Page 95 of His Tenth Dance

He returned only a few seconds later with a wheelchair, and he’d just gotten her settled when a nurse came outside with a clipboard and started asking him questions.

Lindsay relaxed then, because she wouldn’t have to give birth on the barn floor. And now, all she had to focus on was praying that she hadn’t hurt their son too badly when she’d fallen.

thirty-one

Mission jogged the last few steps to his front yard and kept hurrying across the now-dormant lawn to his front porch.

Rich had called to say he’d seen something dripping out of the back window of Mission’s cabin as he’d walked by that morning.

The bathroom window, and Mission expected to find his whole cabin flooded when he opened the front door. He’d just finished their morning meeting on the harvest and everyone’s role in it when he’d gotten Rich’s text.

He really didn’t have time for anything to go wrong right now. Harvest time on a farm was the busiest time of year, as everyone tried to get in everything they’d been carefully cultivating for months.

Travis had so much alfalfa this year, he’d hired extra hands just to get the job done. Mission had done the same, as summer had been so good to them and this final crop of hay couldn’t be lost.

He also didn’t want their squashes, corn, apples, or peaches to go to waste. Molly usually headed up the farm stand that soldtheir extra produce, but Hunter had asked her to pass the job to someone else.

Britt and Gemma had taken it on, and Mission needed to get them another trailer full of corn for the stand that day.

He so didn’t have time for a leak or flooding his home, especially today, as he and Kristie had planned to sneak away from work an hour early to have chocolate cake for their birthdays.

Hers was actually today, and his would arrive in another four days.

“If her gifts got wet….” Mission shoved his way into his house, ready to take on the world so he could get back to work and wouldn’t miss his date that evening.

He expected to smell something moldy or damp. Step into an inch or more of water. Something.

His cabin sat in stillness, the morning sunshine filtering through the open blinds and highlighting the dust motes in the air.

There was no flood. No smell of something gone wrong.

He came to a stop at the corner of the wall and looked down the hall. No evidence of water at all, and he growled as he scanned the kitchen.

His breath caught in his chest when he saw the chocolate cake on his dining room table.

“That’s not a leak,” he said as he moved along the island and bar to the table. Someone had been in his house all the same.

Not just someone.

Kristie.

This looked like a normal chocolate cake, though it stood three tiers tall, and Mission had never had such a large cake made just for him. Granddad usually bought an ice cream cake, and the two of them sat on his back deck and enjoyed the dessert together.

A note had been placed next to the cake, and Mission recognized Kristie’s handwriting from her veterinary records and invoices.

Happy birthday, cowboy! I hope this chocolate cake meets your standards—its official name is Triple Chocolate Chip Cake with German Chocolate Coconut Filling.

She’d added a smiley face, and Mission chuckled at the ridiculously long name of the cake.

Cut into it, and you’ll see all your favorites. I used the good, flaked coconut and semi-sweet chocolate chips, according to your preferences.

Can’t wait to see you tonight, and don’t eat all the cake, because I want to taste it too.

She’d drawn a heart and signedKris, and Mission lowered her note, his heart expanding into a bigger version of itself with every breath he took.

As he stood there and gazed at the chocolate-frosted cake which concealed so many things—including the attention and care Kristie had paid to his likes and dislikes—he knew he’d fallen in love with her.

“You can’t tell her on her birthday,” he lectured himself as he turned to get a knife. The “flood” in his house had clearly been a lie, and Kristie had clearly staged things with Rich.

---