Page 77 of Animal Tamer
Rowe laughs. Out loud, easy, hay dust in the air around him, and even after weeks of collecting that sound, it still lands in my chest like a coin in a jar.
“Deke made you two breakfasts today,” he says.
“He did not.”
“He did. The plate and then the 'leftover' biscuits that were not leftover. I watched him make them fresh and lie about it.”
“He's fattening me up.” I pat Rome's leg and straighten, wiping my hands on my jeans, and it comes out of me on autopilot, the old reflex, worn smooth from thirty years of use. “Not that I need help. Some miracle already happened when a man who looks like you decided he liked all this.” I gesture at myself with the hoof file, breezy, moving on. “Anyway, Cleopatra's admirer?—”
“That's not true.”
I glance up. He's stopped forking. He's leaning on the handle, and his gray eyes are on me with that show-night focus, and I realize the joke didn't slide past him the way jokes about myself are supposed to slide past people.
“Rowe. It was a joke.”
“It wasn't.” He doesn't say it unkindly. He says it like he's reading an animal limp—that's not the joke you think it is, that's an old injury.Then his eyes narrow, just slightly, like he's doing math. Like he's measuring a board.
“You're making a face,” I accuse.
“I don't make faces. Now tell me more about Cleopatra's admirer,” he says, and goes back to the hay, and the subject closes like a door.
I forget about it by lunch. That's my mistake.
That night,the show runs long. Saturday crowd, two encores for Brutus, a kid in the third row who Rome decides deserves personal attention, and by the time chores are done, I'm sweaty and hay-flecked, and my ponytail has given up its life's purpose. I shower in our tiny bathroom, taking my time, and when I come out with a towel wrapped around me, steam following me like a cape, Rowe is standing in the middle of the trailer.
“Take the towel off,” he says. “Sit on the edge of the bed.”
My stomach does something acrobatic. His voice has the low register in it, the one that bypasses my brain entirely and speaks directly to my pussy.
“Are we?—”
“Sit.”
I drop the towel. His eyes travel down me and back up,slow, and no matter how many times he does it, my skin heats like the first time. I cross to the big bed he built—the bed that eats a third of the trailer—and sit on the edge, knees together, hands folded like I'm waiting for a bus. Naked at a bus stop.
Then he pulls out his phone and starts texting.
“Oh my god.” I laugh. “Who are you texting? Are you asking Silas for more chains? We have chains, Rowe. We have so many chains. There's a drawer. The drawer clanks when we drive.”
“Not chains.”
“Then what?—”
Someone knocks on the door.
Every muscle in my body activates at once. Rowe crosses the trailer, and I hiss “Rowe—Rowe—” and he opens the door, and Logan steps inside.
I squeal. Actually squeal, a sound I have never once made in my adult life, and my arms fly up to cover my chest while I scramble to fold my legs, my knees, my everything.
“Don't you dare.” Logan's voice rolls through the trailer, warm and dark and utterly unbothered, and when I look up, his gray eyes—Rowe's eyes, one shade hotter—are moving over me like I'm the headline act. “Don't you dare cover that delectable body. I've been promised a show.”
“Promised—” I whip my head to Rowe. “Youtextedhim?—”
“Chair,” Rowe says.
Logan drops into the chair by the wall with the glee of a man being handed front-row seats, boots planted wide, forearms on his thighs, and grins at me like Christmas came early. “Evening, Doc.”
“I'm going to die,” I inform the ceiling.
