Decidedly with Wishes - Stina Lindenblatt Page 0,32

it was this particular cowboy who had my blood burning hot.

I smiled at Eli as he took the photo. It wasn’t hard to do, considering I was about to cross another item off my bucket list.

Two down and four to go.

Last night at the B and B, I’d started doing research on dating sites for San Francisco and the Bay area. But as much as I knew I needed to set up an account and profile on at least one site, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Not yet, anyway.

Besides, we weren’t returning to San Francisco for ten more days. But I would definitely set up the accounts before we left Copper Creek. Time was ticking to find my future husband.

At the thought of that, my stomach twisted into a bullion knot.

Eli jumped into the wagon and sat next to me, our bodies a breath away from touching. The fresh scent of pine from his soap and whatever else he used beckoned to me, and I had to fight the urge to lean into him.

“Ready?” he asked.

I grinned and grabbed hold of the prickly edges of the bale I was sitting on. “Absolutely.”

“Okay, Joe,” Eli called to the man in his fifties who was sitting on the tractor seat, a baseball cap perched on his head.

The tractor engine rumbled to life, and a moment later, we were slowly rolling backward—our backward.

Since we weren’t traveling at an insane speed—quite the opposite—I relaxed my hold on the bale and grinned at Eli. “I’m actually going on a hayride. I can’t believe it.” A little kid couldn’t have been more excited on Christmas morning than I was at this moment.

He laughed, the sound a low, delicious murmur. “I take it you’re enjoying it so far.”

I rapidly nodded. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He smiled, and I couldn’t help but let my gaze fall to his lips.

For a heartbeat, I wondered how they would feel against mine. But I pushed the thought aside and looked away. “It’s so beautiful out here.”

We were driving along a dirt road, farmland on either side of it. The knee-high wild grass swayed softly in the breeze like waves on the ocean. In the near distance, mountain ranges covered in pine trees and patches of snow reached upward.

A bird screeched above our heads, soaring high in the fading blue of the sky.

That sensation gently bubbling inside me?

Peace. I’d been so busy with work and making the girls’ dresses in my free time during the past five years, I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to experience it.

“It is,” Eli said. “I love San Francisco, but I always love coming home to this.”

“If you hadn’t been drafted to the NHL and didn’t play hockey, would you have stayed in Montana?”

“Probably. My father is a physician and my mother’s a nurse at the hospital in the next town. With my struggles in school, neither of those options were open to me. I would’ve ended up working for my uncle on his farm or one of the other farms or ranches in the area.”

“Is that what you would’ve wanted to do, or was that the only option you felt was available to you?”

“More like the latter. I enjoyed helping out on my uncle’s farm during the summer as a kid, but it was never something I wanted to do as a job once I got older.”

“How did you get into hockey?”

“It gets damn cold here in the winters, and the ponds freeze. There isn’t much else to do around here at that point but play hockey. I was lucky my parents could afford to buy the equipment and Mom worked part time at the local medical clinic, so she could drive me to practices and games.

“When I got older, I moved to Minnesota to play with a junior team and lived with my billet parents during that time.”

At what had to be a confused expression on my face, he explained, “Billet parents are like foster parents for hockey players. Most kids who dream of playing in the NHL but live in small towns without a highly competitive hockey team are recruited to join junior teams in larger towns. During the time they’re playing on the team, they live with billet parents. They’re your parents away from home. They get paid to look after you, and they’re often the ones who go to your games and cheer you on.”

“How old were you when you moved away?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” The screech of the bird above us had nothing