“We don’t have water in your place yet, but we’ll be able to keep all of your plants alive in the greenhouse, in the garden, and I’ll figure out how to get the water in there.”
“I’m pretty sure Colt said he’d come tomorrow and do it,” Lenore said in a very small, almost childlike voice. “He said we’re only missing a couple of fasteners, and he knows exactly what to get.”
“Great,” Brandon said lightly. “I’ll learn from him, and then I’ll know.”
“This is almost too much for me,” Lenore said. “I believed you when you told me, even with you living and working here for three months, that we might not be able to get this far. And we’re going into week four, and I’m going to have power and water.”
“There’s still plenty to do, sweetheart.”
Lenore stopped, pulled back, and gazed around. “Yeah, there is,” she said, something unspoken hanging at the end of the sentence.
Brandon’s pulse stuttered through his veins. “If you don’t need me anymore,” he said. “Just say so. I’ll start looking for something else.”
Her eyes flew to his. “Of course I need you,” she said. “Why would you even say that?”
“I mean, if you have power and water, your chickens properly contained, a garden, your barn is airtight and watertight—what do you need me for?”
“Just like you said,” she said. “There’s still so much that needs to be done. Pastures, enclosures, crops. There’s a whole ten acres down there we haven’t even cleaned up yet.”
He smiled at her softly. “But you can drive a skid steer now. You can have that cleaned up in a couple days just by yourself.”
“I don’t want you to go,” she said, her eyes blazing with challenge. She obviously had no idea what such words did to his heart, but it ballooned up with hope.
“Good,” Brandon said huskily. “Because I don’t want to go.” He leaned down and touched his lips to hers in a tender kiss. He didn’t linger long, because they weren’t that far away from the others.
“But really, Lenny, you tell me if you don’t need me here anymore. I won’t take your money for nothing.”
She swallowed and nodded in a tight little burst. “What about you?” she asked. “You won’t have power in your cabin.”
“Just more reason for me to come visit you more often after work.” He grinned at her and kissed her one more time. “Now, come on. Conrad is like a small child on Christmas, and he can’t wait to show you his plans.”
Brandon turned and looked behind him. “And I don’t hear that excavator working, which means they’re waiting for your go-ahead before they do anything.” He looked at her again, his eyebrows raised. “What do you think? Does Conrad have a good plan?”
“I’m not approving anything unless he has hand-drawn sketches the way you do,” Lenore said with a grin.
Brandon chuckled, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out a couple of rumpled pieces of paper. “Oh, you mean like this?”
23
Lenore watched as the serviceman got to his feet, a groan pulling through his chest and coming out his mouth.
“That should do it,” he said.
Her heartbeat skipped and jumped and hopped. All eyes came to her.
“Let’s go test it,” Brandon said, and she wasn’t sure who was more excited about having electricity in the cabin—him or her.
Definitely you,she thought. She’d been the one living here without it for so long.
She led the way up the steps and into the house, five loud cowboys gossiping like women as they followed her. Both servicemen had been at the homestead all afternoon, creating the infrastructure for the batteries and running the line from the now partially buried container to her home, and then hooking everything up properly, both on the inside and outside.
Lenore paused just inside the door and looked across the front wall where her shoe racks of pathetic batteries had been. Brandon had cleaned them out to see if they could be used or salvaged, but neither of the servicemen fromPower Uphad wanted them.
Lenore didn’t currently know where they were, but they didn’t sit in her house, and in fact, a new electrical panel gleamed from the wall at shoulder level.
The solar panels would collect the energy from the sun and store it in the batteries. When she needed the power, she’d call on it by flipping a switch or plugging something in, and it would come from the batteries through the inverter, which converted it to the one-hundred-twenty volts she needed for lights, a refrigerator, the TV, a vacuum cleaner, and anything else she wanted to power in the house.
With electricity, she could have Wi-Fi—and the whole world opened before her in that moment.
