Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 113270 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 566(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113270 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 566(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
I straighten and let out a deep exhale. My breath fogs in the cold. “We’re not missing them exactly. Betty Bagley called and said they’re in her front yard.”
Randy stares at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“What? They can’t be missing if you know where they are.”
He sighs, and I resist the urge to bury him in blame. It’s his fault we’re doing this in the first place, and he knows it. If I’d had my way, he’d be doing whatever the fuck he wanted without me to worry about.
“Just…keep the rest corralled,” I instruct instead. “I’ll grab the four at Betty’s and be back.”
“Yeah, go play shepherd,” Randy calls after me. “I’ll just stay here and wait for the other half of the flock to chew their way into traffic!”
I leave him to his bitching, hopping in my truck and heading down the road with a bucket of feed and my sanity hanging by a thread. I’ve got a lot of pent-up anger with my brother—and I know it’s not a one-way street—but you can’t meld two minds when they’re on opposite sides of the same damn coin. His greatest frustration with the sheep is that we don’t excel—but we’re never going to. The point, for me, is to exist.
Main Street is awake and active as I make it into town. Storefront lights are already on, the smell of coffee and donuts and fried food wafts in the air, and snow is pushed along the curbs in tired gray piles.
Sheriff Peeler’s cruiser pulls up beside me at the one and only stoplight in town, and I rev the engine playfully like I’m reckless enough to race the sheriff. Some days, I am. Today, though, I’m feeling pretty good, still high off the unexpected, incredible sex of two nights ago.
Frankly, I’m thinking getting Randy laid might help a tremendous amount with his disposition.
Pete rolls his window down, grinning at me like he’s been waiting all morning for this. “Morning, Tad. Lost sheep again?” I follow his eyes toward Fran’s flower shop, where all four of my missing sheep are currently munching from the flowerpots outside like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Shit. Apparently, they had their fill of Betty Bagley’s yard.
“Morning, Sheriff,” I say, tipping my ball cap toward him. “They’re not lost. They’re just…uh…sight-seeing.”
He chuckles. “Let’s hope they don’t make it down to Melba’s again.”
He’s referring to the Melba Danser Bakery Disaster about a year ago. That was before my sheep Mabel got pregnant and managed to sneak into Melba’s shop and raid her bread display.
Frankly, it’s a day I’d prefer everyone in Red Bridge forget.
“Oh, no worries. I’ll have them wrangled up before they get that far.”
The light turns green, and Sheriff Peeler chuckles as he drives away.
When I pull my truck to a stop outside Fran’s, Mayor Norman Wallace is the next person to call my attention from across the street. “You ever thought about pigs instead, Tad? I hear they’re much easier to keep in a pen.”
I pretend to laugh to keep the peace. Mayor Wallace’s ego knows no bounds when wounded—the yellow bridge in a town named for a red one is evidence enough of that.
He moves on with a wave, his head bobbing with pride over his joke, and I head toward my woolly hooligans who have now destroyed all the flowers Fran has sitting outside her shop.
Shit. Landscaping bill is going to be big this month, given the destruction to Sheila and Marty’s Japanese maple, Betty’s hedges, and now this.
As I wrangle the flock toward the back of my truck, where a big pen waits for them to climb their asses inside, Cindy Jo Barringer offers a flirtatious finger-waggle in my direction. She’s Red Bridge’s one and only wedding planner and moved here from Texas about two years ago. She’s also single, in her late twenties, and always ready to mingle.
“Oh hey, Tad,” she says, stopping to watch me muscle fluffy ass after fluffy ass up the ramp and into the trailer.
“Hey, Cindy Jo.”
“Missed you at karaoke on Friday. You still owe me that duet.”
“How about a rain check?” I say, managing a friendly smile through the sweat dripping into my eyebrows. “I should have these troublemakers contained by the end of the week.”
I wink, and she laughs. “Those sheep of yours need leashes,” she teases.
“I’ll be sure to tell Randy. Maybe we can tie them all to his legs.”
She cracks up and then scuttles away toward her boutique next to The Diner, but before I can finish up, I field two more single bloodhounds as they sniff out their chances of turning my eye.
After Cindy Jo, there’s Peggy, and after Peggy, there’s Nicole. Nicole is fully single, but technically, Peggy is in the middle of a divorce—she’s just handling her social life like the papers have already been signed.