“You’re notgrand. Why are you even out here? I thought you’d be taking it easy for a few days, at least.”
With Aaron on task for the morning, I’d been headed to my house to try do just that, but I cut a wide circle and walked back toward the barn instead. “Thanks for your concern, but I’m fine.”
She kept pace with me. “I’m not sure you are. You’re all gray around the mouth. You should sit down for a little while, take a break.”
This again.
“I don’t think that would make much of a difference.” Nothing did. My muscles throbbed in my chest like my ribcage might bust apart any minute—just a matter of not doing anything to make it worse. Walking around didn’t help, but lying in bed, wishing for sleep that wouldn't come, proved no better. I didn’t know what to do with this restlessness I couldn’t shake. If I let it, it’d swallow me whole.
“What could it hurt to try?”
“Just my pride,” I muttered, striding past the empty stalls, trying not to think about all the work I’d normally be doing right now. I could scrape by for a while with a little extra help from Aaron, but I didn’t have a contingency plan for this kind of situation. Nothing like it had ever come up before. Solo operations like mine were common, but maybe I’d put too much stock in myunbreakablereputation.
“Did you have breakfast?”
I laughed but cut off the sound with a grunt when the pain shocked through me.
“I did.” If she considered toast breakfast—which I didn’t. But anything more would have been too much for me to manage. I’d been defeated by fried eggs. An all new low.
She walked through the barn aisle beside me, her flip-flops slapping against the concrete floor. “Is there anything I can do for you? Anything you need?”
Nothing she could provide. Nothing realistic, anyway.
“I’m not sure exactly what you’re offering here, June.”
She splayed her hands, glancing around. Apparently, she wasn’t sure, either. “I feel kind of responsible for the state you’re in—”
“A bit, yeah.” A little advance warning of her impromptu visit would have been nice.
She glared again, but there might have been a speck of humor to it.
“I just wanted to see if I could make it up to you somehow.”
Hundreds of ways she could make it up to me spun through my head, but I shut them all down one by one. That would never happen. Not now, not ever. I’d already been left once by a city woman with big plans—I wouldn’t sign up for the same heartache with June.
“It’s just ribs, June. I’m fine. Unless you’re offering to muck out stalls and water the horses, there’s really nothing I need.”
Her face lit up, and she took an eager step closer. “I could do that.”
I leveled her a hard look. “Since when?”
The line between her eyebrows returned. “I grew up on a farm, you know.”
“Remind me again how many horses your dad has out on his fruit farm.”
She pressed her lips together in a look of irritation. Too bad for her it was cute as hell.
“I know how to muck out stalls. Your grandmother taught me right here.”
Now that stopped me. “Gram taught you? When?”
“At a Girl Scout merit badge trip.”
My brief laugh fanned the flames in my chest, igniting the embers in my lungs. My temples ached from all this walking around, and a cool sheen of sweat had broken out on my forehead. I needed her to get gone so I could collapse and not think about leggy brunettes for a while.
“What, twenty years ago?”
She held her head a little higher. “Seventeen.”
