Page 12 of Hopeful Cowboy

Ginger looked at him, another round of surprise moving through her. “You don’t like hunting?”

“Not particularly.” He met her eyes, and Ginger couldn’t help leaning toward him, as if he possessed a powerful magnet and she had no other choice but to get closer to him. Her heart started screaming a warning, but it took her brain several long seconds to get the message.

She cleared her throat. “Well, seeing as how our last hunt was last week, and you’re only obligated to be here for five months, I don’t think being involved in the hunt will even come up.” She released her foot on the brake and let the truck inch forward again. “And something outside…I’m sure we can do that.” She glanced down at Connor, who’d fallen asleep at some point during the drive.

A smile touched her mouth, drying up when Nate said, “He’s cute, but I have no idea how to take care of him.”

Ginger heard the apprehension in Nate’s voice, and she once again didn’t know what to do with it. “You did great today,” she said. “You held him when he needed you, and you helped him with his lunch, and you kept him right beside you.” In fact, watching Nate do all of those things had warmed Ginger toward him considerably.

“Will you help me with him?” Nate asked.

Ginger glanced at him, her eyebrows shooting up. “What?”

“I saw you with him,” he said. “You’re great. You know exactly what to do.”

She started shaking her head, but Nate continued anyway. “You showed up with chocolate, and you handed him a napkin before I even knew he needed one. You knew when to take him from me, and when to give him back, and you picked up his tie when I didn’t even see that he’d dropped it.”

“Nate,” she said, but she stopped. Of course she was going to help him. Hadn’t she already decided to make this transition for him as easy as possible here?

She had, and she knew it. Instead of answering, she eased around the corner and said, “There’s the homestead.”

Nate finally took his eyes off her face, and Ginger felt the weight of them go. “Oh…wow,” he said again. “Look at that place.”

Ginger looked at it, trying to see what Nate did. The homestead was really two houses connected together with a three-car garage in the middle. The garages had doors on both sides, so she could get to the road she was driving down now, or out onto the ranch in the opposite direction. When they were open and the sky shone through the gaps, it really was spectacular.

But they were closed today, which only made the house seem much bigger than it was.

“I live on the left side,” she said. “The West Wing, we call it. Like the White House.”

“Alone?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I have three women that live there with me. We all work on the ranch. Emma, my assistant, is there. Jessica is my stable master. She lives there. And Jill is a ranch hand. She works in the behind-the-scenes stuff the most. She lives there as part of her room and board.”

She passed through the front gate, where the fields ended and an unruly patch of grass barely passed for a front yard. “On the right is where the cowboys live. The Annex. You’ll live there with Connor. Emma put you on the main floor, where there’s only three bedrooms. A great guy named Spencer Rust lives in the other one. Downstairs, we have three more bedrooms and three more bathrooms, and the boys double up down there.”

Nate said nothing, and Ginger really wanted to know what he was thinking. So she asked, “What are you thinking about?”

“I get the whole bedroom to myself?”

“Yes,” she said. “And Connor can have the other one. If you’d rather sleep in the same room, that’s fine. We weren’t sure—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Anything is fine, honestly.”

She reached up to press the button to get the far left garage door to lift.

“I lived in a dormitory with sixteen other men,” he said. “I can’t even remember what it feels like to have an entire bedroom to myself.”

Ginger had been told that before, and she hated that she hadn’t remembered. “Emma and the other girls have been working on a babysitting schedule for Connor. You’ll come over to our kitchen tonight, where she also has a feast waiting for us. Then I’ll take you to the men’s wing—what we call the East Annex. Or just the Annex.”

She pulled into the garage, her heart thumping in a strange way. “And that’s it. You can’t come to the West Wing whenever you want. It’s off-limits to cowboys.”

“I don’t know if you know much about me,” he said. “But I’m not a cowboy.”

Ginger grinned at him, feeling a little out of control. Definitely tired, which probably spurred her to say, “You will be, Mister Mulbury. Trust me on that,” in a flirty tone. She didn’t add a giggle to the statement, thankfully, and quickly got out of the truck.

As she busied herself with her luggage from last night and all the paperwork she’d been given at the FCI, she kicked herself for saying anything about Nate becoming a cowboy. She also couldn’t allow herself to flirt with him again. She needed him on the ranch; that was all. He didn’t get to know about her private life, and she’d had plenty of experience with keeping things professional between her and the cowboys. She could do it with him too.

Nate had a waking-up Connor in his arms while he waited near the tailgate, and Ginger hurried to go up the steps in the garage that led into the utility room. An entire wall of cabinets greeted her, as did a washer and dryer and four boot racks.

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