Home > My Cowboy Single Dad Blind Date

My Cowboy Single Dad Blind Date
Author: Hanna Hart

1

 

 

Trent

 

 

Raising a kid was hard.

Trent Haven knew this. He’d heard it from his parents and seen it repeated on television shows and in movies but experiencing it for himself was nothing short of a shock.

This was especially true when your wife took off with another guy and left you to raise your kid alone all before your twenty-sixth birthday.

His son, Bexley “Bex” Haven, had just turned two years old. He had hazel-brown eyes, like Trent, and a shock of bright red hair, like Lily—Trent’s ex-wife.

Lily left Trent when they were both twenty-three years old, just two months after having their son.

Before she left, the Haven couple had it pretty good.

Trent’s parents owned a number of dude ranches across middle and Southern Texas and assigned each of their six sons to run them. Trent moved to Nueces County, seven miles south of Corpus Christi, when he was just eighteen years old to run the smallest Havenview Ranch in the chain.

The couple bought an old farmhouse and renovated it into the rustic-chic house of Lily’s dreams, complete with three-car-garage and swimming pool.

They also had a hefty income for two teenagers.

While the rest of his family’s ranches were geared towards tourism, the Nueces Havenview location was more of an orchard and boutique hotel. They only had ten cabins for guests to stay at and didn’t have the even close to the experiences for their tourists that his brother’s ranches did.

At Havenview Nueces, guests could enjoy meals at the on-site farm-to-table restaurant, schedule weddings and business retreats at the big barn, ride horses, and take a two-hour tour of the three-hundred-acre property. But that was it.

They didn’t offer fly fishing or wagon rides or cowboy shoot-‘em-up-pretend-standoffs like some of his other brothers did. They were a working ranch.

The Havenview ranch had ninety-acres of orchards, plus the greenhouse, restaurant, an area for horses as well as sheep, chickens, and, of course, the guest houses.

Even with tourism on the bottom rung of Trent’s priorities, the money his family was able to put into restoring the ranch—mixed with the standing contracts to supply three different grocery store chains across Texas and New Mexico that came with the purchase of the property—Havenview had been an immediate success.

“What’s that?” Bex asked his father, pointing up to the white blossoms that coated the rows of apple trees.

Trent adjusted his son in his arms, lifting him up to grab one of the flowers.

The two of them had taken the morning to walk through the orchards

“That’s a flower, buddy. They bloom on the trees, and then you know what happens?” Trent asked, and Bex shook his head, inspecting the flower. “They grow into apples.”

“This one?” his son asked, lifting the crumpled pink and white petals to Trent’s eyes.

“Well, maybe not that one,” he laughed, nodding toward the massacred bloom.

“You around?” came a fuzzy voice through the walkie-talkie clipped to Trent’s belt.

He reached around to grab it and recognized the voice immediately to be his best friend Bill.

“I’m in zone five,” he said, looking up to the sky as if he could somehow see Bill there. “What’s up?”

“The bees absconded!” Bill yelled with humor.

“What? What do you mean?”

Bill didn't respond, but Trent could hear a little ATV out by the gravel roads that weaved through the orchards and rightly assumed it was Bill, looking for him. Before long, Bill was running down the rows of apple trees with a big grin on his face.

"What's this about the bees?" Trent repeated.

"They're gone!" Bill repeated.

Trent's brows twisted to a deeply confused frown. "All of them?"

Bill nodded.

Trent and Bill Jefferson had been friends for six years. Trent's father hired Bill's father, Bill senior, and his agricultural consulting firm when they first bought the ranch. Jefferson Consulting helped Havenview quite literally blossom.

When Trent and his father Joshua told Bill senior what they wanted from the ranch, Bill made it happen. Within a few years, Bill Junior joined the crew, and he and Trent had been best friends ever since.

"What do you mean?" Trent repeated, still wanting to know what had happened to the thousands of bees he had just bought for his ranch. "What happened?"

"Da, the bees gone," Bex piped up, looking at his dad as if to say, “Why's that so hard to understand?”

"Thanks, buddy," Trent said, offering a small smile before turning his attention back to Bill.

"I've noticed them getting a little antsy the last little while, but then again, it's been about hundred and twelve degrees the last couple of days, and I assumed the bees were getting hot," Bill said.

"Is that a thing? Do bees sweat?" Trent asked curiously. "Are they temperature-sensitive to heat?"

"I mean...I've been checking on them, too, and I could see them working in the frames below, and I thought they were just going down to the lower boxes because they were cooler down there? That was about a week ago, and when we checked in this morning, they were all gone."

"They're not dead, are they?"

Bill shook his head. "Nope, just...abandoned ship."

"Why? What did Jordan say?" he asked of their bee expert.

"She said they didn't like the ranch. She said there were a few reasons they could have left, one being new wood or painted wood. They don't like that."

"All right," Trent nodded, and the two of them began walking back toward the ATV. "So those were two big mistakes we made, I guess. Here I was thinking I was letting them live in the lap of luxury."

"She also said a lack of fresh food or a water source for them, which..." Bill paused, and the two of them looked around the acres of fruit trees. "Obviously, that isn't it."

Trent sighed. He'd heard that bringing bees to the ranch would boost farm production. Keeping bees often made flowers and produce larger and more plentiful and he was fully on board when Bill had pitched the idea, even though he absolutely abhorred bees.

"You'll be happy to know Jordan and I did a deep dive," Bill said, running a hand through his budding afro. "I think we got to the bottom of what happened."

Trent met his friend's eyes. "And? What happened?"

"The Queen is dead."

Trent let out a loud laugh. "Way to bury the lead!" he exclaimed.

"I think her legs got clipped by one of the interns when they were moving them to a new hive."

"Sure, sure," Trent chuckled. "Blame the interns."

"Queen died," Bex repeated absent-mindedly as he continued to reach up toward the apple trees while they walked.

"Can't they just...hire a new one?" Trent asked, then pressed his lips thin in a curious way.

"Hire a new one?" Bill said, carefully repeating the words.

"You know what I mean! Can't they just elect a new one?"

Bill burst out laughing. "It doesn't work like that, unfortunately!"

"We freed them from slavery. They shouldn't be leaving," Trent grinned, throwing a hand out in front of him. "They should be erecting a statue in our honor!"

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air #
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)