Dopey finally took a few steps, but none of the other goats seemed inclined to follow. The guy turned to nudge another goat, which caused Dopey to stop moving. The remaining duck that wasn’t following Sugar got offended by the other goats being pushed around, and she squawked, flapped her wings angrily, and went waddling off—in the opposite direction.
“Dammit, Alice,” the man exclaimed.
That seemed to annoy the pig, who decided to go find a quieter place to eat and went wandering toward the front of the bar.
“Hermione,” the man said, raising his voice slightly, calling after the pig. “I really like bacon. And pulled pork.”
Charlie snorted again. He looked over.
“Did you say her name is Hermione?”
He sighed.
Charlie grinned at him. It was. The pig’s name was Hermione. “I know you didn’t name her—though it would have made it even better if you had—but I have to tell you, something about hearing you say Hermione really delights me.”
He rolled his eyes. She couldn’t see it in the dark, but she was sure of it.
“I get the impression that you’re pretty used to people wanting to delight you,” he said, turning to nudge another goat. Who didn’t want to be nudged.
Hmmm, also not exactly a compliment. But not really an insult either. It could have probably sounded like an innuendo, actually. But this guy didn’t seem like the innuendo type.
“It’s true,” she admitted. “People like to make me happy.”
“Why is that?”
That was an interesting question. But she liked to make other people happy, so it seemed that they should feel the same way in return. “Probably because I’m delightful.”
“You don’t say.”
Yeah, he didn’t seem convinced. “If you’d danced with me, you would have known that.”
“I’m not too easy to… delight.”
She felt her lips curl into a smile.
His brows rose. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That smile.”
She shrugged. “Just a smile.”
“No.” He shook his head. “That’s an oh-that’s-really-interesting smile.”
“Is it?” She pretended not to know what he was talking about. But it was really interesting that he wasn’t easy to delight.
People who were hard to delight were her catnip.
“It is,” he confirmed.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m not really the dancing type.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And delightful isn’t a word I use any more often than Taylor Swift.”
“Okay.”
“You’re still smiling.”
“Huh.”
And apparently, good-looking, six-foot-three-inch guys with scruffy jaws, who had a soft spot for goats and who weren’t easy to delight, were apparently more like chocolate-covered catnip with colored candy sprinkles.
Because he was not getting rid of her now.
Not until he admitted that she was delightful. And that he should have said yes to that dance.
He sighed. “So are you going to help?”
“Help with what?” She had a list already started in her mind of things she’d like to help him with. Like getting him out of his pants.
“The goats.”
Yeah, those weren’t even in the top ten.
Charlie looked around. Then back at him. “Do I seem like the type of girl who would be helpful with goats?”
She’d spent every summer of her life in Autre until she’d turned nineteen and landed her first marketing internship as a part of her college program. She wasn’t not the type to help with goats. She’d spent plenty of time dirty and muddy and not smelling so good when down here on the bayou. Some of the best times of her life.
But right now?
She was wearing Valentino. And her nails were totally inappropriate for this event, but they were spectacular.
“You really don’t,” he said simply.
Well, at least they were on the same page with that.
“But you’re human and have two arms, two legs, and two hands. That’s really all I need right now.”
Charlie bit back her first retort in response to that being all he really needed from her. She was a lady. Kind of.
She was a Landry lady, which meant that she sometimes let the inappropriate comments slip out. But she’d been raised away from the bayou, unlike most of her cousins, which meant that she was typically able to swallow her inappropriate responses before they made it past her lips.
“How about I just go back inside and get you some help from in there?”
The man groaned, and he straightened fully. “Jesus, don’t do that.”
Charlie immediately realized what he was talking about. The people she would go retrieve to help him with this little situation included her cousins Mitch, Fletcher, Zeke, and Zander. And they would absolutely give him shit about this. She would have considered getting her nicer set of cousins—Josh, Owen, and Sawyer—but they happened to be the grooms at this triple wedding, and she couldn’t imagine pulling them away from their new brides for goat herding.
Clearly, this guy realized which men she would most likely bring out to help wrangle the animals. That he didn’t want to deal with them made her think he knew her family rather well.
She looked from him to the goats, then back to him, then to the pig, then back to him again. She blew out a breath and said, “Fine. But you’re going to owe me.”
He hesitated for just a moment, then said, “I may regret this, but I think owing you might be better in the long run than dealing with the Landry boys.”
Charlie decided not to tell him that he was incorrect in that assumption.
Not that him owing her wouldn’t be fun, but where he might end up getting mocked, possibly even bruised, and definitely muddy hanging out with her cousins, it would be an event that he would soon forget about. It would simply be another night hanging out in Autre with the Landrys.
But hanging out with her was not something that he was likely to forget for a long time. At least if she had her way.
Chapter 2
“Okay, just tell me what you need me to do,” she said brightly, suddenly more enthusiastic about this task.
If this guy and his tiny hints of charm also had a little bossiness and a whole lot of competence underneath—and he continued with this general air of reluctance about spending a lot of time with her—this was going to be way more fun than even her grandpa’s moonshine at a triple family wedding.
And her grandpa’s moonshine had been known to lead to things like fireworks and skinny dipping. In other words, lots of fun.
“I need to get these animals back across the street,” the man said.
“Across the street?”
He nodded and tipped his head in the general direction of the Boys of the Bayou office. The company offered swamp boat and pontoon tours of the bayou and fishing expeditions. It was owned and run by, as it so happened, the three men and one of the women who had tied the knot tonight. It had been her grandfather’s business before he’d sold it to her cousins, so it had been in the family for years. It was a staple in Charlie’s life, and she had spent many wonderful summer days on those boat docks and out on the bayou on those boats.
The office was situated across the dirt road from Ellie’s bar.
The Landry family, other than Charlie’s father, all lived and worked within a twenty-mile radius of one another, and the little town of Autre was home to a multitude of Landry family businesses. In addition to the bar and swamp boat tour company, there was also a construction company, an accounting business, a mechanics garage, and many others. Her cousin Zander was even the town cop, and her cousin Kennedy had recently been elected mayor. The Landry family more or less ruled Autre, Louisiana. It was a unique and very special place, and Charlie loved it with her whole heart.
“You’re going t
o put the goats in the office?” Charlie asked.
“No, I think I’ll put them in their barn.”
Charlie glanced toward the swamp boat company again. “Their barn?”
“The barn that’s next to the swamp boat docks,” the man said.
“Why is there a barn next to the docks?”
“Because that’s where they put the petting zoo.”
“There’s a petting zoo?” She really should start reading her grandmother’s emails more carefully.
Ellie would have definitely filled Charlie in on a new petting zoo. But Ellie’s emails tended to be as long as the stories she told out loud. And she didn’t hit ENTER very often. The emails were solid blocks of running text, and they made Charlie’s head hurt a little, even as they made her smile.
Plus, Charlie’s schedule had been crazy lately. She was leaving for a new position with her company in two days. In Paris. Yes, France. She was going to be working in Paris, freaking France.
So yeah, she’d been a little busy. Still, it seemed that her mom or dad or one of her sisters would’ve mentioned that their cousins were starting a petting zoo as a part of their tourist business.
“There is a petting zoo. Boys of the Bayou Gone Wild.” The man seemed put out by the mere suggestion of a petting zoo, not to mention the reality of one.
Charlie felt a little smile curling her lips. The man seemed a little put out in general as it had to do with goats, ducks, and pigs. It seemed that perhaps he had more to do with this dinky zoo than he wanted to have, especially if he knew one of the goats well enough to consider her a stalker. But adding the Gone Wild to the Boys of the Bayou business name was pretty clever.
So this man worked for her family’s new business. And while the goats seemed to be a bit of an irritant in his life, he was gruff but sweet with them. There was just something about him that made her think that he was a good guy. If her family had hired him and worked with him every day, she had absolutely no reason to worry about crossing a dark dirt road and going into a barn with him at night when no one knew where she was.
“Well, the petting zoo is news to me,” she said. “But that’s fun.”
“Oh yeah, it’s a ton of fun.” His tone was dry.
Charlie grinned. “Well, I don’t know what a petting zoo has to do with swamp tours, but has it increased business or revenue?”
“I have no idea. The business’s accounting is not in my job description.”
Got it. “So you just take care of the animals?”
She loved to dress up in Valentino heels and loved to do her makeup, and though she hated fake eyelashes, she definitely enjoyed cocktail dresses and a great blowout. However, she’d always been attracted to blue-collar guys who worked with their hands and weren’t afraid to get dirty.
She attributed that to growing up spending summers on the bayou. She was a Louisiana girl, raised in Shreveport, but there was something about the small-town bayou boys that, especially as a teenager, she’d noticed were just a little bit more than the city boys she was used to.
She was blessed to have a large number of male cousins who happened to have a lot of friends who loved to spend time swimming and fishing off the Boys of the Bayou docks just outside her grandma’s house and bar.
Charlie definitely had an affinity for rugged, outdoorsy, hard-working men. And even if he didn’t have a Louisiana drawl, she liked the gruff edge to this guy and his inadvertent charm. Southern boys could turn the charm on and off like a faucet. This guy seemed to be unaware he was being charming.
And then he scooped Sugar up in his arms and started across the road, shepherding three other goats along in front of him. “You comin’?” he called back.
To her, Charlie assumed.
It took her just a moment to gather her wits. It was probably the biceps bunching that got her a little flustered, but the way he cuddled Sugar against his chest as if he had done it before made Charlie feel a little warmer than she had a moment ago.
She looked around, still not entirely sure what he expected of her, exactly. But clearly, she was supposed to somehow get a group of animals away from Ellie’s, across the street, and to the barn that she had, so far, not even noticed in the hours she had been in town.
“Okay, let’s go, guys,” she said to the goats, who were still munching grass and not paying a bit of attention to her. One of them lifted its head and blinked at her. “Yeah, you, let’s go.” She jabbed her thumb in the general direction the man had headed. The goat blinked again, and then went back to eating grass. Charlie sighed and called after the man, “Hey, what are the rest of their names?”
He turned back. “Are you just trying to get me to say goofy goat names?”
“They have goofy names?”
“They’re named after the Seven Dwarves. The goats are, anyway.”
Charlie grinned. “What about the ducks?”
“The Brady Bunch.”
Her eyes widened. “Jan? Bobby? Marcia? All of them?”
He sighed, obviously not as delighted by this fact as she was. “Yeah.”
Charlie laughed. “And is there a Harry and Ron to go with Hermione?” she asked of the pig.
“Yep.”
Charlie loved everything about this. “Tori and Maddie and Kennedy named them, right?”
“Of course.”
Oh yes, he knew her family well. Kennedy was her cousin. Tori and Maddie were two of the brides tonight and Charlie’s new cousins-in-law. And yes, the Landry girls—even those who were Landrys by marriage rather than blood—were as much trouble as the boys. Especially when they got together and ganged up on someone. Like a poor, unsuspecting, put-upon farmer from…
“Where are you from?” she asked. Yeah, it seemed out of the blue, but his lack of accent stood out down here.
He clearly agreed it seemed out of the blue. “Here. Now.”
“But before here.”
“D.C.”
“That’s where you grew up?”
“Nope.”
Mr. Congeniality was going to have to try harder than one-word answers to turn her off. Especially now that he was holding a goat like someone would a puppy. Or a child. No matter how annoyed he seemed, he liked the animals, and that was sexy.
“You sound like you’re from the Midwest.” She did lots of calls and meetings with people from around the country.
“Good guess.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted to keep talking to me.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because it would be a lot faster and end the conversation sooner if you just answered the question. The way you’re going, you’re just making me more curious and more determined to keep talking.”
He sighed. “Kansas.”
She grinned. She’d figured out how to push at least a couple of his buttons. “Kansas. Yep, that sounds right.”
“Maybe if you start talking to the goats, they’ll decide to come to the barn to end the conversation too.”
She nodded, not even a little insulted. He acted annoyed with the goats but was actually kind of sweet to them. It seemed he was treating her similarly. She was okay being on the same level as the goats with this guy. “Maybe. Good idea.” She turned. “So, guys…” Then she looked over her shoulder. “Wait. They’re not all named after the Seven Dwarves. There’s Sugar. And there are more than seven remaining.”
He sighed. “You’re going to keep asking me about their names, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
He looked resigned. “There’s Sugar and Spice. They’re sisters.”
“Does Spice adore you too?” Charlie teased.
“Nope. They all love Josh. The pigs too.”
Charlie could see that. Josh was a sweetheart. And he was married to Tori, the soft-hearted, animal-crazy veterinarian from Iowa that he’d met at Mardi Gras a couple of years ago. He probably got big brownie points with her for being sweet and spending time with the animals.
The man pointed to the goat furthest away from the group. “That one’s Stan. His real name is Satan. Owen named him. But the girls think that’s mean so they call him Stan instead.”
Charlie laughed. “Does he live up to the Satan name?”
“He’s the one who opens the gate for Sugar,” the man said as if that was all the proof she should need.
Charlie looked at the goat in his arms. “He likes Sugar?”
“Nah. He just likes to be a pain in the ass and knows that opening the gate is the best way to piss off the humans.”
The guy was talking. Like, multiple words in a sentence and multiple sentences in a row. It was about goats, but honestly, Charlie was pretty charmed by all of this.
“So, Sugar, Spice, Stan…”
He sighed but pointed again. “Vinny.”
“Vinny?”
“Short for Vincent Van Goat.”
There was just a beat, and then Charlie snorted. “No way. Is he missing an ear?”
“He is. Are we done now?”
"What? No! I need to know what happened to his ear!”
"I shouldn’t have made that a question,” he said. “We are done now.”
Charlie shook her head, still smiling. “But that leaves only five goats with dwarf names.”
He started to turn away.
“And there are seven dwarves,” she said.
“Huh.”
He was definitely not into this. Or he was pretending anyway.
“I’ve met Dopey.” She glanced at the goat, a little surprised to realize that she remembered which one he was. “That leaves Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy—weird name for a goat.”
He just shrugged.
“Happy, Doc, and Grumpy,” she finished. “Which one’s which?”
Fall in Love Book Bundle: Small Town Romance Box Set Page 225
