she didn’t pick up her fork again. He felt the weight of her gaze on his face, but he didn’t look up.
“What changed?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” Bishop did raise his eyes then, wishing he could just say what came into his mind.
“I mean, you changed. You went all cold.”
Bishop searched her face, finding genuine interest and confusion on her face. “When’s the last time you’ve been on a date?” he asked.
Her eyebrows flew up, and she leaned back, folding her arms. “Excuse me?”
“I’ve been flirting with you since the moment you showed up on my porch. I held your hand down there. Tried to figure out if you were a lot older than me or a little, because I don’t mind an age difference, but I didn’t want it to be, you know, creepy.”
His mouth was going to get him into so much trouble tonight, and yet, he couldn’t stop it. “And you were all, ‘why do you need to know that?’ as if you have no idea when a man is flirting with you. So I thought, maybe she hasn’t dated in a while. I don’t know. Maybe the fourteen-year-old prevents that. Maybe you’re not looking for a boyfriend or another—” He finally got his voice to stop.
Montana’s eyes had been steadily widening, and she gaped at him, her mouth open slightly. In the next moment, she snapped it shut, her arms still tightly clenched across her chest. “It’s been a while,” she said. “Since I dated.”
“You seriously didn’t know I was flirting with you?”
“I’m rusty, not oblivious.”
Bishop nodded, his face starting to heat now that he’d blurted out the entirety of his thoughts.
“I’m thirty-seven,” Montana said. “Four years isn’t very much.”
Bishop ducked his head and looked at his food. It wasn’t appetizing cold, and he’d definitely need to eat something more than he had. “No, ma’am, it is not.”
She hadn’t said she was looking for a boyfriend or another husband, and Bishop found himself needing to know. “If a flirty cowboy with a really big mouth asked you to dinner, would you check with your assistant so you could go?”
“I don’t have an assistant.”
Bishop’s gaze flew back to hers. A smile spread across her face, and she started giggling. That grew into real laughter, and Bishop grinned too.
“Liar, liar,” he teased, chuckling with her.
Montana pulled out her phone and looked at her calendar. “Depending on the evening, I think I could say yes to dinner with a flirty cowboy who has an honest mouth.”
Bishop’s chest finally expanded properly when he breathed, and he grinned at her. “Great,” he said. “Let me know if one asks you out.”
Chapter Six
Montana went down the immaculately carved steps, slowing as she neared the first floor. She wasn’t so bitter that she couldn’t appreciate Micah Walker’s skill with wood, even if she silently vowed to never say so, to anyone, out loud.
The front of the house had a long, wide hallway, but the only way to go was into the kitchen, so Montana bypassed the extra-wide front door and the huge windows, and went under the arched walkway that led into the kitchen.
She expected to see Bishop there, whipping up a hot breakfast before a day of hard work on the ranch. Only the faint morning light greeted her. Well, and plenty of silence.
Montana stopped again and took in the vastness of the space here. She’d always wanted a fifteen-foot-long island, and this kitchen had that. There were cupboards everywhere, and they weren’t quite white, but more of a freshly-churned-butter-yellow. They made the whole room lighter, and someone had put cheery blue and gray curtains to dress up the windows.
If she kept going straight, she could exit the house through another door that led out onto a deck. To the right of that sat the long table she’d admired yesterday. She moved over to that, tracing her fingertips along the wood. It spoke to her soul in a way nothing else, save motherhood, ever had.
She wasn’t sure if that made her strange or wonderful that she loved her daughter only slightly more than she enjoyed taking a rough piece of wood and turning it into something as functional and beautiful as a family table like this one.
In her mind’s eye, she could see the joy this wood got to absorb as people sat down for holiday meals. She felt the bond brothers had with brothers, and mothers with sons, and daughters with mothers. The sibling energy flowed through her, and she