“The bright one’s Regulus. That’s Leo’s heart. The surrounding stars make the Sickle.”
“They kind of look like a backward question mark.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s really cool. Do you know any others?”
“Not a damn one.”
He said it so dryly that I glanced up to see if it bothered him—but he winked at me, and my bones melted.
I wasn’t gonna make it to eighteen hours.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hank
I deserved a medal.
This week alone, I’d fully and completely caught up on the paperwork Jasper had interrupted with his banana coffee cake. The barn had never looked better with fresh hay and scrubbed-out feeders. The tack shed had been organized and cataloged. What wasn’t being used, and that was most of it, had been donated and carted off. The tool shed got its own makeover and was now organized to surgical precision. Fences were all checked, and the trail cam platform screws had never been tighter.
Inside the house, I’d cleaned from top to bottom, including the baseboards and the pantry. The deep freezer was defrosted and wiped out. The junk room had been cleared out too. Hell, I even painted the bathroom I’d been thinking about painting for more than five years. No one who’d ever been in it could explain why my mom had thought medicine pink was a great shade to piss under.
And yet, here it was a week later, and despite all the work, I still hadn’t been able to shake my thoughts about Jasper.
When I went to sleep at night, I dreamed we’d done more than just look at the stars from his porch. He starred in all my dreams now, and when I woke up each morning, my cock was hard and my hand was already jerking myself off.
Before bed, I’d been reading every article I could find about littles. I tried watching a few videos, but it felt weird and oddly disloyal to watch some random little call another manDaddy. After a few wildly uncomfortable attempts, I gave up. If it wasn’t Jasper, I wasn’t interested.
After Sunday night’s dinner, I’d hightailed it back to my house before I did something foolish. I’d managed to stay away from Jasper’s place for a week.
Our wide spot in the road was crawling with options for him. Comfort had become a bit of a queer haven, thanks to our free-thinking ancestral roots. He’d have plenty of folks to keep him busy, and I could cheer him on from my side of the pasture.
My parents had scrimped and saved and busted their asses to scratch out a living on this land. They’d done all right, but had never quite gotten past the fear that disaster was always one unpaid bill away. My dad gladly retired the minute I’d mentioned it.
Then I’d taken over and sold off the angoras. The profit margin on their fiber wasn’t enough to keep us afloat. But with them gone, I’d had to figure out what would work. Being rich had never been my dream, but building a cushion between me and disaster absolutely was. That part had happened slowly over the last five or ten years.
This land had been in our family since the 1850s, when Comfort was first settled. It was a part of me. Every big event in my life had happened here, and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. The part of Cypress Creek that cut across our back pasture was where I learned to swim. The barn was where I’d had my first kiss and figured out I liked girls in glasses. The pasture was where I had my second and discovered that boys in glasses were pretty great too.
It was pure dumb luck that I happened to be at the auction house when someone from a research lab got turned away. He was looking for land that wasn’t easy to find. An open pasture that was both rocky and lush and not currently used for domestic production was a tall order. When he left the office, I followed to find out what he wanted it for and, more importantly, how much he was willing to pay. Apparently, that amount was a helluva lot more than we’d ever made raising angoras for fiber. It hadn’t made me rich, but I could pay the bills, supplement my parents, and still have some left over.
I’d practically given away our pens for that first contract. By the time the second one came, I charged a little more. Little by little, I expanded our capacity with what we could handle and what we could offer. I wasn’t a scientist, but I could damn well tell when a nilgai planned to charge, how a Watusi showed affection, or which goats would grow up plush. When I was a kid, I dreamed of continuing the family tradition of ranching, but I didn’t know it would be in the form of taking care of exotic species. It had worked out even better than I’d imagined.
One thing led to another, and after years of hard work, we were the first place called when a zoo or lab needed a spot for hoofed stock. For the last ten years, this ranch had been my first and last thought every day, and that had been enough. I ran it almost entirely on my own.
And that meant I was too busy for a relationship. It was one less thing on my list and hadn’t felt like a sacrifice. If I needed sex, it was easy enough to hook up on a trip to San Antonio or Houston for a rodeo. Other than that, I was perfectly fine with my hand and a porn subscription.
And then Jasper moved in next door, and every distraction that had never been a distraction suddenly took center stage in my brain.
He was sparkly and funny and dressed his goats in ridiculous collars with silly names. And he could cook like a goddamn pro. Knowing he was just over my buffer pasture was enough to keep me from answering emails.
But what I wanted to do and what I would do were two very different things.
It had taken everything I had this week to stay on my side of the fence, but I’d done it. Jasper was setting up a business, and I knew how damned hard that was, especially when it was a one-person operation. He hadn’t said it outright, but there was no mistaking the impression that someone, maybe his family, expected him to fail. Splitting attention between the business and a man was a near-guaranteed way to make the launch harder.
Me not going over there? That was being helpful.
Except…the goats were still trying to get through the fence. And I was about to move animals into that pasture. A local rescue had some llamas dumped on them, but they didn’t have enough land to house them for the next month. I usually kept my front pasture open for situations like this. The exotics needed to be tucked far from prying eyes and behind high fences. The nonexotic rescues? Those could be up front.
