Page 90 of Redeeming Harmony

“Mostly. Sometimes I dabble in watercolour, but between you and me, I’m terrible at it.” She grinned and stuffed another bite of food into her mouth.

He flipped back to her sketches of the animals, stopping on the one of Winston. “Would you mind if I took pictures of some of your animal sketches to email to a vet friend?”

“Why?” she asked.

“I think he’d be interested in purchasing them to display in his clinic,” Nathan said.

“Sure, thank you, Nathan.”

He used his phone to snap some pictures of the sketches as Harper finished eating. When he was finished, she said, “You didn’t take a picture of my Winston sketch.”

“Oh, I’m buying that one,” he said.

She stared at him. “Sorry, what?”

“I want to buy that one for the clinic,” he said. “Unless you were giving it to your dad as a gift?”

She laughed. “I havegiftedmy dad so many sketches over the years that I’m pretty sure he could open his own art gallery.”

“So, this one is available then?” he said.

“Well, yes, but you don’t have to buy it, Nathan.”

“I know I don’t have to. I want to,” he said. “How much?”

She hesitated and then said, “One fifty, usually, but I’ll give you the friends and family discount so -”

“Two hundred?” he said. “It’s a steal, but I’m not going to argue.”

He took out his wallet and counted out two hundred dollars before setting it on the table in front of her. She stared at the money and then at him. “You have two hundred bucks in your wallet?”

He shrugged. “I carry emergency money of a few hundred, just in case.”

“A few hundred…” she laughed. “My emergency money is a twenty-dollar bill. You and I are at very different life stages, Nathan.”

“Well, we are a decade apart in age,” he said.

“Oh God, you’re not going to return to the ‘I’m too old to fuck you, Harper,’ nonsense, are you?”

“Shamefully, now that I know how good it feels to fuck you, no, I’m not bringing up the fact that I’m an old man,” he said.

“Good, because you’re not an old man, and you certainly don’t fuck like an old man.”

He cocked his head at her. “How many old men have you fucked, Harper?”

She laughed so hard, her face turned red, and she had to gulp down some water. He loved making her laugh.

“Truthfully, you’re the oldest I’ve had,” she said. “But if I’d known older men were so talented in bed, I would have aged up a long time ago.”

It was his turn to laugh, and she grinned at him. The warmth in her pretty blue eyes made him feel like he was playing a dangerous game with his heart.

She carefully removed the page with Winston’s sketch from the pad and handed it over to him. “Thank you again, Nathan.”

“Thankyou,” he said. “Still haven’t had anyone come forward to claim Winston, huh?”

“No, and at this point, I don’t expect it. But I’m going to adopt him.”

“Yeah? That’s great. He’s a good dog.”

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