He didn’t flinch, just waited.
“I’m not a charity case,” I said, quieter.
“Okay. Then what can you sell?”
“I don’t want to sell any of the animals. I can’t stand the thought of it.” I looked from the dogs over to Clarence—who, okay, I might be tempted to sell, but who was going to pay me for a foul-mouthed parrot?—over to the goats. No, I couldn’t do it. “And I need all the equipment.”
I’d already sold anything I could do without months ago.
“I didn’t actually mean selling the animals. I mean what can Pawsitive do that people will pay for? You’ve got sixty animalsand the training to back them up. Can they be leveraged to make money? Sort of like the open house?”
I turned the question over. The animals were what people loved. And then something surfaced that I hadn’t thought about in over a year.
“There was a woman who called me last year. Fourteen months ago, maybe. She wanted to hire me to bring animals to her daughter’s birthday party. Pony rides, a petting area, the therapy dogs. Big production. She offered three thousand dollars for four hours.”
“What happened?”
“I said no. I couldn’t manage it alone. Loading the animals, transporting them, handling them on-site, keeping kids safe around livestock—it’s a two-person job at minimum.” I set down the clipboard. “I didn’t really need the money and I was a one-person organization, so I moved on.”
He was quiet for a beat. “You’re not one person anymore.”
I looked at him. He looked back, and the steadiness of it loosened something in my chest that I hadn’t realized was still clenched.
“Yeah, I guess I could try private bookings,” I said slowly. The idea was taking shape as I said it. I pulled a pen from my back pocket and grabbed a feed receipt from the shelf. “Birthday parties, private events. Families with money who want the experience.”
“A mobile petting zoo. I’d imagine some people would love that for their kids. Do you still have the contact?”
“Somewhere in my email.” I was writing now, jotting down notes, the pen moving fast: which animals traveled well, pricing, transport logistics. “It won’t fix everything. I still need the grants. But if I can book a few events in the next month, it might be enough to cover the missed mortgage payments and get Pinnacle to back off.”
“Maverick’s a draw. Kids went crazy for the rabbits at the open house.”
“Snowball. She’s bombproof.” I added her to the list. “And Al Pacacino, obviously. He’s revolting and children worship him.”
“Does he spit at children?”
“He spits at everyone. We’d market it as a premium interactive experience.”
He laughed and I kept writing, the pen moving fast, my brain faster. For the first time in months, something was loosening instead of tightening. The problem hadn’t shrunk, but for once, I wasn’t carrying it alone.
I didn’t know what to do with the relief of it, or the strangeness. Every crisis I’d faced since my divorce, I’d processed in private and walked back in as if nothing had happened. This time, I hadn’t walked away.
The receipt ran out of space. I put down the pen and looked up.
Logan was leaning against the doorframe a few feet away, arms loosely crossed. He was looking at me, not at the list I’d scrawled, and he didn’t look away when I caught him.
The barn was full of its usual noise, dogs shifting in kennels, the goats thumping against something, but all of it had gone distant.
I opened my mouth. I could have said something about his handwriting or Clarence’s dietary choices, literally anything to put the comfortable distance back between us.
Nothing came out.
He stepped forward, slow enough that I could have stopped it, slow enough that I saw it coming. His hands settled on my waist, and my palms found his chest and I felt his heartbeat under my fingers, steady and unhurried while mine hammered.
This kiss had weight and intention. Unlike the other times, we both saw it coming and we both walked into it, and when hismouth met mine, I wasn’t caught off guard. I was choosing this. He tightened his arms around my waist. I slid my hands and curled them into the fabric of his shirt, and the kiss went deeper, his tongue against mine, and his thumb traced a slow line along my hip bone that made my breath catch hard enough to hear.
“HOLY SHIT!”
Clarence. He screamed it at full volume from his perch, setting off a chain reaction: three dogs barking, Princess Whiskers flattening her ears, Pepper headbutting the pen wall.
