“Well, he’s never tried to bite me,” John muttered. “Not even the first time, when I picked him up and took him out to the field where all the rabbits were.”
“Rattlesnakes have memory,” Tanner said surprisingly. “They’re the most intelligent snakes, next to cobras. And they form complex, long-term relationships.”
John was listening intently. “I never found that part about relationships in any of my magazines.”
“I have a friend who’s a herpetologist,” Tanner told him with a gentle smile. “I asked him.”
“Would he talk to me?” John asked intently. “He might be able to tell me what to do for Precious.”
“Sure, he would,” Tanner replied. “I’ll give you his number after lunch.”
“Thanks,” John said. “I know he’s just a snake. But I’ve gotten attached to him,” he added quietly.
Tanner smiled. “You and your odd pets,” he sighed.
“I could have had worse ones,” John said. He grinned. “Remember the Savannah monitor?”
Tanner made an awful face. So did everybody else at the table.
“It lasted one day,” Cole said shortly, glaring at John. “And we almost had to call in a hazmat team to clean the cage!”
“Nobody told me about what happened after you fed them,”John said sadly. “The iguanas didn’t have a bad smell at all when they went to the bathroom.”
“We will never be able to say that about monitor lizards,” Tanner said with pursed lips and a laugh.
John sighed. “I guess I do have my issues with pets,” he confessed.
“And we won’t mention the goose,” Heather said, tongue-in-cheek.
All the men at the table shifted uncomfortably.
“What’s wrong with having a goose?” JJ, who’d been listening quietly until then, asked curiously.
“I’ll tell you after lunch,” Cole replied. He shifted, too.
Josie chuckled softly. She didn’t dare look at the men, but she and Odalie and Stasia and Heather exchanged knowing glances. Male geese, ganders, always went for a place on men that was extremely painful.
“Not to worry,” Tanner said. “You don’t have to stress about geese,” he told JJ.
“Okay.” He grinned and went back to his plate.
Josie grinned.
They all filed into the living room later to relax over second cups of coffee. “Have you seen the figure that Maddie Brannt made of Odalie?” Tanner asked while Heather and Stasia and Odalie were talking fashion, and John and Cole were arguing heritability traits in their purebred bulls.
“No,” Josie said. “I’d love to see it!” she said as he escorted her back into the library where the curio case held the small statuette. “Does it really look like her?”
“See for yourself,” he invited.
Once they were out of hearing of the people in the living room, he lowered his voice. “I won’t give you away,” he said.
“Thanks,” she replied quietly. “One slip of the tongue...”
“I know. Talk to the sheriff. He has a background in black ops...”
“Already have,” she said. “He’s my backup. I had to fly down to Mexico, to a border area, with one of Velasquez’s men. They killed a poor man, at a small bar just over the border. I watched...”
“First time?”
