AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My gaze dropped to my shoes, my eyes pricking with tears. Pop would have known what to do. We were adrift without him.
And if we didn’t help each other, we’d both drown.
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“If it has anything to do with the fucking internet, I swear to God—”
“What about local deliveries?”
He scowled.
I eyed him. “Are you mad because of the idea or because it’s me who suggested it?”
“You don’t want me to answer. Tell me your big idea.”
“Well,” I started, perking up, “we’re selling milk to local stores, and the surplus is sold for distribution. What if we distributed less wholesale in favor of a local milk delivery service? We could make so much more selling it for retail prices rather than the market value of wholesale milk. And it wouldn’t be hard. We’re already bottling and packaging for the stores. We wouldn’t even need a special transport for now, just a cooler solution for the back of a truck. I could set it up on the website so people could order from us online. We can put up fliers, and I can advertise on the you-know-where.”
He was still scowling, but it was a different kind of scowl. This one I had a feeling was a direct result of me being right.
“Get something together that we can take to Ed and the team. If it’s viable financially, it might work.”
I tried not to smile too big. “Is that a yes?”
“It’s a we’ll see.” He watched me for a beat. “How come you can’t come up with more ideas that don’t cost an arm and a leg?”
“I’ll look through my diary and see if I can dig something up,” I joked.
A quiet chuckle through his nose. “You should probably go shower—you smell like shit.”
“You’re no better. You’re the one with actual shit all over your big, naked mantitties.”
Full-blown laughter barked out of him.
“I mean, you’re wearing jeans but no shirt? It’s like turning on the heater with the windows down.”
“You try shucking hay in shorts and tell me how it feels.”
“Maybe I will,” I said smartly, heading for the shovel to finish cleaning up.
“And maybe next time, think about sunscreen. That’s gonna hurt in a couple hours.”
“But I’ve only been out here a—” I glanced at my shoulder and huffed. “Son of a bitch.”
Jake laughed, petting the albino’s head as he passed her to vault over the fence with such ease, I wondered if he really was some sort of wild beast.
“Do me a favor and stay out of trouble,” he called over his shoulder.
“I can’t promise that,” I shouted after him, enjoying the view until he picked up his hay fork again.
Once I put my tools away and given the girls the treats I promised, I unhooked my phone from the tripod and leaned on the fence to scan the video frames. There were some cute shots of me and the calves, some great ones of me shoveling manure, then the sequence of me getting head-butted by a calf and knocked flat on my back.
But that was nothing compared to the shots with Jake in them.
I’d seen a few pictures of Jake around the house, and in every single posed picture, he was wearing one of those fake, toothy smiles. Like somebody’d told him to say cheese while they stuck him in the ass with penicillin.
When he wasn’t paying attention, he was perhaps the most handsome man I’d ever known.
As I rolled through the frames, the sight of him getting into the mud to pull me into his lap did something melty and hot to my insides. The worry on his face made me wonder if maybe he did care about my well-being. But my favorite shot was the two of us faced off with our arms crossed and mud all over us.
I thought of a handful of captions in a millisecond, weighing the value of putting shirtless Jake on the internet he loathed versus what he’d do to me if I did.
“Hey,” I said in his direction. “I’m going to use these pictures on our social.”
He gave me a look. “Wasn’t that the whole point?”
“And you’re okay with it?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
“Then thanks for asking,” he deadpanned.
“Look at us, being a team and all.”
“Don’t get your hopes up, farmgirl.”
“Too late!” I cheered, letting myself out of the gate to skip toward the house for a shower.
But nothing could wash the smile off my face.
10
No Goats
OLIVIA
A week later, I stood in the store admiring what I’d accomplished in such a short amount of time. Two weeks had to be some sort of a record, not only for the strides I’d made in getting the farm ready to welcome to the public, but for Jake’s lack of interference.
Begrudgingly, he’d let me do what I would. So far, I’d cleaned out the shop and washed all the floors and windows. Ordered goods both local and otherwise, decked out the shop with a trio of glass-front product fridges, and started the process of organizing the displays. A tree-trimming company had come last week and cleared out the underbrush, paring down the tree branches to give a gorgeous view of the house from the gravel parking lot I’d had poured. A local woodworker had provided us with furniture and decor, not only to use, but to sell in a consignment deal that saved us a considerable amount of money.
