part.
And he wasn’t even sorry.
He had never cared about the sandwiches the girls he dated ate or what color their bedrooms were painted. He cared about both of those things with Jill. And now he was getting possessive. This was all very strange.
“We should get going.” He pivoted and started down the walk. He heard the boots on her feet hit the pavement behind him.
“To the penguin habitat?”
“To get breakfast.”
“Any chance you decided to just find me some yogurt?”
“Ellie might have yogurt.”
Zeke stopped next to his truck and opened the passenger door. He waited for Jill to join him. He noted the fact that she’d been fine putting the same clothes on again after showering. Sure, it was all she’d had here, but he knew many women who would have insisted on changing after tromping around a penguin habitat.
No, scratch that. He actually didn’t, because he didn’t know too many other women who would have been tromping around in a penguin habitat in the first place.
Tori, his cousin Josh’s wife. Possibly Charlie, if she got a wild hair. Bailey Wilcox, his friend Chase’s girlfriend, who also happened to work for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. She tromped around in worse all the time. Jordan, Fletcher’s wife, would. Possibly his grandmother. Other than that, he couldn’t think of many. None of the women he dated, for sure.
Jill climbed up into the passenger seat. “Who’s Ellie? I thought we were going to your grandma’s.”
Zeke nodded. “Ellie is my grandma.”
“And you call her Ellie?”
“There are a lot of grandmas and grandpas down here and several that aren’t even ours by blood that seem like grandparents, so early on we all started calling them by their first names. It’s unconventional down here, that’s for sure. But I can’t imagine calling Ellie anything else. Except maybe ‘brat’ once in a while or ‘lovable pain in my ass’. But then again, she calls me both of those things too.”
“I know what it’s like to grow up in a small town with your whole family around. But if I called my grandmother anything but ‘grandma’ she would’ve gasped so loud, you would’ve heard it down here.”
With her on the truck seat and him standing beside it, they were again at a more even height.
He took advantage and looked into her big green eyes. “You’re not from Omaha then?”
“Nope, not even from Nebraska. I grew up in a little town called Bliss, Kansas.”
“Bliss? Sounds like it should be a happy place.”
“It is for the most part. It’s a pretty typical Midwestern small town. Everybody knows your business, you’ve known everybody there since you’ve been born.”
“Everybody takes care of one another and pulls together?” Zeke asked.
“Yeah. For sure.”
“You miss home?”
“Sometimes. But I couldn’t do my dream job there and that’s always been more important than anything else. I go home to visit a few times a year.”
“Dream job as a zoo veterinarian?”
“Dream job working with penguins. Veterinary school was a good way to get credentials for that job. And Omaha was the first position that opened up that would give me direct contact with them.”
“You don’t like working with the bears and monkeys and giraffes?”
Jill shrugged. “Sure, they’re great.”
“But if it weren’t for the penguins, you wouldn’t have been there?”
“Nope.”
She didn’t seem apologetic about it, or even like she had to think about the question for more than a second.
“But when you inherited all this money and you could move the penguins anywhere, why not take them back to Kansas?”
“Griffin,” she said, thinking about that question for only about three seconds. “It’ll be nice to have another veterinarian around who has the level of passion for animals that I do.”
“Moving back home didn’t even occur to you?”
She was no longer looking him in the eye. “It really didn’t. If I was back in Bliss, I would be caught up in all of the family stuff, the community stuff, my old friends. I love them all and going home to visit at the holidays or for events, like anniversaries and babies being born, is great. But living there full-time would definitely cut into my work. My family doesn’t fully understand what I do or why. So they would be constantly harping on me to leave work at a decent hour and come over for dinner and to be available for picnics on the weekends or to help take my grandmother to appointments.”
Her eyes flew back to Zeke’s face. “It’s not that I don’t want to be around them