He knew exactly how falling for Tessa would end. He had the divorce papers in a box somewhere to prove it.
Except . . . Lexi never would’ve patched a fence. Nor given a cat shots nor swabbed medicine on a llama's skin. And Lexi never, ever, would've swallowed her pride for the sake of any animal's health.
His phone buzzed. A text from his older brother, Hank.
Heard from Reno you bought a kid jeans and are making calls to her mom several times a week. Who are you courting?
He shoved the phone in his pocket.
He was not courting Tessa. He was providing veterinary care to animals and appropriate clothing to a child for the environment she lived in. These were professional and humanitarian acts. Nothing more.
7
The donkey had developed a system.
Tessa figured it out on Monday of the second week, when she hung a coral silk shell on the clothesline behind the house—the last survivor of a once-formidable wardrobe—and made the mistake of stepping inside for sixty seconds to pour a cup of coffee.
She heard the paddock gate creak through the open kitchen window. By the time she reached the back door, Loretta had the blouse in her teeth and was backing away with the purposeful determination of a creature executing a well-rehearsed heist.
“Drop it!” Tessa lunged for the silk.
Loretta pinned her ears flat, clamped down harder, and reversed faster. The blouse stretched between them—Tessa gripping the hem, Loretta gripping the collar—in a tug of war that was beneath both of their dignities.
The silk ripped. Loretta stumbled backward with the larger piece and galloped away toward the paddock, coral fabric streaming from her mouth like a victory pennant. Tessa stood holding a scrap of what had once been an eighty-dollar blouse and contemplated the very real possibility that the donkey was doing this on purpose.
“She waits for me to go inside,” she said in disbelief to nobody. “She watches me hang things up, and she waits for me to walk away.”
From the porch, Makayla lowered her cell phone, grinning with unholy delight.
“Tell me you did not just film that!” Tessa exclaimed
“And I sent it to Dr. Steele.”
“Makayla Grace Lawrence?—”
Her phone buzzed with a text. From Dillon. Great. Just great.
Tell the donkey I said coral isn’t her color.
She put the phone in her pocket without responding. She would not give him the satisfaction.
But she might have smiled. Just barely. With her back carefully turned to Makayla.
The wardrobe destruction became an almost daily occurrence—a dark comedy she was learning to tolerate if not enjoy. Blouses, scarves, one glove of a leather pair she’d owned for years. Loretta was either working through a fiber deficiency or waging a deliberate campaign to strip Tessa of every piece of clothing that connected her to her old life. She was beginning to suspect the latter.
But the hat wasn’t the donkey’s fault.
Her favorite hat was a wide-brimmed dove-gray felt fedora she’d bought at a little shop in Orlando. She and Mick had taken Makayla to the big theme parks there for her fourth birthday. Tessa had tried the hat in one of the souvenir shops as a lark, and Mick had tilted it just so on her head, stepped back, and grinned. “Now that’s a hat.”
She’d kept it on a high shelf in the farmhouse mudroom. Well out of donkey range, goose range, and any other range of any creature on this property.
She had not accounted for the chickens. Nor for their ability to fly short distances.
Wednesday morning, she reached for the hat and found a Rhode Island Red hen sitting in it. The hen had arranged herself in the crown with the imperial bearing of a duchess settling into a sedan chair. Beneath her, deposited in the dove-gray felt Mick had bought her, was a single brown egg.
“No,” Tessa declared. “Absolutely not. That is a hat.”
The hen clucked at her with serene indifference and tucked her wings more firmly against her sides.