“Neither of you will be in my way. My house is your house.” I meant it from the bottom of my heart. I wanted Maisey and her things there. I wanted the house to feel like it was full of family again. Since moving Dad and his belongings out to the ranch, the house had felt decidedly empty. “If you can wait until Thursday, when my shift is over, I can help with the heavy lifting. But feel free to move whatever you want while I’m at the station.”
I grabbed a ring from the hook by the door, pulled off my house key, and handed it to her.
Her throat bobbed as she took it. “How will you get in?”
“You can bring me the spare from the utility drawer in the kitchen.”
She didn’t say anything else but slipped out the door and headed down the hall. Vader was waiting for her with the kitten in his mouth again. He pranced over to her, showing the thing off and preening like a damn parent.
“What’s this?” she laughed.
“Vader, the cat-savior-of-the-world, found another stray,” I said with a sigh.
Maisey bent over to pet both animals. “Aw. What a sweetie.”
Vader thumped his tail and pushed the kitten into her hands. Maisey took the little thing, brought it to her face, and rubbed her nose in the fur, and damned if I wasn’t jealous of the cat now.
She turned to me, her expression opening in surprise. “Are you keeping this one?”
“No.”
“Maybe if you keep one, Vader will stop bringing you more. Maybe he just wants a friend. Someone to care for,” she said softly, and her words hit home in ways I couldn’t quite describe.
My crew had moved from the couches to the table with lunch in front of them and were being unusually quiet, absorbing every word. Tejas made a choked noise at Maisey’s idea, and Kasey didn’t even bother to hide her laugh. The probie looked confused as normal, but it was Captain MikeStone, standing at the head of the table, who actually responded.
“Yeah, Romeo. Maybe you should keep this one.”
Stoney wore an SRFD baseball hat turned backward and had a Metallica T-shirt stretched across his chest. The outfit's youthfulness was at odds with his brown hair, which was turning gray at the sides.
“Stoney,” I said with a chin nod in his direction. “What dragged you in today?”
He wasn’t due for another three days, but there was a grimness to him, regardless of the tease he’d just dropped, that made me think he’d come to discuss the rumors about the fire chief position. While I could change my marital status, Stoney had no way to fix his lack of education in time to get the job. It had to be eating at him.
He could argue his experience surpassed my degrees and certificates, and it did. But he’d also made a few enemies on the city council last year, fighting the change to the ordinance on livestock within the city boundaries. It would be a toss-up which way the politicians would vote when it came down to him or me.
“I wanted to talk to you about the schedule,” Stoney said, which we both knew was a lie.
Maisey bent over to put the kitten into the crate, and her dress rose in the back, teasing the curve of her ass and making my body go rigid. When I saw both Tejas and Leon shift to get a better look, I grabbed her by the waist and hauled her toward the exit. “I’m going to walk Maisey out. I’ll be right back.”
Maisey and I almost made it to the top of the stairs when a tinkling stopped us. When I looked back, wide grins were stretched across my crew’s faces while they tapped their silverware against their water glasses.
“Congratulations, you two,” Kasey said. “You’ve been awfully sly about it, but we all know you fit together like two peas in a pod.”
My eyes jerked down to Maisey. It wasn’t the delightful blush that crept over her face, one I wanted to put there for all the wrong reasons, but the wariness in her expression that I suspected would give our secret away. We had one chance to persuade everyone this was real. With Stoney here, I had even more reason to make sure the show we put on convinced them.
“Thanks,” I said. “We wanted to keep it to ourselves for a while, but I guess Delilah couldn’t keep her trap shut.”
Stoney’s face tightened with suspicion.
“Let’s see the ring,” he said.
“At the jeweler’s, being sized,” I answered glibly.
Maisey’s hand slid into mine, and I squeezed it without looking downat her. I kept my eyes trained on Stoney.
“When’s the wedding?” Leon asked while shoveling pasta into his mouth. That kid had a lot to learn about manners.
“We haven’t set a date yet,” Maisey said quietly, and Stoney frowned. “Fallon and I need to find an opening in the ranch’s schedule, but we’ll let you all know soon so you can save the date.”