Page 42 of The Cowboy Who Came Home

“I’ll say.” He stretched his arms out wide and groaned. “Come sit by me, sweetheart.”

Edith did, choosing to sit immediately next to him, in the space created by his outstretched arm. She fit there perfectly, and he settled his arm around her as if he’d done it plenty of times before.

“I spy a fridge over there. What you got in that?”

“Take a guess, Cupcake,” she said, clearly flirting with him.

Finn took a moment, his head cocked slightly, that sexy smile on his mouth. “I’d say Diet Dr. Pepper in the fridge, and that freezer is absolutely stocked with orange sherbet.”

She laughed, because he wasn’t wrong. “I have sherbet,” she said through her giggles. “And chocolate chip ice cream.”

“How very plain,” he said.

“I don’t like marshmallows in ice cream,” she said, continuing an old argument from high school about Rocky Road.

He chuckled too. “Tell me how you came to be a writer,” he said as he quieted. “I don’t remember you writing in high school.”

Edith leaned back and looked up to the ceiling of her she-shed. “I was nannying on Long Island, and I learned about an internship at a publisher in the city. It wasn’t paid, and it was remote, though I had to go into the city sometimes. Once every couple of weeks.” She shook her head, because she was getting sidetracked.

“I fell in love with the publishing process. This concept of taking something from someone’s brain, and they type it out, and we print it on paper. It intrigued me.”

“What did you do?”

“I read slush,” she said. “I’ve always loved reading, and I could do it from my suite on Long Island.”

“What’s slush?”

“Oh.” She smiled again. “It’s what we call the submissions that come in. The slush pile. I worked with an editor who had very specific tastes for what they were looking for. When I read something that fit the bill, I gave it to them. Then they’d read it. They don’t read every submission. That was my job.”

“Fascinating,” he said.

“I learned really quickly what editors liked and didn’t like, though everything is beyond subjective.”

“Is that how you started writing?”

“Yeah, this editor friend of the editor I worked with, she publishes children’s books, and we went to lunch once. The three of us. She kept saying she wanted something that would remind people of a slower time. Something that would ‘remind us that we were human once.’ That we all knew each other and took care of each other.”

“Sounds like Three Rivers.”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” Edith said. “I suggested something with a farm or a ranch, and horses, and this editor loved that idea. Then we all lamented over the fact that there weren’t any manuscripts like that in the slush pile.”

“So you wrote one.”

“That I did. And I gave it to that editor, and she loved it. So, now I write books sometimes.”

“Do you love it?”

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I really do.”

“So,” he said. “Let’s do Could Be Better, Could Be Worse.”

Edith pulled in a breath. “We haven’t done that in years. I’d completely forgotten about it.”

“You want to?”

“Yeah,” Edith said, settling further into his side. “But you go first.”

“Okay.” He took a long moment, and then he said, “Things could be better than having nine sinkholes.”

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