Page 34 of Tempting as Sin
She hummed her agreement, and then the quiet settled in. The osprey was hovering, and then it was plummeting, so fast you could barely blink. It broke the surface with barely a splash, then came back up and took off again, wings flapping hard.
“Home to the nest,” Lily said. “He’s got a fish, did you see? He’ll have a mate and fledglings there still. We have birds here, too. Not as many. They tend to come in pairs. They’re fierce, but they’re loyal.”
“Pair bond’s a beautiful thing,” Rafe agreed. “Though it shouldn’t be. A bird is what its nature makes it. I’m guessing she’s not in any doubt, though, that he’ll come back to her.”
“I’m guessing she’s not,” she said.
He said, laying out each word with caution, “Speaking of pair bonding. I’m also guessing that the real story of how you came to marry Antonio is different from the one he tells.”
“Half true,” she said. “The best kind of lie. One of us didn’t want kids, as it turned out. It just wasn’t me.” She closed her takeout container over the remains of her trout. “I’d better be getting back. I need to feed my animals and put them to bed.”
Well, that had shut down the conversation quickly.
Rafe was quiet on the drive home. He’d obviously said enough. Chuck wasn’t, of course. In fact, Lily ended up sitting in the rear seat with him. “I’d better keep him back here,” she’d said, and he’d thought,Back off, mate, and said, “No worries.” When they got back to her house, Rafe took her bike from the back of the SUV, and then unloaded a sack of dog food, waiting with it under his arm while she unlocked the back door, then setting it down in her enclosed back porch. Which was, no surprise, neat and tidy, lined with shelves and high cupboards.
“Thanks,” she said. “I can bring the rest in myself.”
“Chuck’s drooling again,” he said. “Would you like me to open this bag for you before he floods you out of the place?”
“Well…sure,” she said. “OK. I’ll go get his dish.”
A repeat of the frantic gulping and the licking the bowl along the floor followed, and then Rafe was following Lily through a pretty if diminutive kitchen and into a tidy, absolutely feminine cottage-style sitting room, all greens, pinks, and floral prints, where he set the dog bed down near an ornate brass stove set on a pretty flagstone hearth.
“I need to go back out and take care of my animals,” Lily said. “Thank you for dinner. And for buying too much of our Chuck supplies. It wasn’t necessary.”
“Maybe not,” Rafe said. “Maybe it just felt like it.”
She hesitated a moment, and it was like that time before, and completely different. His hand came up to touch her cheek, and that was all. He said, “No worries, Lily. It’s friends. It’s whatever you want it to be.”
“I want it to be…friends,” she said, and then said it again. “I want to be friends.”
“Then that’s what you’ll get,” he promised. “Friends.” Something softened in her face, and he thought again,Back off, mate,and dropped his hand. He had a feeling he was going to be saying that heaps of times. For a few weeks, in fact.
It was going to be a long few weeks.
“If you really will come get Chuck in the morning,” she said, “I’ll be grateful. I leave for the store around nine-thirty.”
“Then I’ll come by around nine,” he said. “See you then.”
Once again, Lily was jumpy. At seven-thirty in the morning, dressed in her other pair of overalls and her rubber boots, she was leaning into the chicken run, setting up food and water containers, and still feeling that same flutter of nerves in her throat, and everywhere else, too. Whatever kind of flutters you wanted to call them, they were a holdover from last night, and yesterday afternoon, and every minute she’d spent with the werewolf. Or thinking about the werewolf.
Disaster calling. She was nowhere close to the kind of cool woman who could have a sexy fling and then treat her fellow flingee as family for the next fifty years or so, and flinging was what Rafe did.
A black nose poked into the doorway beside her, followed by an energetic shove against her thigh. It was so unexpected that she yelped, jumped, and hit her head on the heavy green-wire roof of the run as her poultry scattered, squawking out their indignant protests, their tail feathers waggling.
“Back,”Lily said, putting her hand onto Chuck’s muzzle and shoving him out of the doorway. He wagged his tail hopefully, drew his furry forehead up, and stared at her with such a “Who, me?” expression on his face that she almost laughed. She didn’t, though. She pointed at the ground and said,“Down.”At which he sat, cocked his head, and beseeched her forgiveness some more. One fuzzy ear up and one down.
“Goofball,” she said. “Oh. Treat. We’re both learning.” She reached for a piece of kibble, said, “Down” again, drawing her hand down in front of Chuck’s face while he drooled in the dirt. When he finally hit the deck, she said, “Good boy,” gave him the treat, and picked up the leash. She was going to have to do every bit of this with his leash around her wrist or under her foot. “Congratulations, dopey,” she told him. “You’ve convinced them all that you’re a coyote. On the plus side, you didn’t bark at them. Down. Stay.”
More quizzical eyebrows. More hopeful tail. But he stayed while she finished the chickens, then trotted beside her to the penned yard where she kept her goats. Where her morning instantly turned into a Frisky Fun Time, once Tinkerbelle and Edelweiss, her ridiculous pair of Nigerian dwarf goats, decided that Chuck was exciting, and Chuck announced that he was delighted to oblige. She’d swear that goats enjoyed misbehaving, at least hers did. It was like there was a Naughty Prize, and they were competing for it.
Did she get Tinkerbelle, the black goat, onto the stand and milked eventually? Yes, she did, because she was calm. She was serene. And most importantly, she could still outwit a goat.
She thought that while Chuck lay down and jumped up and lay reluctantly down again, wagged his tail, and uttered the occasional joyful bark. She thought it while Edelweiss ran laps around the shed and the barnyard with her full udder banging against her legs in a way that couldn’t have been comfortable, interrupted by the odd vertical leap like she’d seen a snake. While Tinkerbelle shifted restlessly on the milking stand, and Lily got her milked anyway, because, yes, she was just that good.
And then Tinkerbelle jumped down and it was Edelweiss’s turn. The troublemaker.
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me, missy,” she told the black-and-white animal, grabbing a snack from the bucket and holding it temptingly on the other side of the metal stanchion that would hold the goat in place. “Let’s go.” She held her gaze until Edelweiss jumped up, then said, “That’s right. Who’s in charge? I’m in charge,” and tied her in.
