She lowered her head and mooed at me, a long, foghorn sound punctuated by the aggressive swish of her tail. The filed stumps of her horns were blunt but would definitely break a rib, at least, if she charged me. Or she might decide to knock me down to trample at her leisure. We’re talking a creature the size of Stella.
And I totally didn’t care.
“Don’t yell at me, you stupid cow!” I jabbed a hand toward the calf, who taunted me from behind its mother. “Keep your juvenile delinquent away from my car!”
She stamped her hoof and let out another throaty bellow.
“No. You shut up. This is my side of the fence.” I waved vaguely gateward. “Get your fat ass and your miscreant offspring back on your side of the barbed wire.”
“Hey! You!”
I froze, with a screech of mental tires and the bug-eyed equivalent of a cartoon spit-take. What the hell?
“You! Crazy girl over there!”
The “over there” jump-started my stalled brain and ground my gears back into motion. It wasn’t the cow talking, then. What a relief.
Slowly, I turned to see a horse, not far away from me, and a guy on the horse, sitting with one fist on the reins and one on his hip, looking down at me like I was insane.
“What the blue blazes are you doing to that cow?” he said.
“Me?” My voice went stratospheric with outrage. “That calf was violating my Mini Cooper.”
The cowboy turned his horse in a leisurely circle, scanning the field. I really had run quite a ways from the house. He shaded his eyes to peer in that direction. “You mean that blue toy parked in front of Ms. Goodnight’s place?”
I swatted a fly and sort of glare-squinted up at him. “Goodnight Farm. Yes.”
“I heard Ms. Hyacinth was going on a trip this summer,” he said, eyeing me and keeping his distance the way people did from lunatics. Even his horse was looking at me like I was nuts.
This was not a good time to realize that I was standing in the pasture in a state of highly questionable decency. Maybe if I pretended I meant to be out there half naked, he would think it was a bathing suit.
Placing a casual hand on my hip—then dropping it because the pose was ridiculous—I answered, “I’m house-sitting for her.”
Then I called myself an idiot. Like axe murderers couldn’t ride horses. Forget that he was tanned and rugged and had a sexy-young-cowboy thing going on, which I didn’t need to be invoking in my head, because he was a stranger and I was in my underwear.
“Um, not just me, of course.” I cleared my throat and folded my arms. Nice defensive body language. I was a National Merit Scholar, for God’s sake. Soldiering on, I said, “Me and my sister. And our pack of big, ferocious dogs.”
The guy was just close enough that I could see his brows arch, one sardonically higher than the other. “And you’re out here sunning yourself in your skivvies because … ?”
So much for that bluff. God, this bravado thing was tough. “I told you. That cow was scratching its butt on my car. I saw it from the window and ran out—”
He’d raised his chin to look past me, toward the house. “Did you by any chance leave the gate open?”
“No! That was my sister, who— Oh hell!” I could hear the dogs barking. Worse, I could hear bleating. Joyful goat chuckles of freedom.
“The goats!” I clutched my head, an absurdly melodramatic reaction suited to this farce. “The goats were in the tree!”
“The … Wait, what?”
I didn’t stay to enlighten him. For all my cursing Phin for leaving the outer gate ajar, I’d left the yard gate standing wide open. Running toward the house, I could see the dogs weaving mad circles around the field. Behind them were the goats, chasing them just for the hell of it, as far as I could tell.
The horse came up alongside me at a trot. Something dropped onto my head and I screamed and batted it to the ground, then found myself staring stupidly at the cowboy’s worn denim shirt. When I looked up, he called over his shoulder, now covered by just a sweat-blotched white undershirt, “Put that on. You’re getting a sunburn.”
Then he kicked his pinto into a slow lope and directed his efforts at rounding up the goats.
Focus, Amy. Just because he looked great in the saddle did not mean he wasn’t an axe murderer.