AllFreeNovel
Share Us
By the time she got to the kitchen, she realized they had already left. Well, that was not going to happen again. Margarette had emphasized the importance of sending her men off to work with a belly filled with a warm, sumptuous breakfast and encouraging words to see them through the day because ranch work was hard work.
She did, however, start preparations for a pie for lunch, and after several failed initial attempts, she thought she might have a winner after all.
Okay, next on the list was laundry. She did a ton of loads, and she may have added too much detergent in one load, which resulted in a huge foamy mess, but she was a quick study, and that wouldn’t happen again.
She ironed their shirts and may have burned a hole the size of a crater into one of them. Without any shame, she hid the shirt at the bottom of one of the drawers in the room she used.
She then had to milk the ducking cow.
Was Margarette serious?
As a heart attack, apparently.
Donning a scarf, which she used as a mask, and wearing her favorite pair of jeans, she set out to find a cow.
Soon enough, she found herself in the middle of a sizable barn with cows and hay all around her.
Right.
She stared at the large, scary-looking cow with a bell around her neck and a name tag too. From where she stood, Lacey could only make out the first few letters of her name, so she called her Alfie. The cow may have looked docile enough, but she trusted it as far as she could throw it.
Spotting a stainless-steel milking pail and stool, she picked them up and got to work. It was probably the most squeamish experience of her life. She scrunched her eyes shut so hard that she felt as if she had sent her eyeballs up into her brain. Flushed an embarrassing shade of red for having to touch another female’s... well, udders, she repeated a prayer that Alfie didn’t kick the wind out of her before she filled the pail.
She wrapped her fingers around Alfie’s teats, reciting what she had read from Margarette’s blog and reimagining the video she had attached as well. She then applied pressure, shuddering as she did so, and squeezed. But it wasn’t hard enough, so she tried again, and this time a squirt of milk splattered into the pail.
Oh yeah. She was milking a cow like the wife of a professional rancher. Professional ranchers in her case. She, Lacey Holland, who hated the smell of farm animals, was milking a whole-ass cow in a barn in her quest for validation.
“Thank you, Alfie, you beauty you,” she said when the pail filled up.
She patted Alfie and received a gentle lowing from the sweet animal. Okay, so maybe cows weren’t so bad.
Emboldened by her win, she cleaned out the chicken coop and decided that it was the chickens who were the stark, raving mad creatures of farm life. She felt as if she had gone to war and been back again. But she ticked it off Margarette’s list with pride.
And then came the pigsty. And that’s where things really got crazier.
In an enclosed area, there were two pigs. Their feeding troughs had already been filled, and fresh water filled the other troughs. So they had been fed already, and the evidence lay strewn all across the enclosed structure. A slew of fruit and vegetables littered the ground, which meant she had to clean it up.
Okay then.
The degree of her desperation to prove Jenna wrong surpassed almost everything else in her life. She was willing to get into a pigsty and clean up after their messy feast of apples, bananas, and other kinds of fruit, carrots, cabbages, and pumpkins too.
Well, if Alfie didn’t kill her and she survived the demonic chicken coop, she could handle the damn pigs. Besides, there were only two of them.
Gathering the rake and bucket, she slipped open the gate, and instantly one of them, which looked very much like a boar, raised its head, and stared her down. She didn't know why she froze. Maybe it was because of the way it bristled and then strutted toward her. Maybe it was the look in its eye that made her want to run and hide.
She was being silly. It was just a pig. She was just there to clean up the mess.
But the boar had cornered her, stood in front of her, bristled away, and refused to let her leave.
She shooed it away, and when that didn’t work, she used the rake to push it away from her. The thing would not move. Every time she made a beeline for the gate, it beat her to it and stood in front of her.
She almost had a full-on panic attack when it started to nuzzle her, licking her hand, and rubbing its thick, rough fur against her as she stood as still as a statue, hoping it would think she was dead and go away.
Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.
This pig was going to eat her, and no one would ever know what had happened to her.
With nothing else to lose, she firmly and loudly told the animal to stay. And it stayed. She refused to be taken in by the heartbroken look in its eye as she escaped the pen. Well, that served him right for scaring her like that; his sty would remain a pigsty.
