Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
WADE
“Eeeeeeek!”
At the wild screech, I turned to find a little boy barreling through the pasture. Without a blink, I took off at a run, far more relieved than I could imagine that my legs were easily twice as long as those belonging to the little boy.
Catching up to him in a matter of seconds, I swung him up in my arms and planted him on my shoulders before he had a chance to realize what was happening.
“Wow! How’d you do that?” the sandy-haired boy asked.
With my palms resting over his knees as I turned and headed back toward the barn, I replied, “It’s my superpower.”
He giggled.
“So that might’ve been funny, but I think you forgot the rules.”
“What rules?” he chirped. His small hands held onto my forearms as I reached the gate, opening it and walking through to return to the where the rest of the first-grade class from Stolen Hearts Valley Elementary was waiting.
“Stay with your group. At all times. Most of the animals here are friendly, but you never know what they might do when something unexpected happens,” I explained.
“I just want to pet the horses,” the little boy was saying as we reached his teacher’s side.
The teacher glanced up, her eyes twinkling, although her expression was carefully controlled. I imagined this kid was a handful in the classroom. “Brian, you need to stay with the group. We’re about to go meet the goats and the pigs,” she said.
“Mr. Wade caught me. I promise I’ll stay now,” the little boy said as I lifted him over my shoulders and set him carefully on the ground.
“You will definitely stay because you’ll be holding my hand for the rest of our tour,” the teacher said with a smile.
I cast her a grin and turned to glance at Dawson. “What’d I miss?”
“Oh, nothing major. Let’s head on into the rescue barn,” Dawson replied with an easy smile. Usually, Jackson and I handled any tours that involved children, but Jackson was tied up with an emergency surgery at the vet clinic.
Dawson was generally a good sport, so I’d gone to fetch him. I considered handling it myself, but there were twenty kids here, just enough that we needed more eyes on them.
“Lead the way,” Dawson said, gesturing toward the door of the rescue barn.
Looking to the group, I called, “All right, kids, follow me.”
We tromped along a path, with a few kids bouncing in and out of the line, toward the rescue barn.
Opening the barn doors, I entered first. We were immediately greeted by Gloria, the massive pig who’d become a bit of a mascot for the lodge as well as the rescue program.
Gloria meandered over to the children. She ended up at the rescue program after a family who’d gotten her as a mini pig discovered she wasn’t so mini.
She was several hundred pounds now and friendly as ever.
We usually didn’t even keep her in the barn, and she wandered around the lodge at will.
However, when we had groups like this, we wanted to make sure they got to meet her.
She snuffled and nudged the children, saying her version of “hello” to everyone. Of course, the kids loved her. Her much smaller companion, Squeaky, came from the side where they shared a stall. Squeaky was, in fact, a mini pig. Cute and nosy, she squeaked a lot. Hence, her name.
The kids fawned over her, and we went on to introduce the group to the goats and rescue dogs.
Our next stop was back outside the barn where they could meet the chickens.
The tour ended over at the horse barn in the lower level of the vet clinic where the little boy who had run into the pasture would get his chance to meet a few of the horses.
Shay usually helped with this part, but she had enlisted Dani to handle it because she was upstairs in the vet clinic managing the reception desk since the vet tech was working with Jackson.
It had been several days since my night with Dani, and I’d been chomping at the bit to push things along.
Hell, I wanted to skip past all the preliminaries and get right to the point.
We were meant to be together, and I knew it.
But, she’d gone all prickly and guarded again, so I was biding my time.
Considering my insane schedule, I was distracted enough to manage my impatience without much difficulty.
With the Christmas holiday barreling toward us, the lodge was full.
For one reason or another, our first responder team stayed busy with various emergencies.
Dani turned when we came through the main doors to the horse barn.
Her brown hair was up in a messy ponytail with a pencil stuck through it, and I wanted to walk right up to her, yank that pencil out, and bury my hand in her curls while I kissed her.
Needless to say, now wasn’t quite the time for that.
The barn was nice and warm. The children walked down the aisle between the two rows of stalls.
“Hey, kids,” Dawson said, stopping in the center of the aisle. “Let’s wait for Dani to introduce all the horses.”
Dani smiled, drawing my attention to her generous mouth. When she caught my eye, her cheeks pinkened slightly, and I had to tear my gaze away. Now definitely wasn’t the time for me to tease, much less to think about just how much I’d been yearning for her.
“Okay, kids, I brought the horses in just to meet y’all. Let’s start with Mischief, right over here,” she began, gesturing to a pony who promptly stuck his head over his stall door at the sight of the children.
After Dani explained how Mischief came to be at the rescue program, a little girl’s hand shot up. “Yes?” Dani asked, pointing toward her.
“How come Mischief doesn’t get to go home, back to the Outer Banks?” the little girl asked.
“For the most part, the people in charge try not to interfere at all with the wild horses on the Outer Banks. But every so often, things happen. They were worried Mischief and his mother were going to die after he was born, so they took steps to take care of them. But once a horse has been rescued and domesticated, they can’t let them back out in the wild.
I promise Mischief is living the good life here,” Dani explained.
The little girl nodded slowly, and Dani moved on, introducing the kids to the horses, one by one. Meanwhile, Dawson and I kept corralling the kids as a few of them darted in and out of the group.
After the teacher left with the kids, Dawson glanced my way. “Thank fucking God I didn’t have to do this alone,” he said bluntly.
“Oh yeah?” I drawled.
“Dude, I have not spent much time around kids. They kinda scare me.”
I chuckled. “That mean you and Evie aren’t planning on havin’ any kids?”
A slight look of panic crossed Dawson’s face. “I dunno. I’d never say no, but God only knows how I’ll manage it.”
Dani came out of the tack room where she’d gone to hang up the leads and halters.
She glanced Dawson’s way, fighting a smile.
“Dawson, you’re big enough to manhandle all of them at that age.
I can’t believe you’re that scared of them,” she teased as she leaned against the stall by Mischief.
When he hung his head over the stall door, she idly reached over to scratch behind his ears.
Dawson shrugged easily. “Maybe so, but I guess I just have to get used to them. I didn’t get much time with kids growing up like Wade.”
I grinned. “It helps that my mom ran a daycare when I was a kid, so I was around them all the damn time. I love ’em,” I said with a chuckle, just as our emergency phones went off.
Slipping my phone out, I glanced down. “Are you on duty today?” I asked, looking back over at Dawson.
“Sure am. Let’s go,” he said quickly.
When I looked toward Dani, her expression was tense. Something was spinning through her mind, and I wanted to know what. But, once again, time was not on my side. Duty called.