Page 24 of Tempting as Sin
Rafe would take Clay Austin out for a cautious spin later today and explore. Right now, though, he was going to run these stairs of Jace’s over and over until the sweat started to pour, lift the heaviest weights he owned until his muscles burned and his legs shook, then use his own body weight in every possible way a person could torture himself. Clay Austin was cut and lean. No protein powder in the nineteenth century. Rafe had no doubt at all that at some point, Clay would be taking off his shirt for a wash in the river. Probably in slow motion.
He grabbed his Bluetooth headphones and went out to the garage again. He’d bring those weights inside, and then he’d start doing it. Whilst thinking cowboy thoughts.
Two hours after he’d arrived, Bailey was sitting on the lowest step of the porch beside Lily and saying, “That’s really gross.”
“It is,” Lily said, tweezing another tick out of Chuck’s neck and dropping it into a once-but-never-again jam jar, now an rubbing-alcohol-filled tick graveyard. “He’ll be happier when these are out, although on second thought, I’m not sure if I can take Chuck getting any happier. Just a few more, though, and then it’s bath time. I think you should call your grandma, because this is taking a while.”
“I told you,” Bailey said. “It’s her shows.”
Lily set down the tweezers, pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of her overalls, and slapped it into Bailey’s palm. “Call.”
Bailey sighed, then punched in the number. “Hi,” he said, as Lily resumed work on Chuck, taking care around the spot on his neck where he’d been tied up. A spot that was obvious now that he was shorn, because it was healing from where it had been rubbed raw, the poor baby. Any part of her plans that had included, “Check whether anybody’s lost their dog” had taken a big old U-turn right there.
“It’s Bailey,” the boy was saying into the phone. “This lady said I should call you and tell you I’m at her house.” At Lily’s gesticulation with the tweezers and her hissed, “Tell her my name,” he added, “I’m at, um, Lily Hollander’s house. Up on the mountain.” A few seconds later, he said, “No,” then “no” again. Finally, he said, “OK. Bye,” and handed the phone back to Lily.
She held it to her ear and said, “Hello?” but the line was dead. She asked Bailey, “What did she say?”
Bailey scratched at a mosquito bite on his ankle. Like the dog, he was less than pristine. Lily wondered how many days he’d been wearing those jeans. “She asked if I was kidnapped. Or if I was bleeding. Then she said why was I calling her right now, then, because it wasThe Price Is Right.And then she said be home for dinner. I told you.”
“Ah,” Lily said. “Her shows.”
“Yeah. That’s her favorite one.” Bailey picked up the tick jar. “My grandma would say this was disgusting, but Ms. Swan would think it was interesting. I think it’s interesting, too. How come Chuck couldn’t scratch them out, if they felt bad? His toenails are really long.”
Lily had already noticed that. That was going to be the final step after the bath. “That’s not how ticks work,” she said. “They’re very sneaky about burrowing themselves in and making themselves hard to get out. You could call it their mission in life.”
Bailey considered that. “How come there are things like ticks and mosquitoes? Ms. Swan says everything in nature has a purpose, but mosquitoes just bite you, plus they carry disease.”
“Bat food?” Lily suggested. “Bats are very important. And what else would eat mosquitoes, do you think?”
Bailey thought a minute, then his face brightened. “Some birds eat bugs.”
“That’s right. Also, where do mosquitoes lay their eggs? Do you know that?”
“They have eggs?”
“Everything has eggs, unless it has live young. Do insects have live young?”
“Oh. I guess not. Like the worker ants carry the ant eggs. I read it in this book at school. It had pictures of it. Where do mosquitoes lay their eggs?”
“In stagnant water, like ponds.Nowwhat eats them?”
“Oh. Fish?”
Lily smiled at him, and Bailey smiled happily back and said, “You have very interesting conversations.”
Lily laughed, screwed the top on the tick jar, and said, “Why, thank you. Let’s give Chuck that bath. Since he doesn’t have a collar, you’re going to have to hang onto his neck at the critical stages. You ready?”
Bailey jumped up. “Ready.” Chuck jumped up, too, like he wasn’t sure what was happening next, but whatever it was, he was all in.
Lily grabbed the homemade dog shampoo she’d concocted with dish soap, vinegar, and glycerin, turned on the water to the hose, dragged it over onto her patch of grass, and said, “Let’s do it. Bring him on.”
Did Chuck cooperate? In a way. At least, he entered fully into the exercise. There was the point, though, where she and Bailey were sudsing him up and he wriggled right out from between her legs, galloped around the yard shaking bubbles from his coat, rolled ecstatically in the dirt, then jumped up again and ran a circle around the two of them, his tail going like mad, flicking muddy water in every direction, then brushed against them and finished the job. Also probably giving them fleas. Bailey was shrieking and jumping, and Lily had a hand over her face and was unfortunately shrieking herself.
“You are a terrible dog,” she told Chuck, but she wasn’t able to be severe enough, because all he did was shake joyfully all over both of them, making them laugh some more. Which was the first time. By the time he was rinsed and toweled off, it was thefourthtime he’d done that, and Lily had given up trying to shield herself. She brought out a couple more towels from the house, tossed one to Bailey, and said, “Well, that’s one way to cool off. Next time? Collar. Leash.”
“He looks kind of naked,” Bailey said, surveying Chuck, who was indeed a startlingly different and no more attractive dog with the layers of hair gone.
“He’s skinny and wet, that’s all,” Lily said, although it wasn’t. Chuck was big, clumsy, homely, and—well, a goofball. “And we’re probably not looking like beauty queens ourselves. You know what he needs now, besides his toenails cut?”
