Page 60 of Single All the Way

I stepped up to the half wall and tentatively reached for her. Betty leaned into my hand as I rubbed her soft, furry neck and laughed quietly. She moved forward and nuzzled me in return.

“You are a lovey,” I said, hugging her with a hand on the back of her neck. The hug ended quickly, and I wondered if I’d interpreted it right. I looked to Ben as he came up to my side.

“I’ve never seen her do anything like that,” Ben said, his tone awed. “I believe Ms. Betty has a new favorite human.”

I laughed and petted her neck again, thoroughly charmed by the big, furry girl with the gorgeous eyes.

Ben

“I’m going to feed the chickens. You’re welcome to stay here with your new bestie if you want,” I told Emerson. “I’ll come back in fifteen or twenty minutes so we can trek back to the house together.”

“You don’t mind if I don’t help with the chickens?”

“Not at all.”

As a matter of fact, I needed a minute.

I pressed a kiss to the side of her head only to have Betty stick her nose between us possessively, making Emerson laugh.

“Back in a few,” I said.

I hurried off, absently telling the horses goodbye. When I stepped out into the cold morning, where a cloudy day had dawned, I inhaled deeply, trying to get my mind right.

I’d realized in the barn, as Emerson looked awestruck at her newfound friendship with my llama, something not good at all had happened without me realizing it.

I was in love with her.

Emerson, not the llama.

The woman who’d made no bones about swearing off forevers and happily-ever-afters for good.

I took my time getting to the chicken house, hoping again that the biting wind would straighten out my head.

It didn’t.

There was something to be said for a quickie in the hayloft in the middle of a snowstorm. Emerson, who I never would’ve expected to get naked in a barn, had stunned me with her brazenness and sent me to the stars with her gorgeous body.

Then, to watch her, so uneasy around the llamas just a week ago, laugh with pure joy at Betty’s friendly advances?

Be still my traitorous heart. I was a goner.

And that, of course, was a big fucking problem.

ChapterSeventeen

Emerson

The only thing more blissful than an unexpected day off from work was a twenty-four-hour break from the kids.

We loved them to pieces. Of course we did.

“But they come with a nonstop, underlying frenetic energy,” Ben had said a few hours ago.

The entire town of Dragonfly Lake had shut down. No school, businesses were closed, nothing was happening until our one city plow could make the rounds. Ben had had Colby reschedule all his patients for the day, and between Edith and me, we’d contacted everyone with a hair appointment to do the same.

After breakfast, Ben had plowed the long driveway and the clinic’s parking lot so it was ready in case of a pet emergency, but so far our day had been uneventful and, frankly, indulgent in a neither-one-of-us-had-had-sex-in-years way.

Point in case, we’d just taken a midafternoon shower together, pleasuring each other until the water ran cold, then moving to Ben’s bed to warm up. It wasn’t just the blankets that had done the warming either.

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