It. Happens.
“You sell a lot of pregnant rats?”
She tossed her hair—this time in a long ponytail—over one shoulder and began playing with the end of it. “I mean...most of our rats are sold as feeders, so it’s not like it matters.”
Oh. Right. That was why I had them in the first place—so they didn’t end up fed to snakes.
“We can take the babies back if you don’t want them. Just bring them in when they’re about three weeks old.”
“What will you do with them?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “We’ll sell them?”
As pets. Or as feeders. Whatever someone wanted rats for.
Yeah. That was not happening.
It looked like Quill was right—I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
Chapter Ten
I found Horst standing in front of the rat cage when I returned to the café.
“Glory O’Bryan,” he said, flashing me a “I can even make a woman forget she’s got a metric ton of baby rats squirming around” grin. “You seem to have more rats than I remember you having.”
“Apparently, Cupcake was pregnant.”
“Ah.” He propped one elbow on top of the cage and leaned his head against his fist. “What an interesting development.”
“That’s one word for it.” I joined him in front of the cage, looking in at the bundles of joy. “Go ahead and say it.”
“Say what?”
“‘I told you so.’”
“First, I don’t remember warning you that you were acquiring a pregnant rat. And second, that hardly seems productive right now.”
I studied him out of the corner of my eye. He could be so flippant that I usually assumed he was teasing me. But at the moment, he seemed nothing but sincere.
“Hey,” he said softly, tugging on a lavender lock of hair. “It’s going to be okay. This isn’t the worst thing that could happen.”
“I have a birthday party in less than three weeks,” I said. “And now I’m going to have a cage full of rats. And I still need to find a Princess Palollipop, and I need to find myself a more professional apron than my bedazzled cat one, and I need to plan my baking, and...”
“Okay, first of all,” he said, “consider the rats a birthday party bonus. Are you charging for the extra furry creatures that will beon display during this party? No. So that’s a freebie. It’s like a hundred extra fuzzy things.”
