Instead, I stay near the door and take it all in. She moves into the kitchen without waiting, pulling open cabinets, checking the fridge, and yanking out ingredients.
“Well,” she calls out, “I wasn’t prepared for a dinner guest, but it looks like I have all the ingredients to make chicken pesto pasta and salad. And I have a loaf of sourdough bread from the farmer’s market. Sound okay to you?”
My mouth practically waters. “That sounds delicious.”
She smiles a little and turns back to the counter. A cutting board comes out, followed by a pan. She lines up the ingredients and gets to work.
I lean one shoulder against the wall and watch her. The knife moves in steady, even cuts. Nothing rushed or careless. She’s in complete control here.
"You cook a lot?" I ask.
She glances over. "I try to. My job keeps me busy, so there are some days when I have no choice but to pick up dinner somewhere, but I prefer to make my meals at home.”
I look around the table, the open files, the highlighted pages. “Lawyer?” I guess.
She nods. "Environmental nonprofit. Trying to make the world a better place.”
Interesting.“Sounds like a tough job.”
“It can be,” she agrees. “But it can also be really rewarding. I want to preserve as much of this beautiful planet as we can for future generations.”
She turns back to the stove. The smell hits a minute later, garlic, pesto, and butter sizzling in the pan. My stomach growls in response.
“Mind if I give Roxy some chicken?”
I shake my head. “Not at all.”
“Come here, Roxy,” Jenny calls. Roxy obeys immediately, like Jenny is her favorite person in the world.
Traitor.
Jenny gives her the chicken and Roxy scarfs it down in record time.
“Sheesh, Roxy,” I mutter. “Have some manners.”
Jenny laughs. “If she was a food critic, I think I’d have just earned a Michelin star.”
For a minute the only sounds are the knife against the cutting board and the food sizzling in the pan. It’s a comfortable, easy kind of quiet. And I’m discovering that Jenny doesn’t feel the need to fill the silence. She talks when she has something to say and doesn't when she doesn't.
If everyone could be like that, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time in the woods alone.
I find myself imagining how my life would be with Jenny in it. Which is anabsurdthought. She’s a beautiful and intelligent lawyer… and I’m, well,a grumpy mountain hermit.
“So, what do you do, Micah? Besides rescue foolish women who’ve wandered off the trail?”
“Um,” I say uneasily, not really wanting to talk about myself. “I did twenty in the Marines. Now I’m retired. I bought a nice piece of land and now I sell timber. In the summer, I sometimes work on boats at Lake Mercury.”
She looks at me in surprise. “Retired Marine? But you’re…” Her voice trails off.
I raise an eyebrow. “What?”
She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I just think of Marines as, erm, clean-cut, I guess?”
“And I was, for twenty years. Now, I don’t have to be.” I run my fingers through my beard a bit self-consciously.Maybe it’s time for a trim.
She smiles. “I get that. I have to dress up for court, but you won’t catch me in a pair of pantyhose when I’m off the clock.”
As she plates the food, she tells me about a case she’s working on. A rural community’s water supply has been contaminated—families who’ve lived there for generations suddenly can’t drink from their own taps. She’s helping put together the case against the company responsible, digging through lab reports and fighting to prove what’s already painfully obvious.