As much as he was hoping that she would say yes, and they would get the billion dollars, and as much as he was hoping that she would start to like him as much as he was starting to like her, he didn’t like the idea that she considered him a trial.

“No. Leaving my family would be a trial. Leaving the farm, the ranch, everything that I love. I’m so happy here.”

She looked down at her feet, and then she looked over at him, her arms swinging at her sides, the sun shining down, and a soft breeze lifting her ponytail off her back and blowing a few strands of loose hair around her face. She looked much younger than he knew her to be.

“I couldn’t imagine anyone not being happy here. It’s a great place.”

She paused, almost as though she wanted to say something about that, but if she did, she didn’t allow herself to do so. “But if we end up going somewhere else, somewhere even far away, like being missionaries to Africa or to a cannibalistic tribe in Brazil, would I be just as happy?”

“I think you would be. I think you know that your joy comes from the Lord, not your circumstances.” He hadn’t done a very good job of that though. When his circumstances had come crashing down around him, had he continued to be happy? Or had he questioned God, wanting to know why God would treat him so terribly, as though that was some terrible thing and he was someone special that shouldn’t have to deal with any hardship. Who was he to think that God shouldn’t allow him to go through trials just like everyone else did?

“Head knowledge, but sometimes not practical knowledge. At least not at first. So it’s kind of shocking when something terrible happens, isn’t it?”

He nodded. Then, he followed her as she opened the door and walked in, the suddenness of the sun disappearing causing him to pause until his eyes adjusted to the dim interior.

“We have a little refrigerator over here, where we keep some of the medication. The B vitamins don’t need to be refrigerated.” She spoke as she worked, getting a syringe and sticking it into a bottle which she turned upside down, pulling the stopper out and filling it up to a certain amount.

She must have already known the dosages. Which made sense, if she did this a good bit.

“It seems like you guys are all prepared.”

“We need to be. Calves get sick and die really fast, and you can’t always wait around for medicine to arrive or even for a vet to get there. And without taking expensive tests, the vet can’t really tell you what’s wrong anyway a lot of times. So, we do the best we can with what we’ve got, to save as much as we can.”

This was a world of difference from what he knew. And Ada was so much different than Abby, his ex. She was practical, cheerful, and down-to-earth. Whereas Abby was very spiritual, according to everyone who knew her, but she was far more concerned about looks and appearances than about practical matters. She couldn’t have been more different than Ada, although they were similar in a lot of ways as well. Ada seemed like a very spiritual person, although she didn’t have the air of superiority about her that Abby had, now that he thought about her in hindsight. It was the reason she couldn’t be with him when there was any hint of scandal attached to him. The way people looked at her was too important for her.

“All right. I’ve got them both. Are you sure you want to be the chaser?” she asked, grinning at him as she led him back out of the shed.

She waved and talked to a couple of people who passed by them, and everyone called him by name. Word must have gone around that he was here to see Ada. Maybe the idea of their marriage had even got around. Speaking of, Ada still hadn’t given him an answer. Maybe when they were done giving this calf his shots, if they survived, he would ask her.

“You’re going to need this,” Ada said as she grabbed a long narrow pole-type thing from the side of the shed where it leaned.

“What’s that?” he asked; it looked like some kind of prod.

“It’s a cattle prod. It’ll work for you to keep the mama cow away. It’ll make you look bigger.”

“This little thing will make me look bigger?”

“It gives your arm a bigger reach. You put it in one hand like this,” she said, “and that looks like part of your hand to the cow. This cow isn’t going to be too bad, and it should work just fine with her. Some cows don’t let a little thing like a person with a cattle prod stop them from getting to their calf or stop them from killing whatever is between them and their calf.”

She grinned and said it so cheerfully that he blinked.

“Kill?” he asked, wondering if maybe he wasn’t getting in a little bit over his head.

“You know. It’s the mama’s job to defend her baby. And if we’re trying to do something to her baby that she doesn’t think we should be doing, she’s going to try to get rid of us. I suppose she’s not really thinking to herself, ‘I’m going to kill them,’ because I wouldn’t want to assign that much intelligence to a cow. As much as I love them, they’re just not smart.”

She was still being so cheerful that he found himself chuckling with her, although the idea of dying wasn’t something that he really thought was funny.

But she didn’t seem too concerned about it, so maybe she was just...exaggerating. Although Ada didn’t seem like the kind of person who exaggerated on a regular basis.

“I’m feeling a little uncertain about this whole trusting me thing.”

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