Page 11 of Guilty as Sin
So why were his feet slowing now? She was down closer to the road this morning, in the barnyard that ended in a wooden shed, painted white with a roof of green metal, and all of it as neat and tidy as the rest of her place. Cutesy, he guessed a woman would call it. Naff, he’d call it. She looked soft and sweet, like always, in every way but the wellies, the knee-high black rubber boots that would have been at home in Queensland. At this moment, though, even as he turned up her drive like he’d been drawn there, she was stripping off a pale-pink cardigan with jerky, impatient movements and hurling it toward the fence. It fell short, landing in the dirt, but Jace didn’t pay too much attention.
You could say that the stripping-off had refocused him. Because underneath the sweater, she was wearing a white tank top with multiple skinny criss-crossing straps that showed off a trim but muscular upper back, an apron that tied around her waist with a giant pink bow and somehow managed to say come-on-boy-let’s-go in a way no apron should, and a pair of gray leggings that traced absolutely every curve of an absolutely spectacular arse.
Normally, with her, everything was flowers, lace, or both. She was missing some ornamentation today, but she still had the apron. Why she was wearing it in a barnyard was anybody’s guess. And why her clothes, or she, or something had made him stop was another question.
Maybe because she’d cut her hair, and it looked—free. You could even call it “wild,” falling not quite to her shoulders in wavy blonde abandon.
Unfortunately, she also seemed to have gone round the bend. What he’d thought at first was some kind of bizarre farmyard game was something else. She’d always looked serene before. Sweet. Seriously not his type. Now? She just looked seriously pissed off.
As he approached, she spat out a string of words that didn’t match her girly pink apron one bit and lunged at one of the two knee-high milk goats that were running crazy patterns around her, bleating up a storm. Three baby goats barely bigger than cats, meanwhile, scampered along the fence separating them from their mothers and took turns jumping straight up in the air and leaping over each other like they were on springs. If goats could be said to be shouting encouragement, that was what the babies were doing. And that wasn’t all. What looked like an entire flock of chickens were running around the enclosure as well, flapping their wings and cackling like maniacs. If it had been a battlefield, it would’ve been one that had turned to custard.
Even as he thought it, the woman shouted, “Son of abitch,”feinted one way, and leaped the other, hitting the ground and taking down the black-and-white goat in a tackle that would’ve done justice to a rugby forward. The goat thrashed, the other goat bleated and leaped around some more, the babies bounced up and down like they were on a trampoline, Tobias barked, and Jace wanted to laugh.
It wasn’t every day you watched a woman go mad.
Her day had started out so well, too.
She’d woken to the sounds of the country. You’d think it would be quiet. It wasn’t. Birds, mostly, calling from near and far. Squawks. Chirps. Trills. Lily could’ve said what they were, but Paige wasn’t a bird person. To her, it just sounded noisy.
A couple other sounds, she recognized. A faraway complaining almost like cats, but not. And a whole lot of cackling.
Right. Goats. Chickens. The shop. All of it her responsibility now. Easy, though. Practically a vacation. Piece of cake.
The first hurdle had been the closet. Or what some people would call a closet. Paige would call it a “room.” Lily’s cottage, which looked more like a gingerbread house than any real house ought to look, had a second story that was maybe half sloped-ceiling bedroom, featuring a front wall of windows that practically invited the mountains inside. The other half? Some of it was a compact seafoam-green-and-cream bathroom so excessively and extravagantly decorated it made Paige sweat, and the rest was closet.
In Paige’s apartment, she had a door that opened to a rod holding her clothes, with her shoes lined up on the floor. She also had a dresser. Boom. Done. Here, rods ran at all heights, with shelves and clever drawers and cubbies above and below. Shoe racks. Boot shelves. Organizers for belts, for scarves, for jewelry, for lingerie. Felt-lined hangers held clothes that shaded from cream to pink to purple to red to blue, and every. single. frigging.itemwas flowered, or lacy, or silky, or something other than “jeans and a T-shirt.” Which was fine when it was on Lily. But Paige hadn’t considered that she’d be wearing all of this and nothing else.
Had she looked in the wall of drawers? Why, yes, she had. Lily had leggings. Many, many leggings. Some of them had lace around the ankles. Surprise! Lily had jeans, too. Artfully ripped, absolutely form-fitting. Clearly much more expensive than the leggings.
It wasn’t like Paige didn’t know her twin’s taste. But she’d assumed that Lily had some way to dress less-than-perfectly for farm chores. She could swear she’d seen overalls before. Cute ones, with flowers on them, but still. Where were they? She longed to call her sister and demand to know where she kept the good stuff, but she knew what Lily would say. “You can do everything in pretty clothes that you can do in ugly clothes.”
By that point, her stubborn side had set in anyway. She was supposed to dress up to milk goats? Fine. She’d dress up. She’d wear the leggings from yesterday, though, just in case. They needed washing anyway, because she’d spilled coffee on them on the plane. And if she didn’t have milk for her coffee and cereal? That was all right, too. She was Heidi now. You got the milk from the goats. She wasn’t a picky eater. She was a cop.
She’d milk the goats, gather the eggs, get beautiful, and make breakfast like a farm girl. She’d watched Lily milk. It was two goats. Fifteen minutes max, and she’d be back in the house.
Too bad the goats hadn’t gotten the memo.
She hadn’t had to deal with any of this last night. One of Lily’s neighbors had been looking after the animals, which included keeping the three new kids with their mothers during the day, the hungry kids eliminating the need for an evening milking.
“Ashley will have them fed and have the kids separated for the night by the time you get there, so all you have to do is milk in the morning and then open the gate so the kids can go back with their mothers,” Lily had said. “And feed and water them, of course. Clean the stalls eventually. But if you decide you don’t want to milk at all, you can just leave the kids with their mothers at night after you feed them, too. Nobody will know.”
Now, while Paige stomped around the barnyard in knee-high rubber boots, a lacy sweater that kept getting in her damnway,a polka-dot apron, and a tank top that wasn’t appropriate to the season but had been the closest thing to “normal” she’d been able to find, she thought about what a good idea it would have been to forget all about goat milk. All these quick motions were hurting, too. Which meant they weregoodfor her.Suck it up.
Anyway, you couldn’t let the goats justwin.Not an option. If this was a power struggle? It was two goats that barely came past her knees. She could take two goats.
If only they weren’t so damn tricky, that is. She’d started out talking to them like Lily, practicing her Lily-switcheroo on them. Sweet. Kind. They looked at her, bleated, and started running around in circles like they were in on the secret and they weren’t having any. Their tiny babies, clearly possessed by Satan, urged them on from their pen, and Paige felt a whole lot less guilty about the three of them having been separated from their mothers all night.
She stripped off the pink sweater, because it was annoying her, threw it toward the fence, and watched it land in the dirt. “You’re full of milk! I’m themilker!”she shouted at the black-and-white goat who was, for some mysterious reason known only to Lily, named Tinkerbelle. Paige had forgotten all about her Lily-impression and was standing like a cop again, her hand going to her hip out of habit.
No weapon in her apron pocket or anywhere else, though. Anyway, if she shot the goats, Lily would kill her. She wasn’t shooting the goats. She just wanted to intimidate them. Unfortunately, you couldn’t shout, “Get on the ground! Now!” at goats. She knew. She’d tried. She’d tried to catch them, too, but it was way harder than it looked. She lunged, and Tinkerbelle jumped daintily back. When she lunged again, Tinkerbelle jumped the other way.
Watch the subject. Track her moves. Anticipate.Somewhere close by, a dog was barking excitedly. A fat orange chicken ran between Paige’s feet like this was a group project, making her jump, and her self-control slipped a bit more.
She let it all go. She breathed. She focused. All right. It was a dance, and Tinkerbelle was her partner.
Right. Left. Right. And… NOW.She hit the animal with full commitment and an expulsion of breath, went down, rolled, and held on. Then she blundered her way to her feet, her arms straining to hold sixty pounds of squirming goat and her leg threatening to buckle under her, and said, “That’s right. We’re milking, motherfucker.”
The voice came from behind her, low and amused.
