Page 33 of His First Baby Rodeo

“Jeff and I never made s’mores together.”

“Okay, well, here, you can have this one,” she said. She grabbed a graham cracker and a slab of chocolate, sandwiched the marshmallow between them, and pulled it off the stick. “It’s crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside when you do it like this. Doesn’t get any better. Try it.”

He eyed her doubtfully, but he took a bite of the s’more anyway.

His eyes widened. “Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

“See what I mean?”

“That is good. How come people don’t always burn their marshmallows?”

“I don’t know! I think they should. But instead they spend ages trying to get them to the perfect shade of golden brown. You don’t have to do all that. Just hold it in the fire for a couple of minutes and it’s good to go.”

He laughed. “You’re hilarious.”

“Why? What did I do this time?”

“It’s just funny to me the way you spend so much effort on nearly everything you do,” he explained. “You’re so detail-oriented. I see the way you are around the ranch. You do everything perfectly, down to the last speck of dirt. You clean the feathers out of the chicken coop. I never did that before you came along.”

“You really should. You don’t want it to get gross in there.”

“And then it comes to something like this, and I see a whole new side of you,” Mac said.

“I feel like you’ve seen a lot of sides of me by now,” El said. “More than most people.”

“Well, I like it,” Mac said, smiling at her. “If I’d known you were going to grow up to be this cool when we were younger, I would have ditched Jeff and hung out with you a bit more.”

“Hey, you could have known it,” she said, grinning. “I was already cool when we were younger. It wasn’t something I had to grow into. You just weren’t paying attention.”

Mac laughed out loud. “I guess I wasn’t,” he agreed. “That’s my mistake. I’m glad the universe offered me a second chance to get to know you, then — and I’m glad I had the sense not to pass it up.”

“I’m glad too,” El said.

She felt almost perfectly happy — but beneath her happiness was a slow-growing dread.

She didn’t know how long she would be staying here with him. The only thing she knew for sure was that their time was steadily running out. And with each day that went by, she realized more and more that she didn’t want to go.

This is temporary.

But her heart was beginning to long for something more.

CHAPTER15

MAC

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to the doctor?” El asked Mac.

“I think I can handle it.” He grinned.

“I just hate to think of you driving with one hand.”

“Well, it’s hardly the first time!” Mac pointed out, laughing. “You’ve seen me drive with one hand a dozen times since you came to town.”

“I know,” El said. “But it makes me nervous. You’re a good driver. It’s not that I don’t think you can do it. I just worry.”

“I don’t know when this became the kind of relationship where you worry about me,” Mac said.

The wordrelationshiphung in the air, and he knew El was wondering just as much as he was why he had chosen to say that. It was the kind of thing that had been happening more and more lately — strange word choices were just slipping out. The night before, the two of them had been naked on the rug in front of the fireplace, in the throes of passion, and Mac had accidentally let slip the wordsI love you.

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