We continued to prepare for breakfast quietly as we both did what needed to get finished. But as I watched Garrett I started to get a sneaking suspicious that he really did know how to cut vegetables. His fingers were still tucked under and he was expertly gliding his knife from one end of each vegetable to the other. He quickly twisted the cut pieces and diced them into perfectly cubed small bites.
“Have you worked in a restaurant before?” I asked.
“Why?”
Garrett smiled at me and I knew there was so much more to him that he wasn’t telling me. He had been trying to get me near him and pretending like he didn’t know how to cut up vegetables. It was clear that he really did know how to work in the kitchen and I had to think there was so much more about him that he was keeping secret.
I didn’t mind him keeping some secrets, just as long as I didn’t feel like he was manipulating me. I hated it when men lied for the sole purpose of getting what they wanted from a woman. I was an adult, and if I wanted to have Garrett in my bed I would, but I didn’t need to be manipulated into agreeing to it.
That was one thing I hated most about the men in New York. If I could find a man who was interested in a strong woman, he always wanted to play games and manipulate the situation. They were rarely honest and hardly ever actually interested in a relationship that lasted longer than a night.
New York had to have been one of the worst places in the world for dating. Although, the middle of nowhere Montana probably wasn’t the best place either. I was pretty sure Garrett was the only man even remotely worth me flirting with, and when he decided to leave I’d be left with no one.
Leaving was what the ranch hands did. I knew not to have feelings for them or to expect much more than a little flirting. But it was fun to imagine a little fun with a guy like Garrett around.
“You seem to have picked up the art of cutting vegetables very quickly.”
“Maybe I just had a really good teacher?”
“Maybe.”
“Perhaps you’d like to help me with my French kissing skills later?” Garrett asked as he moved toward me.
“Hold it, bucko; I don’t think you need help with those skills.”
“How do you know?” Garrett said as he inched closer toward me.
There was no doubt in my mind that Garrett didn’t need help with French kissing or any other skills that involved his mouth. He had the confidence level of a man who spent plenty of time with the ladies. Plus, Garrett was just too damn handsome to need help with any of the stuff like that. Even if he was a horrible person, which he wasn’t, he would have gotten plenty of girls.
“Stop playing with me; I don’t think you need help French kissing,” I said as my face turned bright red.
“Perhaps you’d like to teach me how to saddle up a horse sometime? I’d love to learn that.”
I was much more comfortable with the request to help with horses, but it did seem odd to me that the man had come to work on a ranch but didn’t know how to work with horses. It was one of those things that almost all the men who came to the ranch knew how to do. Why else would they be looking for work on a ranch unless it was something they were familiar with?
“So why exactly did you come to a ranch to work if you’ve never been around horses before?”
Garrett looked away from me and walked back over to his vegetable work area. He smiled but then looked back down at his vegetables and started to cut them again. I hit a nerve with him, I was sure of it. It was a tell-tale sign that he wasn’t interested in telling me why he really had arrived at our ranch. But I was open to hearing the version of his story that he wanted to tell me, too.
“Oh, you know. A man’s got to work.”
I waited to see if there was anything else he was going to add to his story. Maybe why he was traveling from Wyoming to Washington? Or how he had even found our ranch in the first place. I wanted something, any sort of real explanation, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to give it to me.
Over the years, I had heard some pretty crazy stories for why people ended up at our ranch. Some were traveling away from their past, others just trying to waste some time. I tried not to judge people when they ended up at our ranch. Ranch hands were needed, that was a fact. It didn’t really matter how they arrived on our doorstep; we needed them and they needed work. But I did prefer to know the truth of what was going on with them. The truth was something I valued very much in the people I associated with.
“Yep, that’s true,” I said. “Let’s finish up and get you out of here so you can eat and get started on all that work you need to do,” I said as I tried to hide how annoyed I was with him.
Why couldn’t he just talk to me like a normal person and tell me why he was there? Garrett seemed to love keeping secrets and it was all fun and games at the moment, but I was going to get really tired of it really quickly.
“I’m happy to help serve the guys, too, if you’d like.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t let the guys see you back here with me,” I said as it got close to breakfast time. “Go wash up and come in for breakfast with the rest of them. I don’t need help serving.”
Our short conversation had reminded me exactly why my mother had always told me to steer clear of the ranch hands; they never stayed long. When I was younger, I thought she didn’t like me hanging around them because they were older, or because they were poor. I even remembered getting into a huge argument about one young man who had arrived at our ranch suddenly in the middle of the night. My father had brought him and he looked scared to death to be there. He was quiet and I naturally reached out to him to make him feel more comfortable. After a couple of weeks on the ranch, we had grown close and we were laughing and flirting with each other every chance we got.