Chapter 17
Logan
Al Pacacino spat on a six-year-old at the birthday party within the first twenty minutes.
The kid fucking loved it. Shrieked with delight and ran back to the group, yelling that the alpaca had kissed him, which triggered a stampede of eleven other six-year-olds demanding their own alpaca kiss.
Al Pacacino surveyed them with the haughty disdain of a creature who’d been born knowing he was better than everyone in the room and stood his ground while Lark intercepted the mob.
We’d loaded the trailer before dawn and driven two counties east to the Hadley property, a spread of manicured lawn and white fencing that probably cost more to maintain in a month than Pawsitive brought in during a quarter.
I’d hauled the portable pen panels out of the truck bed and had the petting area assembled before the first car pulled in.
Lark had walked the property with the birthday girl’s mother, pointing at spots and talking with her hands, every gesture mapping something the rest of us couldn’t see yet. Her hands were always three sentences ahead of her mouth.
Now the party was in full swing, and I was on the edges where I belonged, keeping the ponies calm in their rotation area and making sure no kid got behind Snowball, who was a gentle animal right up until someone tried to climb on her back, at which point she was a thirty-pound goat with strong opinions about personal space.
Lark was in the middle of it. She had a rabbit in each arm and a circle of kids around her, and she was crouching down to their level, talking in a voice I could vaguely hear but couldn’t make out from across the yard.
One of the bolder boys reached out and grabbed a rabbit ear, and Lark redirected his hand to the rabbit’s back so smoothly the kid didn’t realize he’d been corrected. She guided his fingers through the fur and said something that made him laugh and try it again, gentler this time.
I’d seen her work before. The open house, the therapy sessions, the daily routine at Pawsitive where she narrated the animals’ lives like they were characters in a story only she could hear. I knew what she was capable of.
But there was something different about watching her do it here, on someone else’s property, for an audience that had no idea what they were actually seeing. At Pawsitive, she was the owner, the caretaker, the woman who knew every animal’s name and feeding schedule and medical history.
Here, she was just the woman who’d shown up with a trailer full of animals and turned a backyard into something that had twelve kids sitting on the grass in complete silence while she explained how to hold a rabbit so it felt safe.
She did it without effort. She adjusted her energy to match the group, dialing up or down depending on what the room needed. The loud kids got Al Pacacino and the ponies. The quieter ones got the rabbits and Snowball.
She didn’t sort them or direct them. She just put the right animal in the right place, and the kids found their way there on their own.
Lark truly had a fucking gift when it came to reading people.
One girl hadn’t joined the group. She’d been hovering at the edge of the yard since the party started, close enough to watch but too far back to participate. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and she was tracking the animals with wide eyes that wanted something her feet wouldn’t deliver.
Lark didn’t go to her. She didn’t wave her over or call her name or send another kid to fetch her. She did something I’d seen her do once before, in a paddock, with a girl in a wheelchair who wouldn’t speak.
She sat down in the grass about ten feet from the girl with one of the rabbits in her lap. She didn’t look at the kid. She looked at the rabbit and started talking to it, her voice low and easy. I walked closer so I could hear.
“You’re doing so well today, aren’t you? All these people and you’re just sitting here being handsome. That’s because you’re a professional.”
The girl’s arms loosened.
“Your ears are ridiculous, by the way. You know that, right? They’re longer than my hand. I measured once.”
The girl took a step closer.
Lark stroked the rabbit’s back in long, slow passes and kept talking, her voice carrying just far enough. The girl took another step. Then another. Then she was standing beside Lark, looking down at the rabbit with her lower lip caught between her teeth.
Lark shifted the rabbit slightly in her lap, angling it so the girl could reach the fur without having to ask.
The girl’s hand came out and her fingers touched the rabbit’s side, and her whole face changed.
Her shoulders dropped and her mouth opened, and something behind her eyes went wide and soft at the same time.
Lark still didn’t look at her. She just kept talking to the rabbit, her hand making room for the girl’s, and after a minute, the girl was on her knees in the grass beside her with both hands in the rabbit’s fur and a look on her face that had nothing to do with a birthday party.
Definitely a fucking gift. I walked back to the pony area with a lead rope in my hand.
“She’s remarkable.”
The birthday girl’s mother had appeared beside me with two bottles of water, one of which she held out. I took it.
“The Dawson girl, the one with the rabbit.” She nodded toward the two of them in the grass. “Her parents went through a rough divorce this year. She used to be the loudest kid in every room. I haven’t seen her let anyone get that close in months.”
I looked back at Lark. She was still talking to the rabbit while the girl leaned against her shoulder, both hands buried in white fur.
“Lark does that,” I said. “She’s special.”
“I’ve hired entertainment for my daughter’s parties every year since she was three.
Princesses, magicians, a guy with a snake once, which was a terrible idea.
” She shook her head. “This is the first time I’ve looked at my yard and seen every single kid actually happy.
And I mean real happy, not just performing it for the adults. ”
I didn’t answer. She didn’t need me to. She stood beside me for another minute, watching her daughter try to feed Al Pacacino a handful of grass while Al Pacacino regarded the offering with visible contempt, and then she walked back toward the house.
Lark caught my eye from across the yard. The girl was still beside her. Lark raised her eyebrows in a question I understood without words: Everything okay over here?
I held up the water bottle. She grinned and went back to the rabbit.
The party ran another hour. The kids rotated through the animals, the parents took photos, and Al Pacacino spat on two more people, both adults, which the children found even more hilarious than the first time. By four o’clock, the energy was winding down, and the animals were ready to be done.
Loading was easier than unloading. Tired animals walked into the trailer without argument. Even Al Pacacino went up the ramp without his usual theatrics, which I attributed to exhaustion and definitely not being reasonable.
The birthday girl’s mother found Lark by the trailer as we were securing the last gate. She had a check in her hand, and she had a look on her face that said more than money.
“This was beyond what I expected.” She pressed the check into Lark’s hand. “My sister-in-law is already asking for your number. She wants to book you for August.”
Lark took the check, and I saw her glance down at it. Her thumb ran along the edge of the paper, and her expression did something complicated and quick that she covered with a smile.
“Thank you. We’d love to do it again.”
“I’ll have Laura call you this week.”
We pulled out of the Hadley driveway at half past four. I drove. Lark sat in the passenger seat with the check in her lap, her head tipped back against the headrest and her eyes closed. She wasn’t asleep. Her thumb was still moving along the edge of the paper.
“That covers the missed payments,” she said after a few miles.
“Yeah.”
“It doesn’t fix the mortgage for good.”
“No.”
“But it’s something.”
I reached over and put my hand on her thigh. She put her hand on top of mine, and we drove home.
The ponies came off the trailer first. Snowball went back to the goat pen.
Al Pacacino descended the ramp like he was gracing us with his presence after a long international tour and took his sweet time walking to his enclosure, pausing twice to contemplate the short distance.
Lark took the rabbits to the barn while I dealt with the rest of the gear.
The last thing left was the second pony. I clipped the lead and walked her across the yard toward the east paddock. Behind me, I heard the barn door slide shut and then Lark’s boots on the gravel, following.
She caught up at the paddock gate and reached past me to unlatch it. Her arm brushed mine, and she smelled like hay and sweat and sunscreen and I was done.
I’d been carrying it since the first hour of the party. The strip of bare skin above her waistband every time she bent to pick up a rabbit. The way her jeans sat on her hips when she stood. The way she pushed her hair out of her face with the back of her wrist because her hands were full of animal.
I’d been filing it away all day, and now she was close enough to touch, and every inch separating us was a problem.
I walked the pony through the gate. Unclipped the lead. Lark swung the gate shut behind us. I hadn’t stepped back. There was no fucking way I was moving away from her. I couldn’t.
She looked up at me, and whatever she saw in my face made her breath catch. Her lips parted and her eyes went dark and she didn’t step back.
“Logan—”
I kissed her. I stepped into her and took her mouth. The kiss landed hard, no warm-up, all the want I’d been sitting on since the first hour of that party pouring into it.
I walked her backward to the fence and pressed her against the rail with my hips between her thighs. The heat of her through denim made my breath catch and my hands grip the wood on either side of her.
“We should go inside,” she said against my mouth.