Page 33 of The Coppersmith Farmhouse (Jamison Valley 1)
“Then you’re not driving. And Roe can’t ride in my truck without her booster seat.”
He had a point.
“Keys are in my purse. And some cash in my wallet for dinner,” I said.
He just gave me a look.
“Roe, go grab the keys,” he told her.
He shook his head at me and lifted both hands to frame the sides of my face.
“Worried about you, baby,” he murmured before leaning in and giving me a soft, gentle kiss on the lips.
I raised the hand on my unbitten arm and placed it on his at my cheek.
“I’m okay.”
He nodded and kissed me lightly on the nose, then took Rowen’s hand.
His gesture was so sweet, so perfect, it overwhelmed me with emotion. So far I hadn’t let myself cry, but now I had a lump in my throat and I knew it was a matter of seconds before I couldn’t contain the tears.
With the sight of Jess and my daughter walking away from me, hand in hand to do their “things,” I let go.
Jess and Rowen arrived to pick me up from the hospital while I was signing my discharge papers. We rode home with a pepperoni pizza, a mixed green salad and a pint of chocolate ice cream in the back. While Rowen gave me a play-by-play of the last forty-five minutes, Jess held my hand on the center console the whole trip home.
Bryant, one of his deputies, had helped Jess transfer his truck to the farmhouse. Roe had learned that Bryant had two kids. His daughter was six, close to Rowen’s age, and Bryant had invited her to come over for a weekend sleepover (as long as it was okay with me, of course).
I gave her the go-ahead and promised to get ahold of Bryant’s wife and set it up soon. This had evoked a wailing scream of glee from the back seat as we drove home.
The terror from earlier was nearly forgotten. My girl was happy in the back and Jess was holding my hand. Things had started to right themselves in my world and my fraying ends were twisting back together.
“Do you know who that is?” I asked Jess after dinner.
I was standing in the living room watching a large black truck pull up to the house.
“Yep,” he said with no further explanation as we all made our way outside.
Our visitor was tall and attractive. His blond hair was sticking out from beneath a dirty brown baseball hat. He was leaner than Jess but about the same height.
“Georgia, this is Silas Grant.
Silas, my girls Gigi and Rowen,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, Silas,” I said while trying to remember where I’d heard his name before.
I’d met and heard about so many people since we moved to Prescott, I couldn’t place it immediately. Finally it dawned on me. He was the rancher whose calf had been killed mysteriously and the man Maisy described as “ex-military and, like, terrifying.”
She obviously knew more about him than I did because at first glance, terrifying was hardly the word that came to mind. In fact, his dark brown eyes, pointed at my Roe, might have been some of the kindest I’d ever seen.
Silas opened the tailgate to his truck, revealing a large box.
“What’s in there?” Rowen asked.
From the box, Silas lifted out a huge black and white cat, setting it quickly on the ground. It darted under his truck as he set the box on the ground. In the bottom were three teeny, tiny adorable black kittens about the size of my hand. They couldn’t have been more than two weeks old.
“Kitties!” Rowen shrieked, jumping up and down. She went straight for the box and immediately began playing with the little bundles of fur. Nothing existed in her world at that moment except those kittens.
“The mother here is gentle with a calm demeanor,” Silas said. “She’s not afraid of people and will come around the house, especially if you get in the habit of feeding them on the porch.”
