There was another goat, a very small one, standing on top of his pack.
“Shoo!” Baz said. This had no effect. He waved his arms. Still nothing. He planted a hand on the goat’s side, expecting it to move, and tried to push, but it resisted. Its fur was coarser than he was expecting, and it felt very warm, with muscles flexing beneath its hide. It looked at him with its weird, yellow, slit-pupiled eyes, and an expression which conveyed the general sense ofWhat even was that?
Meanwhile, the goat on the countertop thoughtfully sampled the lid of a tin can.
“You really do that? I thought that was something that only happened in old cartoons. Out!”
He found a sparsely bristled, old-fashioned broom in the corner and tried swiping at the goat on the counter. Predictably, it tried to eat the broom, and now he was in a tug of war with a goat determinedly munching on the broom bristles. Meanwhile, the other big one had decided to investigate his backpack. He had no idea where the small one had gone. Probably nowhere good.
“For cryin’ out loud,” Baz said.
He was an alpha bear shifter with his own clan. He ought to be able to dominate a farm animal.
Baz stared intently into the goat’s eyes. At least now he had it as a captive audience, more or less, since it was still munching on the other end of his broom.
“You want to bend to my will,” he told the yellow eyes, which blinked slowly as the goat continued to chew on his broom. “You can feel yourself weakening ...”
“Are you having a stare-down with a goat?”
Baz jumped and looked over his shoulder in dawning dismay. That sounded like Arden.
That was Arden.
She was standing there looking sleepy and tousled in an oversized T-shirt and the same pair of jeans she had been wearing yesterday, which he knew because they had sparkly decorations around the waistband and (he remembered very clearly, without her having to turn around) on the back pockets.
Baz, meanwhile, was holding a broom with a goat on the other end, wearing a pair of boxers and his oldest, rattiest tractor supply store T-shirt, and nothing else.
He stared at her in horror.
Arden stared back, her gaze then drifting slowly around the inside of the old store.
“I came over to find out what was up with the goats.” She frowned. “I guess you might not be the right person to answer questions about that.”
“Do you see my pants anywhere?” Baz said, somewhat desperately.
“I think that goat’s got them.”
He hadn’t even noticed yetanothergoat on the far side of the counter, which had dragged his jeans across the room and was chewing on the hem.
“Out!” he half-yelled, giving the broom a tug.
“Do you want me to do anything?” Arden asked, her voice choked with suppressed laughter.
“See if you can get my pants.” He didn’t want to let go of the broom because that would be letting the goat win, but he was afraid that if he tugged it onto the floor, broom and all, he would hurt it. Although considering the goat’s weightless bound up to the countertop, perhaps not.
“You folks having problems?”
The new voice drawled its rhetorical question in a deadpan tone. A new person appeared in the doorway that Arden had just vacated.
The woman who had just entered the store wore a large floppy-brimmed hat and a T-shirt that read GOAT HOARDER. Her feet were encased in absurdly large mud-covered rubber boots. She carried a long, slender stick in one hand.
Baz had never thought about what a goat herder might look like, but this was about what he would have expected.
“What do you normally do to get a goat off your countertop?” he asked.
“I normally don’t let it get to that point,” the goat woman said.
She strode forward and delivered a brisk tap to the goat’s hind leg with the stick. The goat completely ignored her. “Right,” she muttered, and grasped the goat’s collar with one strong, competent hand. Baz had not previously noticed they had collars. She gave it a pull. The goat pulled back, leaning until it nearly went down on its hindquarters. At least it let go of the broom, so Baz abruptly had both hands free. He tossed the broom back into the corner, since it was clearly useless, and went to help Arden rescue his jeans. The other goat, apparently feeling outnumbered, let go of his pants and Baz ruefully inspected their goat-slobbered length.
