Her Four Cowboys

“An elephant heart can weigh anywhere from twenty-six to forty-five pounds,” Austin answered promptly. “That would be so damn cool.”

“It’s forty-four, actually,” Lucy said with a coy smile.

We all laughed as Austin shook his head ruefully, and the rest of the night passed pleasantly enough with Lucy telling us different pieces of animal trivia between us sharing our own anecdotes of the last ten years. I hung back for the rest of the conversation, content just to listen to her and observe as she talked. She was so stunning that it was physically difficult for me to pull my gaze from her, and again, I was thankful that there were other people there to distract from the fact that I couldn’t keep my eyes from her.

With the way that her blonde hair hung down, occasionally brushing the side of her neck, I knew that I’d be seeing her again… not just in person, but also in my mind’s eye.

6

LUCY

“Hey, Mama,” I said, coming downstairs for breakfast that Saturday. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d allowed myself to sleep in until whatever time my body just got me up naturally. “How’s it going?”

“It’s good,” she said, handing me a cup of coffee as I stumbled into the kitchen. “I’m glad to see that you’re getting some good sleep. You’ve been putting in such long days at the clinic.”

“I know,” I said, yawning as I took a gulp of my coffee and tried not to grimace. It was way too sweet, and my mother had dumped in at least twice as much cream as I usually took, but I wasn’t about to let on that I didn’t like it. Not when she’d been putting in such an admirable effort to keep from stifling me.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out which of that nondairy stuff you take, and I figured you might be able to pick some up if you went out to get the groceries.”

Well, that was fair enough. I nodded, smiling. “Thanks anyway for the coffee, Mom. I just don’t use sugar anymore.”

She shook her head, and the green eyes that I’d inherited went wide. “I really don’t know how you can do coffee without any sugar at all, much less how you can drink any of that oat stuff takes the place of actual milk.”

I rolled my eyes. “Mom, we’re not that far from Denver. You must know at least a couple of vegans.”

“Just because I know them doesn’t mean that I see eye to eye with them on their dietary preferences,” she said.

I laughed. “So, I guess this is the moment where I say something cheesy, like a farm girl is a farm girl no matter where the farm is?”

“Exactly. And you wouldn’t be able to make me into anything other than a farm girl,” she said, picking up the plate from beside the stove and handing it to me. “Here. I kept these warm for you.”

“Aw. Thanks, Mom.” I really was grateful. No one made scrambled eggs quite like my mom, and despite having lived on my own for the last decade, I’d never been able to nail them the way she did them.

“Have a seat at the table, hon, and then we can go over what I’ll need you to pick up from the store for Christmas.”

I’d already set my plate and mug down at the table, but I was brought up short by her pronouncement, and how casually she’d seemed to drop it in the middle of my breakfast.

I shut my eyes tightly before looking back at her. “Fine. Let me see the list.”

Forty-five minutes later, I was pushing the cart through the aisles of our local grocery store, looking for the exact type of honey and bulbs of garlic that had the correct number of cloves for my mom’s purposes.

I’d been looking through the potatoes, carefully combing through them so that I had a decent variety of russet and red and ensuring that none of them had any rotten parts on them—I’d never hear the end of it if I brought her a rotten potato—and I turned away from the little counter, weaving through the produce section when I was caught up short by my cart running smack into something. I blinked out of my reverie of annoyance to see that I’d run headlong into another cart. I had allowed myself to get more distracted than I ever did.

“Whoa there, Luce,” a familiar voice said, and I blinked up at the tall frame of Adam Kent. His usual smile lit up his face, and he leaned over the handle of his cart so that he was facing me straight on. “If you wanted my attention, you could’ve just asked.”

“Ha ha,” I said, but the smile that stretched across my face was genuine. “Fancy meeting you here.”