Page 17 of The Rancher's Heart

Only Jonas, or maybe Nathan, would come up with such a... laughable excuse. “Smart aleck,” she labeled him succinctly.

The oven buzzer went off. Sloane followed Jonas into the kitchen, searching for a good comeback. Didn’t happen.

After slipping on oven mitts, he pulled the dish out of the oven and placed it on the hotplate. He grinned at her. Sloane shook her head and gave up. He’d been getting his way from the time he’d first stepped in to protect her from boys who were bigger and very intimidated by her grades. She wasn’t going to change him now.

His nacho stack was delicious. Of course. She spent the whole meal letting the tension in her shoulders go while he told stories of clients, each one funnier than the one before. She told him about some of the cars folks brought in for her to fix and her idea of offering her part-timer, Dean Quillan, more hours to take care of things like oil changes and the like while she focused on restoring classic cars, which she loved.

One point in Jonas’s favor—he certainly made eating at home fun. If he asked her out on a real date, would she go? It would definitely be interesting, but it wouldn’t keep her teetering heart safe.

By the time they’d cleaned up the kitchen and she was heading back to town, Jonas watching her leave from the porch, she’d forgotten all about calling Ken. She’d have to call him in the morning.

That was the problem. How, or maybe the better word waswhen, was she ever going to find a guy she could talk to like she could with Jonas, and who made her heart sing with the profound feeling that she’d found someone who made her heart feel like she’d finally come home?

Chapter Five

Smart aleck.Thatwas why Jonas counted Sloane as his BFF. She would give him that knowing look and thenbam!knock him over with the truth. She always gave it to him straight. He could only say that was one of the things he loved about his best friend.

Suddenly, his enjoyment of spending an amazing evening with Sloane faded away. She was the best mechanic in town—in the whole state, probably—and she led with her heart until she sympathized with Julieann. Lucky for him, even if she didn’t know why sometimes, she gave him more grace than he deserved most of the time.

Remembering the one celebratory kiss they’d shared when they graduated from college, a small part of Jonas wondered why he hadn’t tried that again. That kiss had been such a surprise, along with the Fourth of July sparkle in Sloane’s brown eyes when they drew apart.

He’d been so stunned that he’d put the skids on fast. He’d already accepted a job at a prestigious law firm, and she was headed back to Strawberry Ridge to work at the garage with her dad. She would never have been happy staying with him in Denver.

Having recently lost his mom and then kicking Blake off the ranch, Jonas had been empty, with nothing left to give Sloane or any other woman, for that matter. So, he’d let her go home, and he bought a condo in Denver.

If Sloane wanted to use a dating app, he needed to leave her be. It was more troublesome that Julieann had followed him to Strawberry Ridge.

Frowning, he pushed his keyboard away. Best friends didn’t often get the chance to rise to the top of a girl’s most eligible bachelor list, did they? He shouldn’t even think about it. He still didn’t have time to start a romantic relationship with Sloane. He also didn’t want to make the mistake of interfering with her plans to find a guy who could fit into her life much better than he ever could.

Coward.Nathan’s voice echoed in Jonas’s mind. He wasn’t a coward, just cautious.

Sloane might know him better than any other woman, but what she didn’t know was that it gave him hives to think he could follow in his father’s last footsteps.

Needing to conquer his sudden restlessness, Jonas grabbed his keys and headed back to the ranch. As soon as he got there, he went looking for his mom’s letters. Nathan had moved the box to the sideboard in the dining room. He took them to the couch, but even before he sat down, he couldn’t bring himself to read about his parents’ private lives, so he put them back. Maybe someday he would come back to them, but not tonight.

When his mother passed, he’d been convinced she’d died from loneliness. He still thought that. Staring out the window at the expanse of the yard and parking area illuminated by the light that automatically came on at dusk, he was glad to be home, even though he wasn’t ready to uncover his parents’ potential secrets. It was after his dad’s sudden death and becoming the ‘man’ of the house that he started to play the cautious card, making it a point to never make a mistake he couldn’t fix.

That was what his best friend didn’t know.

*

The next day,Jonas was back in the office, sorting through the growing number of cases waiting for his attention.

Everywhere he looked made him think of Sloane and the conversation he should have probably had with her a long time ago. Except, he couldn’t have told her what he didn’t understand.

She’d done a great job helping him decorate, bringing in the view from outside the big picture windows. Sunlight dusted the soft-blue walls. She’d had the furniture upholstered in a woven fabric that blended blues, greens, and a bit of brown. Paintings by several local artists hung on the walls.

Before he texted her, he had another matter to attend to. Grabbing his cell, he dialed the number he found online for the Colorado Ranger Horse Association. The home office was in Pennsylvania. The lady who answered explained the process to get Duke registered as Jonas followed along on the website that he’d pulled up while the phone was dialing. At the end, she gave him instructions for completing a DNA profile and the name of an equine research center to send the sample to that would confirm if the tested horse qualified as the offspring of a given stallion and mare.

It would take time to get the testing done and the paperwork reviewed by the CRHA.

But that wasn’t the Triple L’s biggest worry. The main obstacle was the limited time he and his brothers had to fix the ranch’s cash flow problem. At least Duke’s DNA testing was a step in the right direction.

After leaving the office early, he stopped in at the Strawberry Ridge Coffee Company and picked up a spiced chai latte, Sloane’s favorite. He found her in the garage, her legs and booted feet emerging from under a newer Wrangler.

She probably had her earbuds in, listening to one of the podcasts she favored. He nudged the foot closest to him. “Hey, friend. I brought you a thank-you gift.”

“A gift?” she asked, rolling out from under the Jeep. “What for?”

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