Chapter 3
Tad
My head pounds and my stomach turns, but the thing about sheep is…they don’t give a damn about your plans or your hangover.
I’ve just finished up with the morning feed routine, and some of my flock is already trying to find a way to get into trouble—which isn’t new, but it is inconvenient.
“Back in!” I yell, clapping my hands like an idiot as three woolly little bastards try to shove through a sagging section of fence. Again.
They scatter into the snow, bleating like they’re in on some private joke at my expense. Good one, Tad. How about we shove a giant rod in the middle of your already vibrating brain? Sheep have that smug, blank look that says we win, you lose, and they’re usually right.
Or at least, my sheep have that look. I don’t know about other farmers because I’ve never researched it.
Randy keeps telling me we need dogs. Border collies, heelers—apparently, it’s a must for people who take this shit seriously. Every shepherd worth his salt has dogs, Tad, he lectures almost daily, all the while missing the whole fucking point.
I’m not in this business to succeed. I’m in it to forget.
Plus, my general inclination when it comes to my older brother is to do the opposite of what he wants me to do because it’s his fault we’re in Red Bridge in the first place. The whole state of our lives today, as it were, is his own damn fault, even if he doesn’t see it that way.
Don’t get me wrong; I love my brother. Randy is a good man and an even better older brother, but he should’ve stayed in Chicago and focused on himself instead of worrying so goddamn much about saving me from myself.
But that’s Randy for you. He’s only two years older than me—forty-three to my forty-one, but he refuses to drop the protective older brother act, and as a result, he’s farming sheep—which he fucking hates—while I’m pretending to farm sheep in the name of passing time.
I have nothing to lose and nowhere to be because almost a decade ago, I already lost everything. I basically closed my eyes and randomly pointed to a spot on a map, drained my savings to purchase the one and only farmhouse that was for sale in Red Bridge, Vermont, at the time, and moved here.
It’s not my issue that Randy’s dumb ass followed.
“Ah, ah, Mabel. Get your pregnant ass over here.” My girl Mabel darts around me, beelining straight for Bennett Bishop’s property, of course, my flock’s homing beacon for pissing off my neighbor alive and fucking well.
I skid on my feet and nearly fall on my ass, but I manage to stop her while two other sheep halt dead in the drift and stare at me like they wish they had some popcorn to eat while they enjoy the show.
“Mind your business, Crosby and Nash!” I shout over at them. “Go make yourselves useful by sticking with the group!”
They bleat at me, but thankfully, they actually listen.
I’m at least grateful Randy bought Rose Ellis’s old house from Josie and Clay and is no longer all up in my shit twenty-four seven—and blissfully missing now—because the constant stream of shit he’d be giving me would only serve to make Mabel’s escape ruse ten times more annoying.
With Mabel on her way back toward the barn, I grab the useless fence wire she broke on her way out in my hands. I sigh. Another repair I’ll try to fit in before Randy sees it and has a conniption.
Trust me, a little space from each other is a good thing, for me and for him. I’m no fucking picnic to deal with, I know, but he has a habit of riding my ass that I’m not too fond of either.
I head back toward the barn to grab some tools, but as I pass the farmhouse, a female mess of long legs, fancy clothes, and wide eyes poised at the top step of my porch grabs my attention.
“Hey.”
Soft, feminine notes of a night I should but can’t remember grip me by the balls and stop me in my tracks. It takes a couple seconds for recognition to kick in, but when it does, the news gets even worse.
It’s not just any woman. It’s Breezy, my neighbor Bennett’s sister, standing on my snowy front porch in heels and tailored pants I’d bet cost more than my entire truck and making it so hard to breathe, I feel sickish. She’s beautiful.
But if I fucked with her while I was too drunk to remember, I’m about to be in a whole world of trouble.
Breezy is a city girl through and through. She lives in New York. She runs prestigious art galleries. She probably spends her days drinking expensive coffee and having dinner dates with men who have seven-figure bank accounts.
And her brother hates me. Oh boy.
It’s not out of the ordinary to see her in Red Bridge on occasion—she makes frequent weekend stops to visit her brother and sister-in-law Norah and her niece Autumn, and she’s close friends with Norah’s sister Josie and her husband Clay, but the way she’s standing on my porch like she just came out of my house is a new one, to say the least.
“Uh…hey,” I eventually manage in reply.
“So…thanks for last night,” she says.
“Uh…you’re welcome.”
My memory might as well be Swiss cheese with all the holes it has, a barely there scrap of last night clinging to the edges. Drinking at The Country Club. Randy dragging me out before I ordered another round. Something with that woman Maybelline Ross needing a ride home. Snow. Maybe headlights.
And then…nothing. A blackout curtain.
My stomach drops. I look at her—polished, confident, heels not even wobbling in the snow—and then at myself, boots, old jeans, flannel, and looking like a dumbass covered in snow and mud from wrestling sheep.
The two of us mixing is a recipe for disaster.
She doesn’t give me any more details on what last night entailed, instead moving down my front porch and crouching gracefully near one of my escape-artist sheep to stroke his head.
“Oh, I remember you, Crosby,” she says through a soft laugh. “You’re a little troublemaker, aren’t you?”
Breezy and Clay had a run-in with Crosby over a year ago, on the day of Clay and Josie’s wedding, on their way into town from the airport.
They had to drive the obstinate bastard all the way home in Clay’s back seat because of his Oscar-worthy performance as an injured damsel, but her remembering him by name still comes as a surprise.
Crosby bleats and looks up at Breezy like she’s the fucking sun, clearly in love with her, and she gently pats him between the ears.
With one final pet, she waves to the rest of the herd that’s managed to surround her. “Bye, cuties,” she tells them lovingly, their role switching quickly to beloved pets from what I know them to be—woolly terrorists.
“Bye, Tad.” She leaves me with a wink and a smile, and the pit in my stomach collapses even deeper.
I don’t know what happened last night. Hell, when I woke up this morning, I didn’t even know she was in my house.
Probably because you drank your weight in whiskey—and Randy’s weight too.
She’s on the move, heading across my yard and straight for Bennett’s house, walking through snow and ice and obstacles she wouldn’t have to if I had the wherewithal to do the gentlemanly thing and offer her a ride, but I’m fucking frozen, mind swirling with foggy memories.
Drinking. Snow. Breezy Bishop. At my house. All night long.
Surely she slept on the couch. Or in the guest room. Or…
The more I think, the less I know.
I’m not an expert in much these days—and I don’t pretend to be.
But I’ll be damned if two plus two on this one isn’t adding up to a four-by-four to the head when Bennett Bishop finds out I slept with his sister and have zero memory of it.