Page 118

He was right—competing in beef against the Garretts and the Kings was nearly impossible. The way that he had approached it was brilliant. Specializing was brilliant. And he had done a fantastic job. He had gotten contacts, and he was actually a lot more organized than it appeared on first glance.

Some of her work today was about educating herself. She did some reading on the fact that dyslexic organization tended to be three-dimensional, rather than simply sequential. So what made sense to her wouldn’t make sense to him, and what seemed messy to her was actually arranged in a way that worked for his thought process.

She found a bunch of color-coded folders deep in his office and determined he’d meant to get papers organized by color so he would find taxes, invoices and other things at a glance. Once it was all put together, it would be easy.

Well, as easy as this stuff was. Nobody liked doing paperwork.

It was interesting to care about somebody else’s success. Their operation. She knew Four Corners, and she knew it well. But watching the way that Levi managed a smaller spread was really interesting.

And it only made her more and more in awe of him.

“I’m back with dinner.”

She heard his voice through the door and perked up.

“Dinner?”

“I went down to John’s and got some fried chicken. Now, if he knew that I was feeding a Sullivan, he might have rescinded some of the drumsticks.”

“I’m starving,” she said.

“Well, maybe we should have a picnic.”

“Where?”

“The firepit.”

He didn’t have to ask her twice. She took two beers out of the fridge and went outside, and Levi brought a brown paper bag out and set it down on the small table by the firepit. He took out a smaller bag filled with fried chicken, a tub of coleslaw, a tub of macaroni salad, a tub of potato salad...

“Is everything mayonnaise-based?”

“Everything except the chicken. And the rolls.”

“I’m not complaining, actually. It’s just interesting how much they are essentially all the same food.”

“But they aren’t,” he said. “First of all, because the potato salad has mustard in it, but also because it has potatoes.”

“Good point,” she said.

“I make a lot of those.”

He grinned at her.

She felt...shimmering and ridiculous, and a little bit like she’d been hit over the head.

Or perhaps thrown into a pond.

“Thank you,” she said. “You worked all day and then went and got dinner.”

“Well, I like working the ranch. I do not like sitting in my office and going over all the things that you were dealing with. I definitely felt like I owed you dinner.”

He started to dish food onto his plate. He heaped food on, in big mounds, and she wondered about him being an eighteen-year-old boy, responsible for those other children.

“How was mealtime? With the kids, I mean, after your parents.”

He sat down and dug his fork into a mound of potatoes, and she realized her plate was still empty, so she went and got her own food.

“Well, at first, women in the community brought food. Meal trains are how you take care of people. I was taken care of, Quinn. By some. Your mom even brought some food over a few times. It wasn’t all bad. There were people who cared. But that doesn’t last. So eventually we had a lot of meals like this, chicken from the store and sides.”