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Naturally, the plea I didn’t want him to hear was the one the contrary man responded to. With a quick eye roll that let me know what he thought about my idea of “protection,” he reached up and grasped the zipper pull on the front of his costume.
And then, in achingly slow motion, like something out of a very niche-kink porn video, the sexy turkey yanked down the zipper… and stripped off all his feathers.
Chapter Five
CHARLTON
Hunter was staring at me again.
I’d only intended to save the bulk of the turkey costume from the inevitable sanding dust. But after I’d unzipped the top portion, Hunter’s eyes had gone hot and glassy, and the tip of his tongue had darted out to lick his lips in a way that made me freeze in place and pray my dick would do the same.
Suddenly, I remembered my conversation with Seamus about refinishing floors and double entendres and wondered if he’d been right all along. Maybe Hunter, my former friend and current semi-enemy, was more interested in the other kind of floor refinishing than in doing actual renovation work.
And wouldn’t that be the most unexpected development in a week of unprecedented surprises?
Hunter had been driving me crazy all morning. The man was ten tons of snark packed into six-plus feet of muscular farmer, which was my personal kryptonite. Not to mention, he smelled like clean sweat, hay, and maple syrup, which I would never have imagined was a lust-inducing combo, but for some reason was really doing it for me. If the man kept staring, things were about to get very physical in a way neither one of us had anticipated.
I mean, not to say I’d never thought about Hunter that way. I definitely had. Skinny, virginal, teenage me had spent hours and hours thinking about his generous lips and his powerful muscles, even before I’d known exactly what I’d want those lips and muscles to do to me. And last night, under cover of darkness in Amos’s bunk room, I’d thought about Hunter again… this time in much greater detail.
But those had been fantasies. The reality was my time today had been bought and paid for—and not in a sexual way, despite anyone’s ideas to the contrary. Which meant I needed to strip my costume without making it seem like I was, you know… stripping my costume.
I grasped for some way to distract us both, and what came out of my mouth was, “You know, you never told me how Dolly Parton got his name.”
“Huh?” The reminder of his supposed “prize” turkey snapped Hunter out of the tongue thing. “Oh, that. It… uh…” His cheeks went pink, and he scratched the back of his neck in an obvious tell. “Who even remembers?”
I tilted my head, genuinely curious now. “About everything concerning that turkey? You. Definitely you.”
Hunter dropped his hands to his sides. “Fine, then. Not like it matters anymore anyway. I, ah, got Dolly as a poult from a heritage breeder over in Great Nuthatch right around Labor Day, and I was showing him off at our family cookout. My cousin Kelsey—she was, like, three at the time—thought he was the cutest thing, puffing out his feathers and chirping all over the place. She said he sounded like…” He cleared his throat. “Like Dolly Parton.”
“Oh my God.” I pressed a hand to my bare chest. “That’s adorable.”
“Yeah, well. My uncle Clem didn’t think so,” Hunter said grimly. “Told her to stop being silly because that poult was a tom, not a hen, and it had to have a boy name. Kelsey bawled, and that got everyone riled—she’s my mom’s favorite niece, you know?—and I told Clem that it didn’t matter if the bird was male or female, it was my choice, and a bird as majestic as mine should be named for the most majestic sight in all of Tennessee.” He shrugged. “So, we christened him Dolly Parton. And later, Clem agreed that the turkey had a magnificent bosom. So.”
I laughed out loud, and he shot me a disgruntled look.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. But you should know that poor little Kelsey was devastated when she heard about Dolly’s violent, horrific assault a few months later at the hands of someone Dolly thought was his friend.”
My laughter evaporated, and my back teeth ground together. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. There was no assault, Hunter, violent or otherwise! I put the damned bird in a pillowcase and treated it like the prince you thought he—wait,” I said as I belatedly recognized the name he’d mentioned. “Wait. Are you talking about Kelsey Jackson? The one who owns the boxing gym in town? The one who bid on Jim McNeely last night for the sole purpose of, and I quote, ‘fucking him up’ in the ring? She’s poor little Kelsey?”
