Page 17

“Yeah. Sure, you can. Why don’t you make some coffee instead? That doesn’t involve hot stoves and possible burns.”
“I’m fine,” she sniffed but followed his orders anyway, heading to the coffee machine on the corner of the counter.
“I know,” Nash placated, like she really was a cranky toddler. “Consider it a payment for waking you up in the middle of the night.”
Meg pursed her lips but stopped fighting. He was probably right… Handling a hot stove in her current daze probably wasn’t wise. And hot food sounded perfect right about now.
Meg started up the coffee machine, spooning in liberal amounts of grounds. She knew she was properly exhausted when she started getting impulsive. Impulsive over stupid stuff. Like the thought that she should just eat a teaspoon of the coffee grounds. If you could drink coffee, surely you could eat it too? That was what chocolate was anyway. Wasn’t it? They came from the same bean. Surely just a little nibble wouldn’t hurt; it would at least ease her curiosity.
Luckily, Nash scooted past her to get to the fridge, and she was freed from that spiral of bad ideas. Meg dumped the spoonful of coffee grounds into the machine and decided to keep that particular delirious impulse to herself.
He cracked a half dozen eggs into the skillet, added a colossal amount of bacon to a separate pan and ignited the old-fashioned gas stove. Almost immediately it started to hiss and crackle, and Meg couldn’t think of a better sound in the world.
“I’m assuming that you want some,” Nash drawled, gesturing at the stovetop. Meg had to make a conscious effort not to drool.
“You assumed correctly,” she said and sat down before she was tempted to do anything else stupid. She didn’t need an audience for her sleep-deprived shenanigans, thank you very much.
“My old bossneverwould have made me food for answering a night call,” she said with a yawn.
“I’m not your boss.”
“Contractually, you are.”
Nash just grunted in a disagreeing sort of way. “So your old boss was ungrateful?”
“Just an idiot in general. In a too-big hat.”
Nash snorted. “So he was clearly compensating for something, then.”
“Oh, definitely.”
He shook his head as he poked the eggs around the skillet.
Despite avoiding Nash at all costs while she’d been here, Meg had still been insatiably curious about how he’d ended up doing all of this. Yesterday she had zero intentions of asking any questions, but now… it seemed safer to edge towards asking personal questions with his back turned and his hands occupied by something else.
“So I have a question…” she started.
“Yeah?”
He sounded happy enough for her to ask, not defensive. His shoulders didn’t hunch up or anything, so Meg went ahead and asked.
“How on earth did you end up running aranch?”
He turned a little to look over his shoulder at her, eyebrows raised because he definitely hadn’t been expecting that. Then he laughed, one bright note, and for a second it was like the Nash she used to know had come back to life. Meg allowed herself a small smile, but only when he turned his back on her, his attention back on the skillets.
“Long story,” he said, poking at the bacon.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning on going anywhere anytime soon.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
She waited, letting him think, and sure enough he started to tell his “long story.”
“We had an uncle, me and Will, who passed away when I had just turned twenty. None of us had really seen him much. None of the family had. He was pretty much a recluse towards the end. Anyway, he left the place to me and Will.”
“Oh wow,” said Meg. “And how’d the rest of the family take that?”
“Most of them were just kind of baffled,” Nash said, flipping some eggs. “The rest were just relieved thattheyweren’t the ones saddled with the responsibility of the place. Only a couple were mad that they didn’t get the land so that they could sell it for a profit. But I never liked them anyway, so no losses there.”