Winning the Cowboy Billionaire - Emmy Eugene Page 0,3

just outside the perfumery, which sat a hop, skip, and jump from her front door. Foolishness rushed through her, and she couldn’t get herself to take a single step.

A loud whistle rent the country silence, and Olli whipped her attention toward the sound.

She became aware of dogs barking, and the thundering of horses hooves, and another earsplitting whistle. “Ho, there,” a man yelled, and Olli watched as Spur Chappell rode right in front of her on a magnificent bay horse.

She fell backward at the sudden appearance of him, realizing that he’d put himself between her and an oncoming herd of sheep.

A scream came from her mouth as she steadied herself against the door, and then Spur rode in front of her again, yipping and yelling at someone or something else. The dogs kept barking and barking, and just like someone had put up an invisible fence, the swarm of sheep turned away from her and the perfumery and went in a wide arc toward the south.

Olli pressed her palm over her heartbeat, watching the fifty or so sheep flow away from her.

The dogs went with them, but Spur himself turned and looked at Olli, their eyes meeting and locking for what felt like forever.

A grin danced across his face, and he lifted one gloved hand and acknowledged her before pressing his cowboy hat further onto his head and galloping after the sheep.

“Oh, my…” Olli let her words hang there, all of her focus now on the handsome cowboy who would look mighty fine on her arm for just one night.

2

Spur Chappell hated sheep with everything in him. They had a special talent for getting out of their fences, though they literally had the smallest brains of all farm animals.

He hated that they even had sheep at Bluegrass Ranch, but his youngest brother had insisted he get them. Spur had wanted to keep Duke on at the ranch, and he’d given in.

He wished now that he’d listened to his intuition, which had told him these sheep would be more trouble than they were worth. Not only that, but that Duke would not be around to tend to them properly.

He was off in Alabama this week, looking at two new mares he wanted to bring to the ranch, and that meant Spur was the one in the saddle with all the cattle dogs, trying to round up the naughty sheep.

Things happened swiftly from time to time, and he hadn’t had a spare second to call or text Olivia Hudson, his next-door neighbor, and warn her about the sheep. There were only five dozen or so, but sheep could cause some damage if they were left unchecked.

Of course, they’d headed straight for her place the moment he’d swung into the saddle. Double of course, she’d been standing outside, waiting to be trampled.

He knew they wouldn’t do that, but he’d still put himself and his dogs between the herd and the woman, because the last thing he and Bluegrass Ranch needed was a lawsuit.

Twenty minutes later, he had all the sheep back in their corral, where Blaine had fixed the fences they’d broken through. He touched his hand to his hat for his brother and called, “I have to go talk to Olli. They gave her a fright.”

Blaine waved to indicate he’d heard Spur, and Spur set his sights on his one and only neighbor out here in the hills beyond Lexington. He loved the land out here, which always seemed to be made of emerald green grass and bright white fences. He loved the sky when it was pure blue, and when it had puffy clouds in it, and when the wind blew in a storm.

He loved the smell of fresh water in the stream on his land, and the scent of sawdust in the air from the new bridges he’d just put in.

His horse breathed rapidly, and Spur leaned down to pat All Out’s neck. “Good boy,” he said to the horse, the way one would to a dog. “We got ‘em, thanks to you.”

It was the dogs who’d really done most of the herding work, but Spur never told the horses that. His horses all believed they were kings and queens, because he raised them to be. They had championship blood in their veins, and he expected them to train and run like it.

That was how he made his money, after all. If he had a horse who wasn’t a diva and couldn’t run, he couldn’t do anything with that horse.