remind him of that by tomorrow—but he usually didn’t make the same mistake twice.
Very different behavior than when he was in high school, she mused. She could remember when they’d been assigned to work in the same group on a history project. He hadn’t wanted to put in the effort of leading, but he always had a comment on everyone else’s work. He thought he was way too smart. Apparently, the Marines had taught him otherwise.
During a lull in the conversation, Brooke said to Lou, “Too cold a day to expect any tourists, I bet.”
Lou shrugged. “I’ll hear the bell if anyone rings it, so yeah, I’ll probably get other chores done.”
Adam glanced sideways at her curiously, but since he had a burger at his mouth, she answered his unspoken question.
“We have a beautiful old sleigh from my great-grandparents’ day. Dad had it fixed up last winter, and we started giving sleigh rides to tourists in the afternoons. We’ll even do it in the evenings if someone makes a reservation. Otherwise, they just show up and ring the bell. There are signs in town advertising it at the community center, and we put some ads in the paper. But that’s it.”
“It’s pretty successful,” Josh said, after taking a swig of milk. “Nate’s good with the advertising.”
“The sleigh is actually a big draw,” Nate added. “Josh did the leather tooling on the bench.”
“It’s beautiful,” Brooke agreed. “And I take my turn driving occasionally when Lou can’t. It’s very relaxing, and I’m always surprised by the people I meet.”
“She tries to pretend she’s all into the solitary ranch life,” Nate said in a teasing voice. “But sometimes I wonder.”
Brooke laughed along with her family, but inside she felt a little jolt of surprise. What did he suspect?
Adam glanced at each of them dubiously. “Do you three get along this well all the time?”
“It gets a little sickenin’,” Lou said, cutting himself a slice of cake from the pan.
“Oh, they’ve had their fights,” Sandy added, leaning back in her wheelchair from her half-eaten plate.
Brooke frowned at how much of her mom’s food had gone untouched. Her appetite didn’t seem quite the same yet. She told herself her mom had just gotten home from the hospital, that the meds affected her appetite, so it was only natural . . .
And then she heard a guffaw, and realized all the men were laughing hard. She’d missed the punch line. Even Adam’s eyes seemed bright with amusement although he hadn’t given in to open laughter.
“What did I miss?” she asked, smiling.
Josh leaned forward to see around Adam. “Don’t you remember how mad you were that Nate graduated from a pony to a horse?”
She rolled her eyes. “Not that story again. Let’s not forget that I was, what, six?”
“Eight,” Doug said, sitting down at the other end of the table. “We caught you on Nate’s horse about a mile from the house, clingin’ to its mane, ’cause the saddle’d already fallen off.”
“I wasn’t clinging,” she said patiently, then looked at Adam with a twinkle in her eye. “I was riding bareback, and my brothers still can’t acknowledge my talent.”
There was a collective groan from those same brothers, and though she grinned at them, she reached past Adam and smacked Josh on the shoulder. That pressed her up against Adam’s arm, and she quickly pulled back, feeling suddenly flustered.
“Can you just let this stuff go?” she asked. “Now pass me the cake.”
That evening, Adam fell sound asleep at the dinner table and awoke with a crick in his neck as his grandma was clearing the dishes.
He surged to his feet, feeling a dull ache settle in his lower back. “Let me help, Grandma.”
She tsked. “I told you you wouldn’t need to run for exercise.”
“And I didn’t listen to your warning. But it’s a habit that’s hard to break.”
The other widows must have gone while he’d drifted off, and it was just the two of them at the kitchen sink. He wanted to lead her to a chair but already knew how badly that worked. She’d rather stand and tremble occasionally than admit to any weakness.
“So Brooke worked you hard,” Grandma Palmer said, smiling.
“The ranch chores worked me hard,” he amended. “They took it easy on me in the afternoon. I rode fence for several hours, looking for damage. A bull tried to escape, and I had to chase it back into the pasture.”
“What happened?” she asked, staring up at him.
“I radioed Brooke, who brought the barbed wire for