Wed By A Will

And even if she knew it was unrealistic, she wasn’t letting him kill her donkey for the flimsy reason that the animal wasn’t perfect.

After a long time, he spoke again. “Don’t you have any idea where he came from? Or why he came to you?”

“No.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her again, and sighed, the sigh even more heartfelt than his first one, if that were possible. “Then where do you want him, Ms. Parsons? And don’t say your pasture until you’ve got your fences fixed, because you’re legally libel for anything that happens to my mares.”

Aha. The real reason he wanted her donkey dead.

“There’s a stall in the barn.”

“I’ll put him in there for now. Tomorrow, I’ll come look after the fences.”

“I can look after my own fences.”

“Humor me.”

The donkey chose that moment to lunge at him, his teeth bared. Donahue sidestepped easily, shook his head and dragged the unwilling donkey toward her barn. She started to follow.

“Don’t get too close behind him. He’d probably kick you as soon as look at you.”

So, she trailed behind at a safe distance, and followed them into the murky barn. “I hope the barn doesn’t fall down on top of him,” she said, watching Donahue struggle with a rusted latch on a stall gate.

He gave her a look that said he hoped it did. He installed the donkey in the pen, stepped back and relatched the gate.

“Do you have any feed for him?”

She contemplated that for a moment. Feed for him. A hint might have been nice. Couldn’t she just go pick some of that grass and throw it in here? Donahue read her mind.

“You don’t even know what he eats, do you?” he asked, the softness of his tone not even beginning to hide his impatience.

“I’ll go to the library and find out,” she said proudly.

“That sounds a lot easier than just asking,” he said sardonically.

She fought with her pride briefly then gave in with ill grace. “Okay. What does he eat?”

“He’ll need hay, until you can get him on the grass. A couple of bales. And if you plan to build him up, he should probably have oats. Though,” he frowned, “that might make him all the more eager to get after my mares.”

“All right. I’ll go get a couple of bales of hay, then, and some oats.”

He glanced at his watch, and sighed. “Well, not today you won’t. Feed store closed at five. You couldn’t get hay there, anyway. You don’t generally buy hay by the bale. You buy it by the ton.”

The donkey let out an outraged bray that made the walls shake and made her worry the barn was going to come down around them.

“He’ll need water right away. Don’t go in there with him, you hear?”

The donkey chose that moment to lunge at the gate, so she decided not to argue with Donahue on the issue of entering the pen, even though she did not like the bossy tone of that you hear? She nodded stiffly.

“I’ll bring by some straw for his bedding and enough hay to get you through a few days until I can have a look at those fences.” He glanced at his watch, and she caught a glimpse of weariness as he tried to figure out where to fit her into his day. “I’ll try to come around by eight or nine.”

She wanted desperately to tell him that wasn’t necessary, that she would look after it herself. But the truth was, it was necessary. Her donkey could not wait on a point of pride. He looked like he might perish if he did not get the right kind of attention soon.

She didn’t know a single soul who would know the first thing about giving a donkey the proper kind of care. Certainly her sisters would not. And their husbands were a lawyer and an ex-cop. Somehow that seemed far removed from donkey land.

“I’ll pay you,” she said proudly.

“Whatever.” He stood regarding her for a moment, and then with a small shake of his head, he strode by her and was gone.

His scent lingered in her nostrils for a long, long time.

She went and put her hand cautiously over the gate to the stall, hoping the donkey would touch her fingers again with his muzzle and prove to her she had done the right thing.

But the donkey rolled his eyes at her, and stayed squished as tight against the back wall of his new home as he could go.

“I know all about that feeling,” she said, and she smiled, knowing she had done just the right thing after all.

Chapter Two

“Mr. Donahue, you’re late. You know we have fines for people who pick up their children late.”

“Yeah, yeah. Put it on my bill. Would you tell my nephew I’m here?”

That irritating woman, Mrs. Beatle, was actually wagging her finger at him. Not as easily intimidated by a certain tone of voice, a set of jaw, as Grimes had been.

He sighed. “Please?”

Townspeople just never got it. Mares foaled. Colts in training went berserk. Donkeys arrived. You couldn’t just drop everything and run to town because it was five-thirty precisely and the day care was closing.

He had days, usually in the spring when mares were foaling and he was operating on two or three hours sleep a night, when he dreamed of a job that quit at five-thirty. Or six-thirty. Or ten-thirty. Or midnight.

On the other hand, a man traded something for a job like that. Freedom. He had never addressed another man as his boss, and he was not sure that he ever could.

“Robbie,” he called. Mrs. Beatle was hellbent on continuing her lecture on punctuality, as if he was a ten-year-old boy and not a man who was tough as nails from wrangling horses for a living.

What was it today? He’d put out a magnet for difficult women?

Not that Mrs. Beatle was in the same category as her. His new neighbor. Not even close. Mrs. Beatle was old and gray and built like a refrigerator.

Where as the new neighbor was young and not gray and not built anything like a refrigerator. It occurred to him it had been a long time since anything had gotten his attention quite as completely as she had.

In his mind’s eye he could see her, startling like a deer, when he’d first walked in the door. A rude thing for him to do, but the door had been open, and it was hard to think of that falling down cabin as belonging to anyone but him. The property had been in his family for several generations.

Until he’d sold it. It still felt like some kind of failure that he’d sold off that parcel of land. Maybe that’s why he wanted it back so badly. As if he could erase a whole bad period of his life by erasing the evidence.

At first glance, in that dimly lit cabin, his new neighbor had looked like a teenager. She’d been wearing jeans that were too small, and a T-shirt that was too large. Her hair had looked like a candle flame, yellow, dancing with light, pulled back into a ponytail like the cheerleaders at Miracle Harbor High used to wear.

Except unlike the cheerleaders, who’d always worn those vaguely irritating wholesome expressions of good cheer, in that first second, before she masked it, Corrine Parsons had looked scared damned near to death.