Heartland (True North #7) - Sarina Bowen Page 0,18

supper?” Griff looks at his watch. “You don’t have a lot of time.”

“I cooked!” comes Leah’s voice from inside the house. “Dylan can eat here. Homemade mac and cheese and chicken cutlets.”

“Score.” Griff claps him on the back. “Good luck with the candy. Be in the barn at six tomorrow morning. Don’t forget to set your alarm.”

“I won’t. Jesus.” Dylan rolls his eyes as his brother climbs into his own truck.

Griffin leaves, finally. And Leah gives us a wave hello from the door then disappears as well.

Then it’s just me and Dylan. Alone. The way I like it.

Eight

Dylan

Even a minor run-in with Griffin puts me in a crappy mood. So I’m standing in the creamery scowling while Chastity unpacks a bunch of ingredients from a grocery bag.

It doesn’t bother me so much that he calls me kid. And I don’t mind doing farm work. But he’s gotten so pushy lately about what I plan to do with my life. Like maybe he’s hoping I won’t follow through on farming with him after graduation.

The dude really likes to be in charge. And everyone thinks of me as the fuckup. Maybe he doesn’t think I deserve to help run the place after college.

And maybe he’s right.

“You okay?” Chastity asks.

“Sure. Tell me what to do,” I demand, trying to shake off my bad mood. “We’ll make the first batch small, right?”

“Yes, and no. We’re going to cook two batches at once. But we’ll pour them off at different times, at different temperatures. After it cools overnight, we’ll decide which batch we like best. I only brought five pounds of sugar so we can’t get too carried away.”

“Still sounds like a lot.”

“We won’t need it all.” She looks up at me with those clear blue eyes of hers and tilts her head to the side. “Ignore Griffin, okay? This is going to be fun.” She plucks an apron off a row of hooks on the wall and places it in my hands.

“Don’t let me screw it up,” I grumble. I seem to do that a lot.

“You can’t,” she says. “Caramel is just basic science. You have sugar and fat. We’re boiling the water out of the milk, and then the temperature keeps rising until things start to caramelize. Which has something to do with carbon. The only variable is how high to go, and when to stop.”

“How do you know all this?” I ask, looping the apron over my head.

“YouTube. And the people in those videos didn’t look any smarter than we are. Find the heaviest pot, would you? Look in that drawer.” She points. “We’ll start with two quarts of goat’s milk. I had to get vanilla extract because I couldn’t afford a vanilla bean.”

“That’s okay. We don’t need to be so fancy, right?” I open the drawer and take out the largest pot. “Making money on food is all about walking the line between premium and too expensive.”

“True. You can rein me in if I get too ambitious.” Chastity lifts her eyes to mine, and I smile for nothing. I always have fun with Chastity. She just gets me. She doesn’t look at me and see broken fences and unmilked cows and a guy who’d rather mess around on his fiddle than make a five-year-plan. She isn’t always trying to change me into someone else.

Even as I form this thought, my pocket buzzes with a text. When I pull out my phone, I see Kaitlyn’s name next to a long string of messages. I tuck the phone away again. I’ll deal with her later. Maybe if I take her out to dinner on Sunday night she’ll get over her snit.

If I’m honest, hanging out in a kitchen with Chastity is a better Friday night than listening to hipsters try to sling poetry. I like poetry just fine, but I like it to be good.

“Pour in the milk, okay? Two quarts.” Chastity is measuring sugar into a bowl. “And we’re going to need a wooden spoon.”

“Sure thing.”

We work in companionable silence for a while, with me stirring the milk over the flame while she adds the sugar and the salt. And then we switch jobs, with Chastity watching the temperature slowly rise on a candy thermometer, while I butter some baking pans and then wash and dry various tools and the surfaces.

“Does it matter that nothing seems to be happening in that pot?” I ask. It still looks like milk.

“Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” Chastity says. “It