Brandon honestly wasn’t sure if he could revitalize this place. Perhaps this woman and her husband or other hired help, plus him, could make some headway. But if she had other help, why did everything here look like it had been put together with string and toothpicks?
And why would she have put up a job listing?
He peered through the windshield as the woman came down the front steps. She had pretty blonde hair swinging in a ponytail, and Brandon sucked in a breath as he recognized her.
“The woman from the hardware store,” he breathed out, refusing to let his lips move. She kept coming, and Brandon unbuckled his seat belt and dropped to the ground.
Their eyes met, and she came to a complete stop too, and Brandon knew why—she recognized him too.
All he could do now was pray she didn’t have any friends in town and hadn’t heard of his reputation with women.
2
Lenore Sawyer was having a week filled with shocking things. First, that anyone had responded to her ad on the temporary job board. She’d been using other sources to try to hire somebody, but they’d all fled once they found out about the low salary. Lenore had finally decided to just be super honest about it and see what happened.
So Brandon’s call yesterday had taken her by surprise in the first place. Secondly, he was the first person who’d been able to find the homestead. She’d managed to get two other people to respond to ads on TwoCents, but neither one of them had been able to navigate their way here.
She knew she lived off-grid, but how hard was it to use your phone’s GPS to navigate to a pin? Obviously not that hard, as Brandon Rhinehart had done it.
Of course, Brandon Rhinehart looked to be the type of cowboy who could do anything, and that was exactly what Lenore needed.
Third, he hadn’t run screaming off the property yet. That alone was shocking.
And while Lenore had definitely been praying more than she ever had in the past two months since she’d run—literally—intoBrandon in the hardware store, she doubled down now, begging God that he wouldn’t jump back in his truck and hightail it out of there.
She could barely believe that the only cowboy who’d managed to look past the low salary and get himself here was the handsome man she’d made a fool of herself with. She’d counted on never seeing him again, and yet there he stood in the flesh, reaching down to pat Admiral. Once Susie-Q saw he wasn’t a threat, she went over to greet him as well.
He doesn’t have much time, she reminded herself, and she stopped staring and stepped forward. “I’m Lenore Sawyer.”
“It’s great to meet you. Again,” Brandon said easily, a quick smile coming to his face. Oh, so he was an optimist, and Lenore actually found herself returning the smile, because she definitely needed an upbeat outlook to get this place in shape. He shook her hand and then pulled away, tucked his hands in his back pockets, and looked around.
“She’s in rough shape right now,” Lenore said, deciding that the honesty about the low salary had gotten him here, and perhaps if she just laid everything on the line, he would stay.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Brandon said. “You live here by yourself?”
“Yes,” Lenore said. “My momma and daddy passed away a little over a year ago.”
Brandon’s wandering eyes came back to hers and locked into place. “Oh, I’m real sorry to hear that,” he said. “My daddy’s getting a lot older, and I don’t know how much longer he’ll be with us.”
Lenore nodded, accepting his condolences. “I’m really good with gardening,” she said. “I have a decently-sized garden that I just harvested, and we’ve managed to build a greenhouse onto the side of the house that does okay in the winter.”
“That’s great,” Brandon said.
Lenore turned and faced more of the homestead. “But I can’t keep my chickens contained, no matter what I do, and I lose a couple every month to predators.”
Brandon nodded and fell into step beside her as she started away from the cabin. “What kind of predators you got?” he asked. “You talkin’ coyotes or hawks?”
“It’s the birds that get them,” she said. “But I have seen coyotes and foxes out here as well.”
He nodded and kept looking around. Lenore knew he was the kind of man who would catalog everything. She tried not to feel like he was judging her, though he had to be. She’d done her best, and she’d gotten to the point where she simply couldn’t do more. She’d swallowed her pride and asked for help. Thankfully, the usual humiliation she felt at having someone come to the homestead and see its condition only stayed for a moment.
“I have the space for turkeys,” she said. “And goats, which would give more eggs and more milk. And long term, I want to add a couple of beef cattle that I can raise each year for meat and a dairy cow for milk.”
“Mm hm.” Brandon said nothing, and she thought he probably hadn’t wanted to speak out loud so that his disbelief wouldn’t shine through. But Lenore didn’t know how to keep living if she didn’t have dreams.
And the idea that she could get the homestead to the point where it could support cattle and goats meant that it could support her—and that she wouldn’t lose it. She’d written that down on a whiteboard in her kitchen, and she’d magneted pictures of beef cattle and dairy cows and goats, turkeys, chickens, and even ducks to it.
“I wouldn’t mind putting a pig on the property either,” she said. “I have twenty-five acres.”
