“Are you even listening?” Tate snapped angrily, frowning even harder at her. “I was talking to you and…”
“Do you have to bite my head off all the time?”
“This was a mistake,” he muttered under his breath, looking away.
“Probably.”
“I swear, I don’t even know why I bother…”
“Whydoyou bother – because for the life of me, I don’t know why either… and what’s in the box?”
“I was trying to tell you that, and you got some weird look on your face, while staring off into space. Has anyone checked you for narcolepsy or ADHD?”
Her mouth dropped open in shock at his rude comment before she recovered. He was standing there with this mutinous glare at her that just grated her nerves. Why on earth was he so, so… annoying!
“You’re a piece of work – you know that?” she hissed angrily, shoving a finger into his chest hotly. “Just because you are here doesn’t mean the world suddenly begins revolving around you, Tate Cassidy. Newsflash – it doesn’t. Thought I’d toss that out there in case there were any mistakes or you needed clarification on that hard fact.”
“Hard fact, huh?” he scoffed, raising an eyebrow at her.
“Yes.”
“No wonder you and my sister get along – you’re both annoying,” he said mulishly – and yanked up a box, putting it over the chain-link fence without another word, walking off.
“Tate!” Nettie began, hesitating before hollering his name again as he moved to get into a big SUV with deeply tinted windows.How many vehicles did this infernal man have? Sheesh!“Tate! Come get your stuff!”
He didn’t even look back at her.
He simply raised a hand as if to signal ‘bye’ like this was any normal day in small town Suburbia – not between two people who barely acknowledged each other after a bout of hurt feelings. Well, if he thought she was going to chase after him, he was completely wrong.
She would never chase Tate Cassidy again.
“Not in this lifetime – or the next one,” she muttered hotly and grabbed a flap on the box, expecting it to be filled with… “Dogs?”
She picked up one of the gray stuffed animals – and started. They were coyotes wearing hockey jerseys. He brought the daycare – her – a box full of stuffed animals to hand out to the children. She looked up from the stuffed animal in her hand, completely speechless, and stared after the dark SUV that was pulling out of the parking lot.
“Miss Nettie! Can I have a doggie?”
“I want a doggie!”
“I’ve been good…”
“No, you haven’t. You were picking your nose…”
“You shut up…”
“No, you shut up…”
“Everyone hush!” Nettie exclaimed in shock, dismay, and a massive dose of wonder at what was going through Tate’s head for him to do something like this, something so out of the ordinary. No one asked him to, no one mentioned it, she meant nothing to him – so why in the world would he do something so… sweet.
Turning back to the children, she spoke again.
“Nobody is picking their nose. No one is telling another person to ‘shut up’, and before we hand out the doggies, we are going to count them to make sure there are enough to go around. I don’t want anyone fighting or nobody is getting a doggie – do you understand me?”
A crowd of anxious children was gathering around her, and she was starting to grow alarmed at the thought of there not being enough animals in the box. If that were the case, there would be crocodile tears, tons of boo-hooing, nostrils full of snot bubbles, and other things that would make her shiver in disgust.
And it would be Tate’s fault.
“Let’s count them,” she began, holding them up one at a time and setting them in the grass for the children to see. They needed to draw the conclusion, work on their numbers, and she couldn’t be the ‘bad-guy’ all the time. “One. Two. Three…”
