Page 52 of Cowboy Wolf's Secret Baby

“Yep. I would say that she has no imagination, but then why fix what isn’t broken. If it works, there’s no need to go out of her way to do something different.”

Taryn shuddered and turned pale. “What do we do with it?”

“Do you have something I can bury this with?”

Conner grabbed a shovel out of the back of his truck. “Where do you want the hole dug and how big?”

She walked to the edge of one very old tree and pointed. “Here. About a foot deep.”

He dug the hole and she dropped the bag in, muttering an annulling spell over it, so the bag didn’t poison the tree or the ground.

Conner covered it up.

“The tree is very old. All things from nature have pure energy, unless they have been polluted somehow. The spell and the tree will nullify any negative energy this bag has.”

“Grandmother is awful,” Taryn said. “I know that she has a bad heart and wants us to have one, too. I would never do the things that she does.”

Beth hugged her daughter and said, “I know that. She does too, which is one of the reasons she is not your biggest fan.”

“I don’t want her to be in my fan club, anyway. She would be like Yolanda, the president of Selena’s fan club who killed Selena.”

“Good analogy,” Beth said.

Conner’s stomach rumbled. “I’m hungry. Hopefully, she didn’t do any lasting damage to the truck.”

They piled in and headed to the fairgrounds. Taryn opted for some chicken fingers and fries while the two adults got cheeseburgers and fries.

“When this rodeo and fair are over, I’m going to have to put you on a strict salad-only diet for an entire month just to clean all of the grease out of your system,” Beth told Taryn.

“That’s just not going to happen,” Taryn said. “I’m a carnivore so I need meat to survive. You wouldn’t want me getting up in the middle of the night, sneaking out of the house, and hunting down mice and squirrels to eat.”

“You would eat them raw?” Beth asked.

“That’s what wolves do. I’ve never seen one start a campfire and roast their food over a spit,” Taryn said, seriously.

“The little one has a point,” Conner said. “I think that it’s in all of our best interests, including that of the neighborhood rodents, if we just keep feeding her regularly.”

Beth laughed and said, “I could win an argument when it was just one against one. Now that there are two against one, I can’t win.”

“I was on your side about the donuts earlier,” Conner said. “I’m the objective observer and tiebreaker.”

They laugh.

This feels good, even if there is a shadow hovering over us. We’ll figure something out. Good always defeats evil – doesn’t it?

18

Conner

“What happened yesterday?” Gideon asked while Conner was brushing Zephyr. “I know that arena was clean. We check it over every day before every event, too.”

“My guess is Beth’s mother. She is bound and determined to get rid of me. I think that right now, she is showing me her power, trying to scare me. Today, Beth found a hex bag under the driver’s side seat of my truck.”

Gideon shook his head. “I’m surprised that she hasn’t tried to kill you yet.”

“I thought that, too, at first, but I came up with two theories. One is that she enjoys trying to scare me. She reminds me of the cat that likes to play with the mouse before she eats it. The other is that she might be waiting for the rodeo to move on, hoping that I’ll leave with it.”

“My guess is that you aren’t going anywhere. I’ve seen you with Beth and Taryn,” Gideon said.

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