Sneak Peek! The Cowboy Who Lived His Dream Chapter One
S avannah Calloway slid open the back door on her farmhouse. “Come on, girls,” she said in the most upbeat voice she could manage. “We have to go do our chores, and then Cissy will be here to get you.”
“Cissy, Cissy, Cissy!” Gallery chanted, and she ran toward Savannah.
“You don’t have shoes on,” Savannah said. “Go get your shoes on.”
Gallery came to a complete stop, did an about-face, and ran back the way she’d come. The girl ran everywhere she went, and Savannah recalled the stories her mother had told about her as a child.
We put you in dance just to tire you out. She’d heard her mother say that, along with a fond smile or a laugh, at least a hundred times.
Savannah still felt like she had an endless itch that she couldn’t quite scratch, but she definitely operated on empty most of the time these days.
Being a full-time mom to five-year-old twins, living with her mother, and running a llama farm that also housed alpacas, raised chickens and ducks, did community events, and hosted craft classes, Savannah had definitely learned that there were never enough hours in the day.
She’d cried a lot about naptime as a child too, and now she wished someone would tell her to go into her room and lay down and sleep for a couple of hours.
“Sequoia,” she called, and the little girl yelled something from down the hall.
Savannah could go see what the hold-up was, but she also knew if she waited long enough, the girls would figure it out.
She wanted them to be independent and solve their own problems, and if that meant an extra five minutes before they got out on the farm, then so be it.
It actually took an extra seven, and then Savannah slung the feed bucket for the chickens over Gallery’s shoulder and handed her the scoop, and the one for the ducks over Sequoia’s shoulder, which held the blue scoop.
“All right, my darlings,” she said. “Chickens to the right, ducks to the left. Who’s going to go where?”
Sequoia looked at her as if she’d spoken Japanese, but Gallery held up both her hands, all five of her fingers splayed out.
“This one makes an L, Mama.” She traced down the edge of her pointer finger to her thumb. “So out this way is left.” She pointed with her left hand to the left.
“And you’re doing…what?” Savannah asked.
Gallery looked at her, her deep hazel eyes a mix of Savannah’s own dark eyes and her ex-husband’s lighter green ones. “I’m doing chickens, so I’m going right.”
Gallery put her hand down and moved in the correct direction.
Savannah looked at Sequoia. “Baby, you’re going that way.” She physically turned her daughter’s shoulders to the left. “Remember, ladies, we toss gently . Very gentle . A gentle toss.”
“Gently, gently , Mama,” Sequoia said, and she took the first step in the direction Savannah had pointed her.
She smiled as the girls set out to do their chores, and since the chicken coops and the duck enclosure were connected to the barn and had netting that stemmed from the two-story roof to keep out aerial predators, Savannah didn’t worry about the girls getting hurt or lost.
She returned to the barn and filled two new watering tanks with cold water. After replacing those and taking the dirty ones back into the barn, she rinsed them out and set them to dry.
Then she raked up the straw she’d put out yesterday, scooping it into a bin and walking it over to the compost pile. They’d had quite a bit of rain this spring, and Savannah used the straw to soak up the excess water in the coop area so the chickens wouldn’t be scratching through mud.
Once her best friend and fellow single mom came to get the girls to take them for a movie for her daughter’s birthday, Savannah would roam among the llamas and alpacas, taking stock of them and making sure there weren’t any muddy spots in their pastures.
Her llamas were divas, and they hated standing in mud. Not only that, but they may get foot rot if it stayed too wet.
The previous owner had built the pasture with seven-foot fences and an electric wire around the top, then butted it up against a huge bank of trees in the back, where the llamas liked to hang out in the shade in the hotter months.
Savannah had to come out several times a day to check on their water, especially as the weather grew warmer now that June had almost arrived, as llamas and alpacas drank a surprising amount. She’d thought about investing in automatic troughs but hadn’t been able to split with that much money yet.
She loved a few slow hours with the gentle creatures she raised, and she had seven alpacas and eleven llamas under her care.
Her summer crafting event sat only a few weeks in the future, and once Savannah had enjoyed her fill of sunshine and made sure her animals were okay, she’d sit down at the computer and work on a few marketing tasks.
A few minutes later, the girls returned with empty buckets, and she hung them on the hooks and dragged the stool over to the sink, so they could wash up in the barn.
Her phone chimed just as she handed Sequoia a paper towel. “That’s probably Cissy,” she said. “Let’s go see if she and Claire are here.”
Both twins cheered, and Gallery ran out of the barn. Sequoia opted to skip—a new skill she’d just learned and loved showing off.
Savannah dragged her phone out of her pocket and checked it as she followed the girls. Sure enough, it was her best friend, and she crossed the backyard and found Gallery on a folding chair to reach the button that would open the garage door.
Part of her wanted to protest and tell Gal to be careful, but the girl got the job done, jumped down, and ran to the opening now letting in the bright sunshine.
Savannah once again brought up the rear, listening to Cissy greet the girls and giggle with them. She moved right over to the side of the minivan and helped Sequoia in after her louder, more boisterous sister.
Cissy pushed the button to close the door and faced Savannah. “How are you, girl?” She drew her into a hug.
Savannah sighed into it with a smile. “Great. Thanks so much for taking them.”
“It’s going to be totally fun,” Cissy said. “Claire is super excited, and we’re meeting my mom there.”
“Oh, that’ll be nice,” Savannah said, though she knew the challenges of moms when she was still so young and trying to be one herself.
Cissy grinned at her. “And if I’m lucky, Mason will be working.” She bumped Savannah with her hip, a glowing look on her face.
Savannah laughed and shook her head. “When are you going to go out with him?”
“I don’t know,” Cissy said, suddenly serious. “It felt weird to date after the divorce at first, but I guess it’s been a year.”
“Yeah,” Savannah said. She’d been divorced for almost two now.
“What about you?” Cissy said. “When are you going to start dating?”
“Oh, please.” Savannah laughed. “The last man I met gave my girls flowers and ran off like some cowboy Cinderella.”
Her mind could easily conjure up the image of Wilder Glover, though she’d never told Cissy that she knew the man’s name. “Gal and Sequoia still talk about ‘the flower cowboy’.”
She made air quotes around the last three words, and Cissy grinned. “Maybe if you got off the farm more….” She let the sentence hang there when Savannah shook her head.
“I love the farm.”
“I know.”
“We don’t get a lot of men to the craft nights and yarn spinning demonstrations, but I’m fine.”
Cissy’s phone rang from inside the car, and she started around it. “That’ll be my mom. We’ll be back in a little bit.”
“Yep.” Savannah stood in the driveway and waved to her friend and her girls as Cissy backed out.
“I’m fine.” She scoffed at her obvious lie. She was fine…if the west fence didn’t need to be fixed, and the twins didn’t need new shoes again , or she hadn’t had time to do any of the landscaping and yard work around the house.
Yeah, then she was fine.
She turned away from the actual physical work that needed to be done, her internal loneliness suddenly pressing down on her with the weight of gravity.
Sometimes it caused an ache deep in her chest, right where her heart should be, but today, she brushed it away quickly in favor of spending time with the llamas.
They were always there for her, and they listened better than any therapist and kept her secrets better than any best friend. When she first entered their pasture, several of them looked her way and immediately came toward her.
Gratitude filled her for these gentle creatures and this beautiful land that God had gifted to her.
She’d lost everything in the divorce, having to leave the home where she’d been raising the girls. She’d been forced to abandon her neighbors and friends, and ultimately, her freedom to stay home and be a full-time mom.
Jack still paid his child support and spousal support, but it wasn’t nearly enough to cover all of Savannah’s expenses.
She knew she’d been blessed to find Llama Mamas and be able to purchase it with her mother, and she drew in a deep breath through her nose, inhaling the scent of good, rich earth, grass, and a heavy dose of pollen that always ran in the air this time of year.
She blew it out with the words, “Thank you, Lord,” just as her first llama arrived.
“Hey, Gizmo,” she said, and because llamas were divas, she expected to be spit on at any time.
Gizmo didn’t do it, and he allowed her to stroke down the side of his neck and keep walking.
“Let’s check on your water, you guys,” she said. “Are you getting ready for our craft days?”
She continued to babble to the llamas like they were friends and business partners and could tell her what to do to get more people to register for her summer tours, her yarn spinning classes, and her quarterly craft days.
Anyone who came to Llama Mamas felt the spirit of these gentle animals, and they usually came back, so Savannah knew she should email her list and get a few more people to sign up for the summer activities that maybe they had forgotten about.
She walked all the way to the back of the trees where she kept a trough.
She primed the pump a couple of times and then picked up the hose.
With water gushing out of it, she sprayed down their trough and refilled it, noting some of the worn parts of the pasture that they had already eaten through this spring.
She could section it into four parcels to allow regrowth while the llamas and alpacas grazed somewhere else. She had ten acres for her seventeen animals, and she could probably add one or two more. But in reality, she should probably sell one or two.
“Always two,” she told the llamas. “You guys don’t like going anywhere without a buddy, do you?”
And they really didn’t.
The nearest alpaca to her, a creamy beige female named Mocha, hummed, the sound almost like that of a cat or a quiet moan.
Savannah smiled at Mocha’s agreement. Mocha was particularly attached to a beautiful reddish-brown alpaca named Rusty.
In fact, he walked at her side right now, and the pair rarely separated.
Several feet ahead of them, one of the llamas—an Appaloosa who was mostly white with brown speckles and spots—screamed. Several of the animals ran forward with him, and irritation drove through Savannah that her peaceful walk had been ruined.
She looked ahead to where the llamas were charging, and she found a cowboy standing at the fence, the toe of one boot stuck through one of the squares in the fence, as if he owned the place.
Savannah wanted to move slower, just to make him wait longer, because she had no appointments that day and had really been looking forward to some uninterrupted time on the computer while the girls were gone.
The cowboy calmed the llamas within seconds, and Savannah should be glad about that, but instead it made her narrow her eyes.
Who was he, and why was he here?
She wore a cowgirl hat and her sunglasses to shade her face and protect her from the near-summer sun, but neither of those obstructed her vision.
And as Pine Cone, one of her light milk chocolate brown llamas, moved out of the way, Savannah caught sight of the cowboy at the fence.
Her feet grew roots right down into the earth, and she froze.
“Wilder Glover,” fell out of her mouth at the same time her pulse blipped through her body as if she were having a panic attack.
What was he doing here?
She’d met him about six months ago now, and their paths had never crossed again. Would he even remember her?
He lifted his hand as if she couldn’t see him and called, “Hey, sorry to just show up out of nowhere. Have you got a minute to talk?”
She had more than a minute for the handsome “flower cowboy,” and she figured the only way she’d find out if he remembered her was to get a little closer and see what he wanted.