“Good idea.” She handed him the tools he needed, then spread mayonnaise on slices of white bread. He found ice in the freezer, cracked the cubes from a tray and smashed them into smaller chunks with the small hammer she’d dug out for him. Once the ice was crushed, he rustled up a couple of plastic bags, put one inside the other and brushed the ice shavings inside.

“You’ve done this before,” she observed, slapping ham, turkey, lettuce and tomatoes on the bread.

“Too many times to count.”

“Do you have kids?” she asked automatically and he hesitated long enough to catch her attention. She’d never thought of him as being married or having children, but then she didn’t know much about him. Not much at all.

“Nope. No kids of my own. But I’ve spent enough time with teenagers to get in this kind of practice. I’ve worked on crews with kids where we bucked hay, strung fence, roped calves—the whole nine yards. Someone was always getting kicked, or falling off a rig, or being bucked from a horse or whatever.” He glanced up at her and she felt her breath stop at the intensity in his eyes. So blue. So deep. So ... observant. She felt compelled to look away to break the silly notion that there was some kind of intimacy in his gaze. What was it about him that made her nervous? She was used to men and boys, had grown up with three brothers, yet this man, this stranger, had a way of making her uncomfortable. She pretended interest in slicing the sandwiches into halves. “So you’ve done a lot of ranching.”

“Yep.”

“In Texas?”

“All over. Wyoming and Montana for a spell, but mainly Texas.”

“And that’s where you met Ralph Sorenson?”

He nodded and his eyes fixed on her with laser-sharp acuity. “Years ago.” He handed her the bag of ice, and though there were dozens of questions she wanted to ask him about Ralph and Dave and his life, she carried the ice pack, along with a platter of sandwiches, down to Josh’s room.

She couldn’t help wondering what Luke thought of her and her cramped little home. Filled to the gills with memorabilia from her youth, antiques, and enough books to make her own library, her house had a tight, packed-in feel that bordered on cramped but felt right to her. A string of Christmas lights was forever burning over an old desk she’d shoved into a corner of the living room and her walls were covered with pictures and doodads she’d collected over the years.

To her it was home and, if she moved to Tiffany’s house, she’d take every bit of her life—the mementos from her past—with her.