Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 99960 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99960 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
“I get it,” I promised. “Believe me, I get it.”
He seemed to accept that and relaxed. “I did have a thought yesterday.”
“Oh?” I sipped at my tea, trying not to stare too hard at his handsome face.
“We don’t have any photos together. No selfies. Nothing.”
Damn. I hadn’t thought about that. “Well, if it comes up, we can just say we were keeping our relationship quiet so we deliberately didn’t take any. Now that we’re married, maybe we should try to take at least one a day. Just so we have them. We could take a selfie while we’re out on the farm today.”
“All right.” He nodded gruffly and glanced down at my feet. “Do you have wellies?”
“I have hiking boots.”
“Those will do. Breakfast first.” He pulled open the refrigerator and removed eggs. “Eggs on toast work for you?”
“You’re cooking me breakfast?” The thought caused a little kernel of warmth in my chest.
Jared shot me a too-sexy smirk. “I’m cooking myself breakfast like I have done for years. It’s only polite to ask if you’d like some too.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I’d like eggs on toast too.”
“Sunny side up or over easy?”
“Over easy, please.”
He smiled at the pan as he placed a knob of butter in it. “Guess we can tell people we have one thing in common—we like our eggs the same way.”
I grinned as I pulled the bread out of the larder to make the toast. “Imagine that.”
Jared would never be a big conversationalist. I got the impression he was more of a listener. But at least at breakfast he wasn’t as coolly distant with me as he had been. I peppered him with questions about the farm before we departed, and he told me how many acres he had across eight fields. Each field had a name and a purpose.
Our first stop was the henhouse, right behind the farmhouse. I’d heard the hens clucking around and, of course, the rooster, nature’s own alarm clock. Jared explained he had one rooster to twelve hens.
After we’d eaten and cleaned away our dishes (Jared was very tidy, which I’d already guessed from the state of the farmhouse), he’d pulled a bag of what he called layer pellets out of a large cupboard in the mudroom. While he handed me the bag along with a bag of mixed corn, he grabbed a bucket and filled it with water from an outside tap.
“The chickens need food and water daily, but the food has to be removed at night to discourage pests. Their bedding needs changed once a week, and the henhouse requires disinfection every four months,” he told me as we strolled over to it.
The house was twice as big as any I’d seen, as was the attached chicken run. At the sight of Jared, the chickens came running toward him, squawking eagerly.
I smiled at their excitement and studied what Jared was doing as he poured water into a trough-like dish the chickens could access from inside the run. Next to it was an even longer trough.
He reached for the pellets and corn, but I kept my grip on them and walked over to the trough. “Do I just pour them both in, like a mix?”
At his silence, I squinted back against the early-morning sun. I’d need to return to the house for my sunglasses before we left to explore the rest of the farm.
“Well?”
Jared frowned but nodded. “Aye, just pour it in.”
“Until the bags are empty?”
“Aye.”
I nodded and poured it all in, laughing at the way the chickens ran at it, pecking at the pellets and corn before I’d even finished. “Hungry, huh? Is that yummy? Mmm, it sure looks yummy.” I murmured some compliments to the ladies as the laid-back rooster suddenly squeezed in between them. “Oh, here he is. The man of the hour. This is the life, huh? All these ladies to yourself.”
The rooster cocked his head at me as if to say, “Well, yeah” and I giggled, turning to Jared.
The soft expression on his face made my smile falter.
He’d never looked at me like that before.
As if realizing it himself, he strolled abruptly past and opened a box next to the henhouse. Inside were egg cartons. Weirdly excited about fresh eggs, I hurried to his side and watched as he opened a part of the home that housed the chickens.
He revealed beds of wood shavings inside, and they were dotted with fresh eggs.
“Oh my God.” I clapped my hands together. “Freaking eggs!”
Jared chuckled as he glanced at me before carefully collecting them. “You’re acting like you’ve never seen an egg before, but we just ate them, remember.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never seen them fresh from the source.” I peered into the carton as Jared filled two. A dozen eggs. “Do they lay this many every day?”
“Almost every day. I keep some for myself and I sell the rest to Morag who runs the grocery store and deli. When Sarah lived here, she looked after the chickens and dropped the eggs off with Morag every morning before her shift at Ardnoch. Now I do it.”