Home On The Ranch

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“I should wait until after you’ve paid for the pizza to say this, but you’re doing me a huge favor, letting me take all this stuff. I’ll put it to good use.”

He couldn’t imagine how, but if it made her happy and it made him happy, he wasn’t going to argue with a win-win situation.

As he drove toward town, Ella visibly relaxed in the passenger seat and pointed both air vents on her side of the car at her face.

“This feels heavenly,” she said. “My plan is to take something I get from your place and make enough profit to fix the stupid AC in my truck.”

“It doesn’t work?”

“Pooped out on me a few weeks ago. I’m running the two-sixty air now—two windows at sixty miles per hour.” She laughed a little at her own bit of humor.

She might be making light of the situation, but no AC in Texas was like no water in the desert—unbearable. Working outside in the heat was one thing, but living without it when you were in your house or car was just cruel and unusual punishment.

He slowed down when they came up behind the mail carrier, then pulled around via the opposite lane. Ella waved at the woman driving the little red pickup.

“So you’re not from here,” he said. “How did you end up in Blue Falls?”

“I visited with a friend and liked it so much I made it a goal to move here. It just sort of fit my personality.”

He glanced over at her. “How so?”

“It’s friendly, eclectic, has small-town charm but isn’t so insular that newcomers are treated like invaders. It just seemed to be a nice place for people who’ve lived here their entire lives to share space with people who choose to relocate here.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“Probably not at the front of your mind when you live so far away,” she said as she readjusted one of her air vents. “How’d you end up in Dallas anyway?”

“It’s where I got a job after college.”

“So Keri said you work for an energy company. What do you do?”

“Head of logistics.”

“So you tell people where to get stuff when.”

“In a nutshell.” He slowed as they came into the edge of town.

“Sounds...um, very organized.”

“Which in Ella language means boring?”

“You said it, not me.” The way she appeared to be trying not to laugh caused him to snort a little as he made the turn into the parking lot for Gia’s.

When he held open the front door of the pizzeria for her, her smile lit up her entire face. And damn if he didn’t think it was the prettiest thing he’d seen in ages.

“Thanks,” she said. “Nice to see the city hasn’t robbed you of your chivalry.”

“You do know Dallas is still in Texas, right?”

“Really? I hadn’t heard.”

He smiled and shook his head. Ella Garcia had a lot of sass in that little body of hers, and damn if he didn’t like it.

They slid into a booth in the back corner near the entrance to the kitchen. He took off his hat and placed it in the seat beside him.

“Nice hat, by the way,” Ella said. “It suits you.”

Maybe it had at one point in his life. “You barely know me.”

“I’m decent at pegging people quickly. Comes from never staying any one place too long when I was growing up. It was figure out who to make friends with fast or not have any at all.”

“Lot different than going to school with the same people for thirteen years in a row.”

“Yeah, foreign concept to me.”

The waitress, a little blonde teenager about the size of his pinky finger, came and took their order for a large sausage pizza.

“So, back to the hat,” Ella said. “You look at home in it. No interest in becoming a rancher?”

“When I was younger.” Back when he’d held out hope that maybe his grandparents would change, would see how the way they chose to live affected him.

“When I was younger, I thought I’d be a fighter pilot when I grew up.”

That surprised him. “Really?”

“And then I changed my mind and was determined to become an anthropologist. Then a professional figure skater even though I’d been on ice skates exactly twice. But, hey, it was the year the Winter Olympics were in Nagano, and we were living in Japan. Guess you could say I changed career paths as often as we changed addresses.”

“And you settled on making stuff out of other people’s junk?”

She sighed. “People are too eager to label things junk. We’re such a throwaway culture. I like trying to imagine how to give something that’s seemingly outlived its usefulness a new life. And lucky for me, there are buyers.”

“A lot of them?”

“Enough that I need to figure out how to clone myself. And my house.”

His skin itched at the idea that she might be packing her house as full as his grandparents had. “You don’t have a shop?”

She shook her head as the waitress placed their drinks on the table then spun to take the order at the next table.

“A little toolshed and the back porch. One of my long-term goals is to be able to buy a place with a lot of room to spread out with storage and work space separate from my house.”

He tried to imagine her selling enough reclaimed home decor to afford such a place and had a hard time picturing it. But then he wasn’t the most knowledgeable guy about interior decorating or whatever was in style. Somehow he thought his style was probably called minimalist.

“I know a place that will be for sale soon,” he said with a little smile that conveyed he knew that probably wasn’t in the cards for her.

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Alas, it’s me and the little rental for the foreseeable future. I may see if I can convert the toolshed into a little store if my landlord will let me since they’re working to get the arts and crafts trail up and running.”

He must have given her a questioning look because she went on to explain.

“The local tourist bureau is compiling a list of all the artists and craftspeople in the area and is going to create a trail with a map so tourists can go from one to the next shopping for handmade items and original art.”

“Sounds like a good way to bring in more tourist dollars.”

He tried to picture Ella sitting in a little metal toolshed with the name of her business painted on the outside. For some reason, he didn’t like the image. She seemed like a hard worker, a go-getter, someone who believed wholeheartedly in what she was doing. Someone like that deserved a better public presence than a place you’d normally store garden tools and lawn mowers.

“If you’d like me to look at a business plan or your work flow plan, let me know.”

She stopped with her glass halfway to her mouth. “You’d do that?”

“Yeah. Why do you seem so surprised?”

“Because quite honestly I’m surprised you stopped progress on getting the house ready to sell long enough to come eat, let alone look at the business plan of someone you’ve known barely more than two seconds.”

“It’s something I can do easily when I go back to the hotel at night.” It was certainly a better use of his time than staring at the ceiling imagining Ella lying in bed next to him. At that thought he had to shift in the booth to make himself less uncomfortable. Thank goodness the table hid what those kinds of thoughts did to him.

“I’ll think about it. Thank you for the offer.”

“That wasn’t meant to say you don’t know how to run your business.”

She flipped her hand as if to wave away his concern that he’d insulted her.

“Just a little intimidating. I mean, I’m not exactly running a big corporation here.”

“Every company starts small.” True enough, but a lot of them failed, too. Ella seemed to believe in her business so much, it’d be a shame if hers failed because of lack of proper planning. Sure, he didn’t understand her business, but all businesses came down to numbers. And numbers and logistics he understood.