Leaving Sunflower Ranch was a little anticlimactic the next morning. Stevie simply put the things that belonged to her in her go bag and tossed the clothing the folks at the ranch had loaned her into an empty laundry basket and left it at the foot of the bed. She had wanted to take it all home and launder it, but Mia wouldn’t hear of it. She sent a text to Mia and told her where she could find the basket and got a simple one back that said, OK c u later.

She looked around the bedroom to be sure she didn’t need to do anything else and sighed. She was excited to get back to her own house, but she’d made friends here—no, she’d been part of a family. That was even better than making friends, and she would miss it.

Cody knocked on the frame of the open door and leaned on the jamb. “I thought we would grab some breakfast at the diner. We could call it our first date.”

“Or we could just call it breakfast,” she said.

“If I pay for it, and if I walk you to the door when we get to your house, then it’s a date,” he argued.

Date.

That was a word Stevie never expected to hear from Cody Ryan. She was happy that he asked her out, so why was she arguing with him?

Because I love the banter and the vibes it creates, she thought.

“You win,” she said, “it’s a date.”

He picked up her coat and held it for her. She couldn’t remember the last time she had a date. It had to have been at least a year before she came home to Texas. That would have been when she and Trenton, her second serious relationship, had broken up. He had been in advertising, was good-looking, and made a lot of money, but he was looking for a wife. When Stevie turned down the ring and the proposal, it was all over, and he had since married another woman only a few months later.

Wow! Can it really have been that long? she wondered as she picked up her go bag. She took one last look around the bunkhouse and made a mental picture of the whole place. She would miss being here with Cody and miss all the suppers and good times she had had with the whole Ryan family. She and Cody would date—that was a given—but things would never be quite like the time they had spent in the tack room and the bunkhouse.

“Ready?” he asked. “Need to get anything from the van or tell Dixie goodbye?”

“I’ll drive back out here later this evening or tomorrow morning and get what I need,” Stevie said around the lump in her throat. “I hate goodbyes, and I already kissed Dixie on the nose and told her to mind her mama.”