Page 25 of All Because I Found You

She let her eyes widened, but kept her lips pressed together in a tight line. He had a problem with her talking, then she wouldn’t talk.

Tapping her fingers against the tabletop, she continued to stare at him, now swishing her lips back and forth and nodding her head.

“Are you through?”

She shook her head and continued tapping. She rested her elbow on the table, chin on her palm, and thrummed her fingers against her jaw all while maintaining eye contact with him.

He snapped his gaze from her and trudged over to the cabinet by the fridge. He took down two plates and placed them on the counter. “It should be ready in twenty minutes or so.”

She nodded.

“This is ridiculous.”

She nodded again.

He inhaled deeply, the sound breaking through the silence in the kitchen. His hand shot into his hair, about to push it off his face when he seemed to have thought better about it. Raelyn tilted her head, wondering how bad the scars must be for him to constantly style his hair that way. A deep ache in her gut made her all too aware of how she wanted Ryder to trust her enough to show her—to willingly reveal a part of himself that he kept hidden from the rest of the world.

She could see a bit of scaring on the left side of his nose that cut across to the right, but the rest disappeared beneath his long, dark auburn waves.

“Do you like corn on the cob?” he asked.

She nodded.

With a roll of his eyes, he stormed outside. Confused, she hurried after him. If she’d known he’d get so upset over her liking corn, she would have shaken her head.

Out on the porch, she glanced around the property but didn’t see him. She hurried down, peered around the side of the house, and spotted him walking through cornstalks. Oh. It wasn’t just cornstalks, though. It was a small garden surrounded by a wood fence filled with a variety of plants.

The man owned one of Morgan’s Bay’s most popular farm stands, having farmland around the town, yet he still had his own small private garden. “Do you always pick your own vegetables?” she asked as she stepped through the opened gate.

He stopped in his tracks and turned toward her, his eyebrow arched. “I thought you weren’t talking.”

“I could go back to that if you prefer.”

“No.”

“Okay then.”

He broke a piece of corn off the stalk and handed it to her. She padded through the garden and took the corn from his grasp while he worked on getting another.

“And to answer your question… yes,” he said as he handed her another.

“I wish I had a garden. Kind of hard when you’re living in a townhouse and don’t have a yard.”

“How long have you been there?”

Did he really just ask her a question? Was he initiating conversation? She resisted the urge to slam a hand against her chest and make it a big deal. “Two years. If it was up to my mom, I never would have moved out.” She laughed, remembering how dramatic Mom had been over the news that she was flying the coop.

“You think she’d be happy to have the house to herself.”

“I was the last one to leave home, making my parents empty nesters. It was an adjustment period for them. It was basically like they had to relearn how to live with just each other and not have the buffer of kids to fill conversations or to always be around to help. But trust me, they’re adjusted just fine now. Now I go over and I get ‘What are you doing here’.”

“That’s an understandable reaction to you.”

Raelyn pointed the corn at him and glared, which only seemed to amuse him. His lip quirked slightly on the right, softening his features and reminding her of the teenager she once swore she’d marry one day.

“What other kinds of vegetables do you have in this little oasis of yours?” she asked.

“Corn, different varieties of tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, asparagus, zucchini, cucumbers, eggplant, a bunch of herbs. That’s about it.”

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