Chapter 3
Rowe
As they drive off, the SUV’s tires kick up a cloud of dirt that smacks me right in the face.
Thank you, horrible man with the knee-quaking green eyes (not that I noticed), who assumed the only clothes I own are overalls.
One glance at my ripped jeans explains why he thought that. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on him.
As I choke on grit from the dust cloud that keeps on giving, I decide that, yeah, I should be hard on him. He looks like the kind of guy who’d get you pregnant and then leave you.
I don’t need that happening to me.
So I spit out my dirt breakfast.
I swear, if this day gets any worse, I’m going to scream.
Just as I’m turning into the yard, following the pigs, who are prancing off as if they didn’t almostjustget killed, a tractor sputters up.
“Morning, Rowe.” Clarice Sinclair waves.
My seventysomething neighbor grins widely as she bounces atop her slow-as-molasses John Deere. Today, Clarice is wearing a frayed straw hat and a baggy lime-colored shirt over jeans that are rolled up to her calves.
“Morning,” I volley.
Every day without fail, Clarice drives her tractor into town to grab breakfast at Hardee’s with her friends. Several years back her driver’s license was suspended, seeing as how she went legally blind for a minute (or three) and ran into several buildings—buildings that belonged to her then-husband. Luckily, no one was hurt in the rampage.
Even though Clarice swore up and down that the blindness was temporary, and had only surfaced because her husband of fifty years had left her for a woman half his age, the judge (who also happened to behiscousin) was not swayed in his decision to ban Clarice from operating fast-moving vehicles.
However, he did say she could drive her tractor. He said it as a joke, most likely. But that is not how she took it. So now, good old John Deere is her main form of transportation to and from town.
“Who was that man you were talking to?” Clarice asks as she snails by.
“I don’t know.”
“Some fancy car.”
“Yep.”
“From where I was sitting, looked like he had a cute butt.”
I bust a gut, laughing. “Yeah, he may have had that.”
Hemayhave had that?Mayhave? Who am I kidding?
The mystery man who despised overalls washot. Superhot. Straight-off-the-presses hot.
Not that it matters, because I’ll never see him again.
“He had pretty hair, too,” she continues, like an undersexed geriatric who just arrived on the doorstep of an assisted-living facility ready to meet the octogenarian of her dreams.
The worst part is, she’s right about the stranger.
His dark hair was wavy and just long enough to kiss the spots behind his ears. His jaw was straight, and his green eyes reminded me of sage grass—a beautiful color, when he didn’t have that smug smirk on his face. Which was the whole time I talked to him.
Also, as much as I hate to admit it, his neck was football-player thick, and it got all corded and muscle-y when he was annoyed.
Whichalsohappened throughout our entire conversation.
