Page 28 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“HowNow needs to be milked. Can you milk a cow?” A little sarcasm might have sneaked in there, but the guy appeared to be the pinnacle of city-boy-ness. Her sarcasm was probably warranted.
He frowned. “Don’t you have a machine for that?”
Yep, a city boy. “Big dairy operations have machines for their herds. I have a cow. I milk the cow. If you untie me, I can do it.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I respect your resourcefulness, but we don’t have time for me to chase you through the cornfields. I’ll milk the cow.”
HowNow would probably nail him in the head with a well-placed hoof when he did it wrong. Sarah just had to wait until the cow knocked him out cold, and then she could figure out how to get out of the zip-tie handcuffs he’d fashioned. “Sure. Go right ahead. Bucket’s in the extra stall, there.”
Sarah watched him move, his long legs covering the tight spaces in the barn.
The man petted the small cow first, stroking her ears and letting her sniff his hand while he spoke gently. Then he got the bucket and squatted beside the cow, peering at her udder. He rubbed his hands together briskly to warm them and stroked her flank first, then moved his hands to her teats and started milking the cow with quick proficiency.
HowNow chewed her cud.
Dang. Sarah had thought she had a plan, but the guy knew that you didn’t just walk up to a cow and grab her boob, dang it.
The three barn cats wandered into the stall and meowed at the guy at the sound of the milk streaming into the metal bucket. He angled the cow’s teats and shot each of them a squirt of milk, which they sat up on their haunches to drink.
“Where’d you learn to milk a cow?” Sarah asked him, pissed that her plan to have HowNow knock him out obviously wasn’t going to work.
“I went to boarding school for high school.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that. The one in Switzerland. Supposedly where my brother went, too.”
“The school sent us to live on farms for a week a few times, and we learned to milk the cows and goats. The Swiss believe deeply in their alpine culture and history, from isolationism and neutrality to skiing.”
As the man was squatting and milking the cow, his muscular back flexed under his snug khaki tee shirt, and his uniform fatigues drew tight over his round butt.
Muscles flexed under his inked skin, the long, pointed design staining his flesh like spider legs.
Sarah tilted her head to the side to get a better view of his backside and asked, “Did my brother go on those farm trips?”
“Once. Logan was more interested in the banking internships in Zurich. I’d forgotten how calming it is to milk a cow and care for a horse.”
Sarah snorted. “When Logan was here, we had three cows that needed to be milked twice a day. No wonder he didn’t want to go on your farm trips to teach city slickers how to milk cows.”
“This milk has so much butterfat that it’s slightly yellow. What breed is she?” he asked.
“Guernsey. Their milk is gold because it has so much beta-carotene in it, though it’s also around five percent butterfat. Guernseys are A2A2 cattle, so their milk is easier to digest than the Holsteins that most dairies use. I used to take some Guernsey milk to my friend Melinda Johnson’s house every day because her first kid couldn’t digest milk very well. If he drank Holstein milk, he had stomachaches all the time. I sold her HowNow’s calf a few years ago, so they have their own Guernsey for him now.”
After fifteen minutes, he said, “I think she’s slowing down. I have two or three gallons here.”
“That’s about right for the morning. She produces about six gallons a day.”
He stood, carrying the bucket. “What do you do with the rest of the milk? Or do you drink all six gallons every day?”
“I make my own cheese and butter. I also have a farm stand by the road with coolers for milk, butter, and eggs. You probably saw it.”
“Yeah. Honor system. I noticed it. You’re undercharging compared to the A2 dairy products at the farmers market in Kalona on Saturdays. You should take your butter and produce to that.”
“How the heckers do you know that?”
He looked off to the left and then back to her. “I checked out your farm stand. I needed to know who I was dealing with.”
Just like this guy, coming into her barn and city-splaining to her how to run a farm. “I can’t go gallivanting off to the Kalona farmers market every weekend. I have chores to do.”
“Right. What else needs to be done?”
