Page 20 of The Rancher's Heart

Chapter Six

Sloane almost calledJonas to tell him she wouldn’t make it out to the ranch. He’d want to talk about Ken, and she didn’t have much to say about her movie date last night. And since it was nice but wouldn’t win any awards for best date of the year, she didn’t want to have another conversation about the two ofthemgoing out, either.

I wonder why?

Rolling her eyes, she closed up shop. The garage was only open until noon on Saturdays and closed on Sundays, a schedule her dad had established when he first opened. A single father, Ron Michaels liked his weekends unencumbered, he said, so that he could spend quality time with his young daughter. After he retired, Sloane had kept to the same schedule.

She climbed into her truck and started the engine. The older F-150 purred to life. After rolling down the window to let a breeze filter in, she pointed it toward the Triple L. The nights were cooling down as they headed into fall, but the days were still warm, calling her to get out of the garage and stretch her legs.

She would continue to date, not Jonas, of course, but she’d try some things outside her comfort zone, like mountain climbing, skydiving, or maybe glamping. She was certain a guy out there liked to do those things. She just had to find him.

She loved fixing cars, but working ten, sometimes twelve-hour days, and half a day on Saturday, was getting old. Folks talked about work-life balance. She had none. It wasn’t something she’d worried about until Jonas came back to town and wasn’t interested in becoming more than friends.

It had weighed heavily on her mind and was one of the reasons she’d signed up for Perfect Match. She didn’t want Jonas to figure out she’d been waiting around for him all these years. If she wanted to move on from her crush on her best friend, she should take a chance on the dating market and at least open her life to new possibilities. And it made sense to widen her dating pool.

Jonas wasn’t the only guy around. His suggestion that he be her backup date was... infuriating. It’d taken him a long time to decide she was maybe more than his best friend. Did he feel sorry for her? Was that what was going on? If it was, then that wasn’t going to fly.

Her biggest problem dating anyone else was trying not to measure them against the guy she couldn’t stop caring about. If she kept looking, surely, she would find a man who made her heartbeat go faster than her BFF. Someone who shared the same likes and dislikes, and whom she could see having a fulfilling future with. She just had to keep looking.

She parked in front of the barn. The horses were in the pasture across the driveway. Jonas stepped out of the barn. “Hey, you made it.”

“I almost didn’t. I had a lot of work to do.” And a lot of thinking to do on how to get Jonas to keep his distance from her personal business.

His grin was contagious. “How did your date go?”

She knew he wouldn’t forget. “The movie was great. It was just as good as the first time I watched it.”

“And did Ken like the movie?” Jonas led the way back to the barn, where Duke was still in his stall.

The horse stretched his nose out and nickered at Sloane. She scratched him between the ears. “He thought it was good.”

“Only good?”

Sloane ignored Jonas’s question. “What are we doing with the horses?”

“I need to take a hair sample from Duke’s mane for DNA testing. You get to hold his head still for me.”

Sloane moved her scratching fingers to under his jaw. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”

For a moment, she could see the two of them building up the Rangerbred breed on the ranch and working with the horses.

“All done.” Sloane watched Jonas seal the hairs he’d collected in a small paper bag and put it in his shirt pocket. He patted the horse’s neck. “So, what does Ken do for a living?”

Any ideas she might be harboring that she and this man her heart was hanging on to could perhaps make a happy-ever-after future together were dispelled.

“Actually...” She was going to tell him it was none of his business but changed her mind. There was no reason not to tell Jonas about the guys she was dating. In any case, she wasn’t asking for his opinion on the gentlemen or for his approval. “He’s the head chef at the Starry Night Grille in one of the historic hotels in downtown Durango.”

Jonas’s brows drew together.

She almost laughed. “What?”

“He wanted to take you on a picnic.” He fed Duke a carrot when the horse butted his shoulder.

Making sure Duke had moved out of the way, Sloane punched Jonas’s arm. Payback for him thinking she couldn’t pick a good man, even on her worst day. “I like picnics. And Ken is a nice man.”

“I’m sure he is,” Jonas said, rubbing his arm as he took a step out of reach.

She tapped her booted foot. “You said you wanted help with the horses. So, what’s next?”

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