and he could take full ownership of Granny Frances’s ranch and incorporate it into his own.
“You don’t think—” Ange started, and then her sentence dropped off and her face drained of color. “This is the second envelope. Jo didn’t say it was the last one. What if there are more letters after this one? More stuff she wants us to do, more riddles we have to figure out? Could this be some kind of outrageous scavenger hunt Granny is sending us on?”
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Rowdy shook his head voraciously as his thoughts denied the possibility.
“I don’t think we ought to keep speculating on this bit. We need to go find Jo and clear up the confusion,” he said. “There’s no question that I want to honor Granny Frances’s memory, but...”
“Exactly,” she said, even though he hadn’t finished his sentence. “Whatever needs doing, needs doing quickly. I absolutely cannot stick around after this weekend. My flight back to Denver leaves tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got to return to my job on Monday. It’s my first day back after my maternity leave. I’ll lose my position for sure if I don’t show up. My boss is a real stickler about stuff like that.”
“What do you do?”
“I work in a five-star hotel as part of the dining staff for large, catered events. I’m one of those white-gloved banquet servers you encounter when you go to large meetings at a hotel. We have a lot of major corporations that come through, as well as conventions that meet there.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Not really. It’s a lot of standing and people can get really snooty. But it pays the bills, and I can’t afford to be picky. I’m not going to have the money to pay anything if I don’t get back there on time. Oh, the joys of living from paycheck to paycheck.”
Rowdy didn’t know about that. He lived from season to season.
“How old is Toby?” Rowdy asked, as what Ange had said earlier suddenly clicked. She had indicated she’d missed Granny Frances’s funeral because she was in the hospital having Toby, but that was only three weeks ago.
“Three weeks,” Ange confirmed.
“Don’t you get maternity leave for twelve weeks?” He had no idea where he’d pulled that information from. A television show, maybe. But it sounded fair enough.
She scoffed softly. “In the best of all worlds. I’m allowed to take twelve weeks, but my checkbook can’t handle the money I’d lose. Now I have Toby to support. I can’t afford to take off a whole twelve weeks. Three was pushing it.”
Rowdy didn’t know if Granny Frances had left Ange any money in her will, but it occurred to him that if they could get this deal done with the real estate, that would give Ange something to ease her load.
“Let’s talk to Jo and see what we can do. The sooner, the better. It’s possible that we will be able to work out some of the details about me buying Granny Frances’s ranch, which would in turn save you the trouble of having to come back to Serendipity.”
Her face reddened. “Pushy, much?”
He scowled and shook his head. He was trying to be nice and she was taking it all the wrong way.
“That’s not what I meant. Am I mistaken? I thought that selling the ranch was what you wanted to do.”
She sighed. “It is. I just don’t like feeling as if you are corralling me out of town. You don’t have to be brash about it. I get the hint.”
She shook her head. “Don’t worry. We’ll just have to set aside the whole Feed My Sheep thing and let Jo know that we aren’t going to continue. Surely, it can’t be so important that we have to drop our entire lives to pursue it.”
“Maybe not,” he admitted.
“Well, like I said, I have to be on a plane tomorrow afternoon anyway, so I can’t keep playing this peculiar game even if I wanted to.”
She smiled, but Rowdy could see the trouble she was having in curling her lips upward. “You’ll be happy to know that I’ll be out of your life tomorrow—and you’ll never have to see me again.”
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