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The logs wouldn’t roll that direction because of how they’d been stacked. The kid would be perfectly safe. It was funny, he’d spent a whole lot of time running around this place with no supervision. He and his brothers had driven this truck all around when they were way too young to be doing that, with all of them in the back. Of course, they had lived in the kind of environment where parents hadn’t much cared what happened to them. Or had been the true and active danger to their children.
So really, no one had cared what they’d gotten up to.
But now in his advanced age—he was thirty-four, after all—he did think a little bit more about safety.
They got into the truck and he fired up the engine, started to drive forward, looking in the back to check on Benny. The kid looked thrilled. The snow was still falling, and it was freezing, his cheeks were pink, and he had a wide grin on his face. It was infectious. It made Brody smile too.
They rocked and rolled through speed bumps, but Brody took it slow, and kept the ride as smooth as possible, even while the truck pitched and swayed a little bit. He turned on the radio. It was filled with static, but he could still hear the twang of country music coming out over the questionable speakers.
And he cranked it up.
By the time they coasted into the cabin driveway, the snow was really coming down. And when he stopped in front of it, the door burst open.
“What exactly is going on?”
“You sent him outside,” Brody said, looking at Elizabeth’s extremely worried expression.
Seriously, the kid had no idea. She would kill him as soon as look at him if he did the wrong thing. He had the sense that he had done the wrong thing as far as she was concerned, and he was about to get a lecture.
Not death, though. There was a little bit of comfort in that.
“I see that. And you...found him?”
“I did,” Brody said. “We cut some wood. And brought it to you, because you’re going to need some in your woodstove, since it’s snowing and very, very cold.”
That seemed to lower her hackles some. “Oh. Well. That was nice. It was nice.”
And then their eyes connected, and her cheeks went pink. And he knew that she was thinking about the kiss. The Lord knew he was.
Maybe that was why she was mad at him. A man could hope. Mad not because they had kissed, but because they had stopped. He had been questioning himself on that score ever since. But then there was the kid. And then there was... Brody. And everything he was.
“All right, Benny, now you have to help me carry it all up onto the porch.”
Benny’s grin slid off his face. “That’s a lot of work,” he said.
“Ranch life is a lot of work, kid. But we loaded the wood up, now we need to finish the task.”
“That doesn’t seem fair, though, because I did help load it up.”
“First of all, life isn’t fair. Second of all, an unfinished task means you may as well not have started. That would make loading the wood useless. Do you want to make all that work you did useless?”
“No,” Benny grumbled, and climbed up the side of the pickup, and jumped down to the ground, rounding to the tailgate. Elizabeth gasped when he did it, but didn’t freak out wholly.
Brody lowered the tailgate, and Benny started taking hold of pieces of wood.
“Why don’t we make a stack right here beneath the window, close to the door. That way it will be easy for your mom to get at it when she needs to start a fire. Or better still, easy for you to grab it while your mom does that.”
There was still grumbling, but he was doing it.
Elizabeth looked over at him. “You’re awfully authoritarian.”
“I just think he ought to do some things for you. Is that authoritarian?”
“Well, I just...”
“You feel guilty, so you don’t want to ask him to do anything. I don’t feel guilty. Not about much of anything.”
Damn, he was a really great liar. He could take his show on the road.
