r head. “Just, you both sure remind me of Barry and I when we were young.”
“How so?” I asked in surprise.
“Oh, you know, just the way he’s stopped by to check up on you, and the way you talk so familiarly about your lives. It’s sweet.”
I smiled over at Trethan, wondering if we were ever going to be a sweet older couple celebrating their fiftieth anniversary, but I wasn’t as worried about that now as I had once been.
Trethan and I seemed to have settled into life together pretty well, doing sweet things like brunch together on Sunday mornings before I went to the gallery or long walks around the ranch on sunny afternoons. Things were obviously going to change once the little one arrived, but I was no longer worried about the type of father he would make. I had seen him with kids who came to ride horses at the ranch, and he was starting to remind me more and more of my own father, rather than his.
“How many months along are you?” Janet asked me.
“Six and a half,” I said, unable to keep from smiling just thinking about it.
“Getting close now,” she said. “Do you know what the sex of the baby will be?”
I shook my head. “Trethan’s hoping for a boy,” I said. I rolled my eyes. “Really hoping for a boy. But I’m happy with whatever we have.” I wrinkled my nose. “Except twins. I watched a documentary on twins the other day, and I don’t think I’m ready to handle that just yet!”
Janet laughed. “Well, I wish you all the best,” she said. “Barry and I raised three hellions, ourselves. Of course, none of them live anywhere near home at this point, and it’s hard for them to travel now that they’ve got their own broods, but we visit them as often as we can.”
“That won’t be a problem with us,” Trethan said, shaking his head. “I’ve been working for her father for years; he owns the Lazy J Ranch. You might have heard of it. It’s one of the main riding ranches in town.”
“As a matter of fact, we’re going for a ride there tomorrow,” Barry said.
I laughed. “Trethan will be taking you on your ride tomorrow, then,” I told them. “He handles everything to do with the Sunday nature rides at this point!”
“Oh, great!” Janet said, shaking her head with a smile on her face. “So you both grew up here in White Bluff?”
“We’re high school sweethearts actually,” I told her, smiling over at Trethan. “We took a few years off while I went to college to study art, but we got married less than a year after I came back, and we’ve been happy together ever since.”
“That’s just so sweet,” she said, shaking her head. “Well, now we absolutely have to buy something to bring home with us.”
Barry snorted. “Knowing you, you’d like to buy every last thing in this gallery,” he said good-naturedly.
The two of them moved off, still debating which piece would go best in which part of their house. I watched them, still smiling.
“You’re thinking about us,” Trethan guessed, observing my face.
I blushed but shrugged at him. “Don’t you ever think about our future?” I asked, actually curious to know whether he did or not.
“Of course, I do.” He reached up to brush back a lock of my hair. “Every morning that I wake up next to you, I roll over and just look at you, and you know what I’m thinking then?”
I glanced over at the customers wandering around the shop and then lowered my voice. “Knowing you, you’re probably thinking about how horny you are,” I said, smirking at him.
He burst out laughing. “That comes after,” he said. “No, when I first wake up, and I roll over and I see you lying there in bed next to me, my first thought is always how lucky I am to be there and to have you there with me. And then my next thought is to think about the fact that I get to wake up to you like that, wake up with that beautiful, perfect, peaceful view, every morning for the rest of my life. And, I feel like the luckiest man in the world.
“And then I think about how horny I am.”
I laughed and shook my head. It had taken a while for him to open up about his feelings for me. Although to be fair, it had taken me just as long to open up about my feelings for him. But by now, I knew that Trethan was a secret romantic, underneath it all. Poor circumstances in his past might have led him to hide that away from me for a long time, but it was obvious to me now.
I couldn’t have picked a better man to spend the rest of my life with. And I couldn’t have picked a better father for my child.
“So, I was thinking that, now that I have the ranch all to myself, maybe I’d start a bull-riding school at the Lazy J,” Trethan said suddenly.
“No way in heck,” I told him succinctly, not even having to think about it for a moment. Where once I would have been worried about crushing his dreams by telling him that he wasn’t allowed to do something that he wanted to do, now I realized that the only way for us to really cooperate as a couple was for us to be upfront about the fact that our future was, in fact, our future, rather than his future and my future as separate entities.
And there was no way that I was letting him have anything to do with bull riding again, not after his accident.
But Trethan was smiling and jostling my shoulder lightly. “Just joking,” he said. But then, his look turned serious. “What do you think about circus riding, though? We could be teaching acrobatics on horseback. Wouldn’t that be something?”