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“You’re talking about sensation. I’m talking about emotion.”
He’d been right. It was both.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Harry
Most of February had been unseasonably warm and wet, and it made Harry’s life hell.
It had already rained more here in the valley than it had his entire five years in Los Angeles. He wished the temperatures would stay low enough for snow. At least then he wouldn’t have to hear the incessant babble of it on his roof.
He peered out the sliding door that overlooked his small deck. The aesthetic was post-apocalyptic—gray-and-brown terrain, bruise-blue sky. The Chardonnay block closest to the carriage house had been pruned hard the month before, and now the trellises looked like rows of skeletal soldiers awaiting orders to advance.
It didn’t help that most of the family had left for the weekend. Ma and Dad had gone to the mountains with Nate and Maren for last-minute wedding preparations for Patrick and Mercy’s wedding next month. Duncan was out with a woman he’d met at the Everetts’ party in the fall.
Urgent pounding on his front door spiked his blood pressure. When he answered, Rowan stood there, like he’d conjured her out of sheer longing. Behind her, thick clouds scudded across the leaden sky, and everything was damp with a mist toofine to be called rain. A halo of fuzzy curls shimmered around her face, thousands of tiny droplets of water caught in the fiery filaments. The chill smudged ruddy color into her cheeks and the tip of her nose.
She was breathless, pressing a hand to her side. “You know that saying about March—in like a lion and out like a lamb?”
Harry’s lungs seized. He tasted the storm in the air, the enormous energy of it. The world was restless with the rising wind.
“Apparently, lambs come in February,” she said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“One of the ewes was two for the price of one. Baby sheep. Coming now.”
“How is that possible?”
Rowan straightened, cocked a hip, and withered him with an impatient look. “Well, when a mommy sheep and a daddy sheep love each other very much—”
“Damn it, you know what I mean. How did we get one that was pregnant?”
Pregnant.
Jesus, he felt light-headed just saying the word.
Rowan threw her hands up. “Love—finds a way?”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Harrison, she’s laboring in the barn right now, and I’m freaking out. I was grafting vines in the greenhouse and I heard her bleating from all the way up there.”
Laboring.
“No. Fuck, no.” His jaw locked shut. He shook his head.
“Please.” Rowan grabbed his wrist and tugged. He yanked out of her grasp hard enough she stumbled backward. Shame instantly seared his face.
She righted herself quickly and blasted him with a glare. “You told me to let you know when I needed you, remember?”
Another glance at the sky. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
Rowan blinked the wet out of her eyes. “You don’t get to choose when someone needs you.”
She was right. But he was fucking weak. “I’m not a veterinarian.”
“If you can’t help the ewe”—she visibly faltered, her body somehow stiffening even as her expression softened—“be there forme.”
