“Oh, we’ll need two jars of pickled beets from the cellar.” Granny Gertrude pointed one aged finger with a slight bend in it to Georgia’s list.
Georgia Quinn admired the wrinkled skin and paper-soft quality of her grandmother’s hands. She looked up into her bright blue eyes, still as mischievous as ever.
“Doesn’t Gramps hate beets?” Georgia asked, making the one next to the beets on her list into a two.
“Oh, he loves them.” Granny waved her hand like she was swatting at an annoying fly. “And when you go to the grocery store today, make sure you get several extra bags of chips. We always run out.”
Georgia changed the four to an eight on her shopping list, enjoying this quiet, peaceful time with her grandmother.
Yes, she hated the Quinn family parties and get-togethers. There seemed to be an endless string of them, as if something as trivial as Flag Day or the First Day of Fall required a huge shindig with the people she saw nearly everyday anyway.
But the annual Harvest Festival was something she thought should be celebrated, because it meant a tremendous amount of work had just been completed on the family ranch where she and her siblings lived and worked.
“Are eight bags enough?” she asked. “It’s just us, Granny.” The larger Quinn family got together from time to time, including at the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and just before Christmas. She wasn’t sure if they were all as crazy as her branch of the tree and had celebrations for things like a full moon, but it didn’t matter.
Georgia had been dreading the upcoming holiday get-togethers in all their varieties for a few months now. Maybe since last New Year’s Day when her long-time boyfriend, Simon Flower, had broken up with her instead of popping the question.
She frowned at the mere thought of Simon. She hadn’t been on a date since, and he’d been out with three different women in the last nine and half months. She shook her head, her long auburn hair brushing her arms as she did. But the thoughts wouldn’t go.
“Eight is fine,” Granny said, moving into the kitchen to put on the kettle. “Do you want tea?”
“Have I ever not wanted tea?” Georgia grinned at her grandmother. “How have you put up with all these family events for so many years?”
Granny Gertrude smiled back at her, the weathered, wonderful expression of someone much wiser than Georgia looking back at her. “Oh, honey.” She got down two teacups, and Georgia thought that might be it. Granny was getting up there in years, and she sometimes lost her train of thought in the middle of the railway.
She put the cups on the counter where they’d been going over the grocery list for the Harvest Festival. Georgia would go and get everything she could that night, and the day before the big event next Saturday, the four sisters in her family would spend all day making the food for the cowboys, ranch hands, seasonal workers, and anyone else who had come to help them put in their cattle and crops.
Georgia was tired just thinking about it.
Granny sat at the counter and twirled her teacup. “I don’t mind the family parties. When you’re my age, they’re something to look forward to.” She gave Georgia a look with loads of sparkle in her eyes. Georgia sometimes got in trouble after Granny looked at her like that.
“What?” she asked.
“You just need a boyfriend,” Granny said, and Georgia almost rolled her eyes. “Then the parties are more fun.”
“Okay, Granny,” Georgia said, chuckling as the tea kettle sang. “I’ll get right on that.”
* * *
That evening, she waited as long as she could to go into town. It was a twenty-minute drive from the ranch where she lived, and if it were later at night, there was less chance of her A) seeing someone she knew, and B) getting sucked into a conversation about her lackluster love life she didn’t want to have.
After all, the grocery store in Quinn Valley wasn’t one of those big chain, open-twenty-four-hours type of stores. She’d only gotten a cart and put in five jugs of apple juice from a display just inside the door when someone said, “Hello, Georgia.”
That voice.
She turned as the creepy-crawlies started up her spine. Sure enough, Simon himself stood there, looking all debonair with his dark hair swept to the side. Honestly, Georgia thought he’d always tried too hard to look like Hollywood’s next big thing, when really he’d left Quinn Valley for less time than she had.
“Hello, Simon,” she said as nicely as she could.
“Shopping for the Harvest Festival?”
“Yes.” She glanced at a woman who came to Simon’s side. She was the model type, with a bigger gap between her thighs than humanly possible. Georgia instantly felt inferior, though she probably only carried an extra ten pounds, and Simon had always told her it was in the best places anyway.
“This is Carrie,” he said, as if Georgia hadn’t been in the same class as the other woman for many years. He really was so arrogant.
“Hey, Carrie,” Georgia said, consulting her list. “I have to—”
“Darling, we should get going. We’ll be late to the movie.” Carrie gave Georgia a slightly wicked look as she tried to tug on Simon’s arm.
“You look good,” he said to Georgia, to which Carrie practically hissed.
“You guys go on,” Georgia said in a voice that was much too loud. She worked to quiet it, when really she just wanted to rage at her stupid ex-boyfriend who hadn’t had a problem moving on from their four-year relationship.
Four years.
And some of the best years of her life too. She couldn’t believe she’d wasted them on him. Hadn’t seen his inability to commit much sooner. She smiled as she said a prayer to maintain her composure.
“I have to meet my boyfriend later too, and this list is long.” She waved the list at them as if they cared what was on it. Then she walked away, a new, strange idea morphing in her mind as she searched for the crushed tomatoes her mother would use to make the most amazing tortellini soup.
The next morning, Georgia read and re-read the words she’d typed into the box on the computer screen. Quinn Valley had a small newspaper with poor circulation, but their online classifieds were huge. It wasn’t really something run out of Quinn Valley, but Lewiston, which was about an hour away.
But if she wanted a car, a dog—or a job—everyone in the vicinity knew to check the online classifieds first.
And she was about to post a job for a handyman to help her finish the barn. She almost scoffed. She did not need help finishing that barn, except for maybe Father Time, who seemed to keep throwing tasks at her that prevented her from getting out to it to finish it.
She flexed her fingers and read the ad one more time. It sounded reasonable. She needed someone who was handy with a hammer to help on the Quinn Valley Ranch. She couldn’t put must be handsome, or men without girlfriends only in the text.
She wasn’t that desperate. At least she didn’t think she was. And she would not be hiring this person to be a handyman around the ranch, but to be her fake boyfriend for the next three months as she faced the busiest time of year for Quinn family events.
Granny Gertrude had said they’d be more fun that way.
Georgia’s guilt almost had her deleting the listing. She knew Granny hadn’t meant for her to hire a boyfriend, but since the other options for finding a man hadn’t panned out well for her, Georgia felt like her choices were a bit limited.
And the women at church had already twittered to her about her “new boyfriend,” because word in Quinn Valley got around quickly, and apparently Carrie hadn’t wasted any time in mentioning the fake beau to anyone who would listen.
Determined now to show her and Simon—and herself—that she’d moved on, Georgia hit CONFIRM on the listing and not one moment later, a message popped up that her listing would be live within the next fifteen minutes.
She sat back in her chair, her desk filled with folders and notes that sat at precise ninety-degree angles. No one came in her office without her permission, and nothing happened at Quinn Valley Ranch that Georgia didn’t know about. Didn’t schedule. Didn’t plan.
You can’t plan a boyfriend her mother had said. Georgia knew that. She did. But maybe, just maybe, she could hire one.
* * *
A week later, her situation was desperate. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Maybe that within fifteen minutes, her phone would blow up with potential handymen—er, boyfriends—and she’d have her pick?
But it hadn’t. In fact, only one man had applied. A Logan Locke, and she’d scheduled an interview with him that morning, which was seriously cutting it close as the Harvest Festival was the following evening.
But apparently, Logan had been on another job that didn’t end until yesterday and he couldn’t come until today.
“He’s all you’ve got,” Georgia told herself as she straightened her hair and then pulled the sides back. “So don’t blow it. Don’t apply your list of boyfriend rules to him. He doesn’t need to meet them. He just needs to A) not have a girlfriend.” She held up her fingers as she started checking off items. “B) not be a felon, and C) be able to pretend better than almost anyone.”
She sighed and dropped her hands to the bathroom sink in front of her. “This is impossible.” But she still turned, pulled on her cowgirl boots, and headed out of her bedroom.
All of the Quinns in her family lived on the ranch property somewhere. She and her three sisters shared the main homestead, which had seven bedrooms spanning two floors. There was a kitchen upstairs and down, the office where Georgia maintained the operations on the ranch, a piano room where Jessie gave lessons when she wasn’t dealing with the animal births, and four bathrooms.
Her parents had built a cottage in the corner of the yard and moved into it a few years ago. Her older brother, and the only boy in the family, Rhodes, lived in a cabin closer to the main road. He’d take over the ranch one day, and the homestead would become his. He’d said he wouldn’t push any of his sisters out, but Georgia was hoping to be long gone before then.
He lived next door to her grandparents, and he took care of them a lot of the time. Georgia went down to their cabin several times a week as well, and she treasured her time with them. They didn’t seem to care how close she was to getting married and having children, and she felt more peace there than almost anywhere else on the ranch.
There were cowboy cabins that sat in an octagon beyond the main ranch buildings, which included a dozen stables, several huge pastures for the horses, two bull pens, and three barns full of pigs, chickens, and even a wild turkey or two.
Behind the barns, a huge field with llamas and potbellied pigs and a couple of goats often found Georgia standing there, talking to the animals as if they could understand her. Today, those pigs and llamas were her goal. She’d named them all after explorers, some so obscure she had to give history lessons to some of the new cowboys who came to work the ranch.
A knocking in the unfinished barn caught her attention as she passed it. Her heart flopped in her chest like it had been hooked up to an electrical pulse. “Hello?” she called as she entered through the doorless entrance.
A man turned toward her, his dark gray cowboy hat going well with those bright, bright green eyes. Her heart wailed at her now, and her legs stopped working completely. He wore his beard neat and trim, just how Georgia liked.
He was mesmerizing, and Georgia forgot her own name for a moment. Then, it registered that he stood in her barn, with a hammer in his hand. Her hammer.
She stepped forward to take it from him. “Who are you?” she demanded. “And what are you doing in my barn?”
He let the hammer go without resistance, those eyes pulling at her and drinking her up and smiling like they’d just shared a funny moment. “I’m Logan Locke,” he said swiping the sexy cowboy hat from his head to reveal gorgeous sandy blond hair. “I’m here to interview to help finish this barn.”
Georgia let the hammer fall to her side. She couldn’t have picked a more handsome fake boyfriend if she’d held a lineup of cowboys. And she knew her granny was about to be proven right. This holiday season was going to be the best one she’d had in all of her thirty-one-years on Earth.
“Oh,” she managed to say. “I’m Georgia Quinn. Some of my interview questions will seem a bit unconventional….” She wanted to reach up and tuck her hair behind her ear, maybe give him a flirty smile. But she kept her professionalism front and center. After all, she had to prove to him that she could pretend as well as he could.
“I’m ready,” he said, tucking his hands in his pockets and giving her a smile that should be illegal. “Fire away.”
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