The Longest Ride(22)

She also liked that he was comfortable leaving her alone with her thoughts. A lot of people felt the need to fill every silence, but Luke simply watched the bulls, content to keep his own counsel. After a while, she realized that the music from the barn had stopped temporarily – the band on a short intermission, no doubt – and she wondered whether Marcia would try to find her. She found herself hoping that she wouldn’t – not yet, anyway.



“What’s it like living on a ranch?” she asked, breaking the silence. “What do you do all day?”



She watched as he crossed one leg over the other, the toe of his boot in the dirt. “A bit of everything, I guess. There’s always something to do.”



“Such as?”



He absently massaged one hand with the other as he thought about it. “Well, for starters, horses and pigs and chickens need to be fed first thing in the morning and their stalls need to be cleaned. The cattle have to be monitored. I have to check the herd every day to make sure they’re okay – no eye infections, no cuts from the barbed wire, things like that. If one is hurt or sick, I try to take care of it right away. After that, there are pastures to irrigate, and a few times a year, I have to move all the cattle from one pasture to the next, so they always have good grass. Then, a couple of times a year, I have to vaccinate the herd, which means roping them one by one and keeping them separated afterwards. We also have a pretty good-sized vegetable garden for our own use, and I’ve got to keep that going, too…”



She blinked. “That’s all?” she joked.



“Not quite,” he continued. “We sell pumpkins, blueberries, honey, and Christmas trees to the public, so sometimes I spend part of my day planting or weeding or watering, or collecting the honey from the hives. And when the public comes out, I have to be there to tie down the trees or help carry pumpkins to the car, or whatever. And then, of course, there’s always something broken that needs repairs, whether it’s the tractor or the Gator or the fencing or the barn or the roof on the house.” He offered a rueful expression. “Trust me, there’s always something to do.”



“You can’t possibly do all that alone,” Sophia said in disbelief.



“No. My mom does quite a bit, and we have a guy who’s been working for us for years. José. He handles what we can’t, essentially. And then when we have to, we’ll bring in crews for a couple of days to help shape the trees or whatever.”



She frowned. “What do mean by ‘shape the trees’? You mean the Christmas trees?”



“In case you were wondering, they don’t grow in pretty triangles. You have to prune them as they’re growing to make them come out the way they do.”



“Really?”



“And you have to roll the pumpkins, too. You want to keep them from rotting on the bottom, but you also want them to be round, or at least oval, or no one will buy them.”



She wrinkled her nose. “So you literally roll them?”



“Yep. And you have to be careful not to break the stem.”



“I never knew that.”



“A lot of people don’t. But you probably know a lot of things that I don’t.”



“You knew where Slovakia was.”



“I always liked history and geography. But if you ask me about chemistry or algebra, I’d probably be lost.”



“I never liked math that much, either.”



“But you were good at it. I’ll bet you were among the best in your class.”



“Why would you say that?”



“You go to Wake Forest,” he answered. “I’d guess you aced every subject growing up. What are you studying there?”



“Not ranching, obviously.”



He flashed those dimples again.



She picked at the railing with her fingernail. “I’m majoring in art history.”



“Is that something you were always interested in?”



“Not at all,” she said. “When I first got to Wake, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I took the kind of classes that all freshmen take, hoping I’d stumble on something. I wanted to find something that made me feel… passionate, you know?”



When she paused, she could feel his attention on her, focused and sure. His genuine interest reminded her again of how different he was from the guys she knew on campus.



“Anyway, when I was a sophomore, I signed up for a class in French Impressionism, mostly to fill out my schedule, not for any particular reason. But the professor was amazing – intelligent and interesting and inspirational, everything a professor should be. He made art come alive and feel relevant, somehow… and after a couple of classes, it just clicked for me. I knew what I wanted to do, and the more art history classes I took, the more I knew how much I wanted to be part of that world.”