Page 53 of A Sweet Chat for the Cowboy

“You? A black sheep? What are you talking about? You’re a smart business owner, right? What, are your brothers all Nobel prize winners?”

He laughed.Hardly.What would Kash win a Nobel prize for, instant barley fermentation? “Not exactly. I don’t think I’m the black sheepnow.But I was back then. I hated school, I wasn’t good at sports, I wasn’t good at anything. I used to run away and hide in the woods to get away from my father.”

She didn’t answer for a minute, and he wondered if he had scared her off. But then a message came in. “Do you know how much that makes me like you?”

His cheeks grew warm. Wow. He hadn’t been expectingthat. Did she now feel like she was floating a few inches above her bed? Or her chair? Or the ground? He didn’t really know where she was. “I do not,” he wrote, and she sent an emoji with big red hearts for eyes. His cheeks grew warmer still.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she wrote. “Tell me your good memory.”

“Right. So one time I was hiding out in the woods, and my mother came looking for me. I was scared that I was in trouble, and I loved my mother. Back then and always.” A lump formed in his throat, and he was grateful that he wasn’t trying to tell this story out loud. “So I didn’t ever want to make her mad. But she wasn’t mad. She brought me a Tupperware container full of cookies. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so loved. But she didn’t lure me into the minivan with the cookies, and she didn’t drop the cookies off and leave me there. No, she sat right down with me in that wilderness, and she ate the cookies with me. And she didn’t make me talk about my feelings either. We just ate cookies and watched the natural world around us until I was ready to go home.”

Chapter 27

Wynona yawned as shegot into the van.

“Tired?” Martin asked.

She wasn’t in the mood for small talk. “Yeah. I think I stayed up too late.”

“Does it count asup too latewhen it happens in the morning?”

A pain shot from one of her temples to the other. “Whatever. You know what I mean.” Her phone rang, and the pain grew teeth. She looked at the screen before answering and then, seeing it was the lab, hurried to say hello.

A sympathetic tech on the other end of the call gently informed her that her precious toad scat had come from a Rocky Mountain Toad—not a western Blake toad. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she struggled to keep her voice even as she thanked the messenger. She hung up and swallowed hard. She didnotwant to cry in front of Craig.

Martin reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “Sorry, boss.”

“It’s okay,” she said, faking stability. She started the engine. “It was always a long shot.” She put the van in gear. Yes, it had been a long shot, but her penchant for positivity had let her believe that it was possible, that she wouldn’t have to delay hunting season and tick off half of her home state.

She was shocked and grateful that Craig stayed quiet on the matter.

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APPROACHING THE TRAILHEAD, Wynona could clearly see that there were fewer trucks than usual. They were meeting earlier than their normal time because they would have such a long hike ahead, so maybe people were just lagging behind.

But as soon as she approached Tucker, he told her that no, this was all they’d have. They could do four smaller teams or go down to three teams. “Let’s do three,” she said. “We want to be thorough.”

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