His brows rose as if with disbelief.
“Agift?”
“I mean, it is a very nice hay bale,” I said soothingly. “Same with those ones over there. Well-packed. Competently tied. The grass all nice and evenly dried. No dampness or mould.” I gave him two thumbs up, which only seemed to confuse him further. “Good work!”
“Good work?” he scoffed. “Any fool can bale hay.”
I kept my thumbs up and angled my arms back, using them to point directly at my own chest. “Want to show this fool?”
I knew the basics, but we’d had a lot more equipment on our ranch than Zohro seemed to possess.
He turned his gorgeous, frowny face towards the hay bales, then back to me.
“Fine,” he said. “But don’t thank me for things if you don’t mean it. You can be direct with me.”
“Noted,” I said with a nod, pleasantly surprised.
“And Jolene?”
“Yeah?”
His eyes burned suddenly white before he turned away.
“Don’t call yourself a fool in front of me again.”
11
JOLENE
Zohro’s method of baling hay was a lot more rustic than I’d anticipated. Where we’d had robotics and powerful machinery to do most of the back-breaking work on Terratribe II, Zohro just had Wyn, a few pieces of ancient-looking equipment, and the strength of his own body. Which was obviously nothing to sneeze at, considering how many bales of hay he’d already managed to stack up today so far.
“If I devote a good portion of day to it, I can make more than fifty,” he told me.
“More than fifty?” I echoed incredulously, sure I’d heard him wrong. “On your own? With nothing but this stuff?”
I mean, the man was baling hay manually! He had to cut the grass himself with a scythe! Once it was cut, he explained that he let it dry in the sun for two or three days, using a metal tedding contraption dragged behind Wyn that helped turn and fluff the cut grass, letting it all dry evenly. Once dry, he had to bundle it together by hand, and he stuffed those bundles into a large wooden box with a big lever on top that, when pressed down, squashed the grass into a tight rectangular prism. Gaps between the wood planks of the box allowed Zohro to tie a cord aroundthe packed plant matter inside, so that when he finally opened the front of the box, he could remove a perfectly solid bale and toss it into his pile.
I watched him work for a while, admiring his relentless competence and the seemingly endless well of energy that drove him. It was almost an angry energy. He worked like he was mad at…everything. Like he hated the grass so much that he never got tired of squishing it into blocks, no matter how many times he had to do it. His injuries from last night didn’t seem to slow him down at all. Or if they did, it only meant he was even faster than this normally, which was hard for me to comprehend.
Once I’d gotten a feel for everything involved, I stepped in to help.
Except, I wasn’t nearly as much help as I’d hoped to be. My belly got in the way when I tried to stuff grass down the top of the upright wooden box, and I was too short to exert enough pressure on the lever up top to press the grass down fully. I tried a few different angles and techniques with no success, all under the watchful and entirely unimpressed eye of the poor sap who’d agreed to marry me.
“I swear,” I panted, pushing the brim of my hat back to wipe sweat from my forehead, “I do somewhat know what I’m doing. I’ve been on a ranch all my life. I’ll be more help when I’m not this freaking pregnant.”
Except, when I was finished being pregnant, I’d be healing and looking after a newborn…
Which meant I might be even more useless to him.
A fresh batch of sweat oozed from my pores, and this one had nothing to do with physical exertion. I mean, he’d said he wanted to marry me for God knew what reason last night…
But that was before he’d seen my epic baling failures.
“I’ll be on grass bundling duty,” I said, determined to find some way to lighten Zohro’s load and prove my worth. And I didn’t just want to prove it to Zohro in that moment.
I wanted to prove it to myself. I’d always been a farm girl, and it suddenly felt like I had no idea what I was doing on a farm.
I’d always been a horse girl, and now I didn’t even have a horse.
