Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 85453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 427(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 427(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Now her comment about firing at football players makes sense.
“How often do they come out?”
McKayla continues peering down the scope while answering my question, “Up until I learned to shoot, almost every weekend.” Nothing but annoyance is heard when she adds, “We lost a heifer every month.”
“From them tipping the cows?” When she nods, my lips quirk.
I thought that was an old wives’ tale.
“But with Junior missing the state championships due to a pellet to his right butt cheek, their visits slimmed down to season openers and homecoming week.” She pulls back to peer at me. “They must have caught wind that I had left for school.” Her smile makes my cheeks ache. “This will ensure they won’t come back anytime soon.”
She fires another shot. This time, she takes down a victim with an air rifle pellet to his left butt cheek.
“Goddammit, McKayla. They weren’t doing any harm!”
A man with a big white hat and an even whiter shirt glares in our direction like he can see McKayla through the darkness before he helps the man she shot to remove his boots before he gets hit again.
“The rules apply to you too, Clayton,” McKayla shouts when only one man remains fully clothed.
“I’m not—”
Pew.
“Alrighty, I’m stripping. Hold the damn reins.” As he removes his clothing, Clayton grumbles, “But you wait until your momma hears about this. Aunt Anna doesn’t like when you’re mean to me.”
“You want to hope Momma doesn’t hear about this, Clay, or she might stop making you that pickled pork you love so much.” I am obsessed with the depth of McKayla’s accent. She couldn’t be more southern if she tried. “But I guess you deserve that since you’re hurting her cows.”
“We weren’t hurting anyone.” His head follows the movement of the pellet that whizzes past his head. “We won’t do it again. I promise.”
Once the group of eight are stripped down to their boxer shorts, McKayla restates her demand for them to place their clothing into the dam at their side, then commence their long walk home. “And don’t think I won’t be here, waiting for you if you come back before dawn.”
I wait until their grumbles mimic a mosquito whizzing around my head before releasing the chuckles I’ve struggled to hold back the past twenty minutes. “That was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Although I would have made them walk naked.”
McKayla shrugs like the thought never popped into her head. “To a cowboy, losing your boots, hat, and truck in one night is far worse than prancing around naked.” She packs up her makeshift command, dumps her air rifle into the trunk, then slips behind the steering wheel. “And their egos were already bruised.”
Lost, I ask, “Because a girl showed them how it’s done?”
My smile competes with the moon when she answers, “Because you have more between your legs than all of them combined, so they couldn’t have missed it when they drove past you.”
Chapter 26
Cash
I’m still grinning like a man who had his ego stroked in the right way when McKayla veers us past a set of structures dotted back from the road. Fields stretch as far as the eye can see, but with the sky suffocated by dark storm clouds, it is as eerie as hell.
“Is that one of your cousins’ houses?” I learned shortly after leaving Clayton and his friends that Clayton is one of the cousins McKayla mentioned when announcing she’d never been kissed.
Her recently washed hair streams into my nose when she shakes her head. “That’s a bunkhouse.”
“Bunkhouse?” I ask, unaware of the lingo.
She turns down another dirt road. “Workers’ cabins. You sleep in them if the roads become too boggy during the wet season. Well, we did when wrangling cattle. We haven’t done that since we sold the last of our main stock four seasons ago.”
Her smile is brighter than a crack of lightning brightening the sky when I mutter, “Damn vegans. Ruin everything.”
“Kind of like this storm. It looks like a doozy.” She shifts her focus from peering out the windshield to me. “Everyone wants rain until they realize they forgot to build an ark.”
“I don’t think you need an ark,” I mutter under my breath when the main house comes into view. It is massive. “A yacht, perhaps?”
McKayla laughs before pulling up beside an old oak tree that’s branches almost touch the two-story manor. “A yacht would be fun, but have you ever driven a harvest machine?”
“I can’t say I have.” After unlatching my seat belt and making sure my clothes are on straight since I got dressed in a hurry, I slip out of my seat before shadowing McKayla up the front porch of her childhood home.
It reminds me a lot of the main home on Yellowstone, except the porch is larger, and there is more wood and a bigger floor plan.