6. Dallas
6
DALLAS
Katie rides her horse right up to the farmhouse, loops its rein around a verandah post and strides up the porch steps.
She still has the lamb tucked inside her jacket. She kicks off her boots and walks straight inside the house.
I catch up with her in the front hallway, grabbing her wrist and pulling her to a stop. “What’re you doing?” I say, my voice a low rasp.
She turns to look at me, her expression clearly asking what I’m on about.
“You can’t just walk on in like you live here.”
She rolls her eyes at me—for maybe the fiftieth time today—and turns away, heading back down the hallway. “I virtually do live here,” she tosses over her shoulder. “It’s like my second home.” She pauses when she reaches the door to the kitchen and gives me a ‘hurry up’ gesture. “Come on, cowboy, this lamb isn’t going to feed itself.”
She has me there, so I follow her down the hall, hoping Olivia or Violet aren’t going to be weird about me just strolling into their house.
“Lady Sadie!” Katie announces as she spots my daughter sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by felt pens and pieces of paper. “Just the lady I needed to see.”
“Hi, Katie,” Sadie says, her voice soft and shy. Then she sees me. “Daddy!” She beams, then launches herself across the room into my arms.
“Hey, Sadie girl,” I murmur into her hair as I squeeze her tight. She is the sole reason I do anything these days, so as irritating as Katie is, I will persevere with working with her, for Sadie.
Sadie has finally settled in here. She’s happy. She’s so excited to be starting school and she adores both Violet and Olivia. We’re not going anywhere.
The only thing she’s unhappy about is that I won’t let her ride the horses, but she’s going to have to come to terms with that, and at some point I’m going to have to deal with what happened this morning when Katie put Sadie on one. She didn’t even ask permission. She wouldn’t have asked Olivia, because she’s fully aware of my boundary and has never once taken Sadie near a horse. Olivia wouldn’t have said it was okay, so Katie clearly took it on herself.
From what I’ve learned of Katie so far, it tracks. Reckless, irritating, knows exactly how to push all my buttons even though she doesn’t know me at all.
Sadie untangles her arms from around my neck and slides to the floor. In the time it’s taken for me to say hello to Sadie, Katie has stripped off her jacket and is bundling the lamb into an old towel.
Violet is at the sink, already preparing a bottle of milk.
“Do you want to help me feed her?” Katie asks Sadie as she sits cross-legged on the floor, holding the lamb in her lap. The poor thing can barely hold its head up.
“Can I?” Sadie asks, wide-eyed.
“You sure can,” I say, really hoping Katie knows what she’s doing. She seems to. Aside from being a pain in the ass and relentlessly mocking me, she does seem to know about working on the farm. The basics at least.
“Here you go, Sadie,” Violet says, handing over the bottle. Sadie carries it to where Katie is sitting, then watches with rapt attention as Katie tries to get the lamb to drink.
I stoop and pick up Katie’s discarded jacket from where she dropped it on the floor, because apparently she couldn’t take an extra second to hang it over a chair or something. I’m about to do exactly that, when I realise the lamb wasn’t cleaned by its mother before it was abandoned, which means the inside of the jacket is sticky with afterbirth. I take it into the laundry and clean the worst of it off, hoping it’ll at least be dried out enough for Katie to wear it for the rest of the day.
There’s no way it’s warm enough out there for the yellow tank top she has on now. There’s also no way I can be around her when she’s wearing the yellow tank top, because the amount of skin on show reminds me way too much of last night.
It reminds me of her stretched out across her bed, naked limbs tangled with mine and the contrast of the soft, delicate skin of her breasts, belly and thighs against my rough, calloused hands.
I can’t believe my life right now. I throw caution to the wind one time and end up working with my one-night stand. The one who made me promise there’d be nothing past that single night. I wanted a repeat so badly, until I saw Katie standing in the arena this morning. Then, I wanted to go back in time and knock some sense into me.
The worst part of the universe’s cruel prank is that it didn’t even give me enough time between the one-night stand and seeing her again. So, when I see the exposed skin of her arms, all I can think about is the way I ran my hands down them, leaving goosebumps in my wake. Or when the low-cut neckline teases what’s below, I have a vivid memory of the moment she pulled her sweater over her head last night, leaving her standing in front of me in killer jeans and an even more killer white lace bra.
I scrub harder at the jacket, trying to clean the memories from my mind. I cannot work with someone who I’m going to constantly have sexy flashbacks about, and because I have to work with her, I have to sort myself out.
By the time I return to the kitchen, with an almost spotlessly clean jacket, the lamb is finished feeding and is curled up in my daughter’s lap.
“Look, Daddy,” Sadie says, wonderstruck.
“Did she have a good feed?” I ask her, crouching down beside them and stroking first Sadie’s head, then the lamb’s.
Sadie nods. “She did. Her name is Porridge.”
“Porridge? ”
“Yes,” she says, voice deadly serious. “Katie said I can help look after her, and any other ones that don’t have mummies.” She looks up at me with her big blue eyes. “Is that okay?” She adds in a whisper.
“Of course, I’m sure we’re going to need extra help to look after them. Especially when they’re this little because they need feeding lots and lots.”
“I can do that,” Sadie says, then leans back against the wall, cradling the lamb close to her.
I stand and watch them for a long moment. When I finally turn away it’s to find Katie watching them too.
“What’s your phone number?” She asks me, out of the blue.
“What?” I ask, caught off guard. She definitely said last night was a one off. Why would she need my number?
“I’ll send you some pictures I took.” She flashes her phone in my direction, a shot of Sadie and the lamb on the screen.
Oh. The type of thing I always forget to take photos of. I rattle off my number and a few moments later my phone is bleeping as a bunch of messages zing across the kitchen.
Violet feeds us an early lunch before we head back out to check the cattle. Katie finishes hers first and loads her dishes straight into the dishwasher. She’s so comfortable in this house and around Violet, who keeps staring at Katie with a look of contentment on her face, like her long-lost child has returned home.
“I’ll just clean the lamb goo off my jacket and I’m good to go,” Katie says, grabbing the garment off the back of the chair where I’d put it.
“I’ve done it,” I say. “Your jacket. Hopefully it’s dry by now.”
“Oh,” Katie says, flipping it open and running her hand across the clean lining. “Thank you,” she says, her voice quiet. “You didn’t have to do that.”
I shrug. “Seems like the least I could do. You let Sadie help you with the lamb.”
“Of course I did.” Her expression is puzzled, like she can’t figure out what I’m getting at.
“Not everyone would,” I say, then push back from the table. “Come on, this work isn’t going to do itself.”
“Not the actual tonne of it that you have to do, no it won’t,” Katie says, that sarcastic smirk back on her face.
I grit my teeth so I don’t say something I’ll regret to her, in front of my boss, and more importantly my daughter.