LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Three

      By nature, she was a light sleeper. Always had been. But the night she had spent in Brock’s massive California king-size bed had been one of her deepest sleeps on record. Perhaps it was the fact that she had been flat-out exhausted, or maybe it was the silky-soft material of the sheets. Either way, she had awakened from her sound sleep in the dead center of the bed, surrounded by a pile of plump pillows that had to be Brock’s soon-to-be ex-wife’s doing, feeling happy and content. She didn’t even scramble out of bed, as was her usual practice. Instead, she opted to linger a bit, staring up at the ceiling with the comforter pulled all the way up to her nose.

      “Dad says get up!” Hannah burst into the room without knocking.

      Shocked out of her random, drifting thoughts, Casey popped upright, her long auburn hair a mass of tangles. Hercules was vaulted forward, but he landed on all four paws. He waggled his tail and yapped at Hannah.

      “If you want to come into someone’s room, what is the polite thing to do?” Casey asked.

      “Knock.”

      Casey gave the preteen two thumbs-up. “Okay—try it again.”

      “What?”

      “Knocking before you come in. You knock, wait for an answer and then you come in. But only if I say it’s okay. Okay?”

      “Okay.”

      Hannah slammed the door shut, causing Hercules to yap wildly. Casey heard a knock on the door, but she waited for a couple of seconds before she answered just to make certain Hannah wouldn’t burst in without getting the green light.

      “Come in!”

      Hannah flung open the door again with a laugh. “Breakfast!”

      “Thank you, Hannah. Nice waiting, too.” Casey smiled at the girl. “Can you do something for me? Would you take Hercules out to use the bathroom while I get dressed?”

      Brock’s daughter’s face beamed at the thought of being able to carry Hercules for the first time.

      “I know you’ll make sure he’s okay.” Casey was reassuring herself as much as she was reassuring Hannah. It was hard to let Hercules out of her sight. He was so small and vulnerable. But she had heard about Hannah’s affinity for animals from Taylor, and she had seen how kind she was with her own dog, Lady.

      Casey yawned several times, wiped the sleep out of her eyes and stretched her arms high above her head, before she scooted to the edge of the bed with a dramatic sigh. Rest time was officially over for her. Today, she had to go see how the Beast had fared in the storm, figure out how to get it towed if need be and then figure out whether or not she was just going to stay for a short visit with her sister and then head back to Chicago. She wanted to stay in Montana for the summer—it was too late to put in a request to work summer school. And she had been looking forward to this trip for months. She’d hate for it to all fall apart, but she couldn’t imagine staying with Taylor and Clint, in their small rental, for three months. Even though Taylor would try very hard to make her feel like she wasn’t a bother, she knew that she would, in fact, be an intrusion on the newlyweds.

      Casey went into the tiny attached bathroom to fix her hair, if possible, and wash her mouth out with mouthwash. When she got a load of herself in the mirror, she started to laugh. She looked like a redheaded Medusa. She had tried to tame her hair before bed, but it hadn’t worked. Now, it was even worse after a night of sleep.

      “Whatever.” Casey made a face.

      She took off the white undershirt Brock had let her borrow. After getting dressed, she made the bed, and then left the folded undershirt on the comforter, along with the pajama bottoms she hadn’t used. Brock’s pajama bottoms had just slipped right down her hips.

      Finally, she retrieved her beloved Jimmy Choo boots from beneath a nearby chair and stared at them sadly. They were ruined. Her beautiful, expensive, Jimmy Choo boots that she had vision-boarded for months, that she had saved a little every month to buy, were caked with red clay and still wet from the day before.

      “You poor, poor boots. You didn’t deserve this. I didn’t deserve this.” Today, she wasn’t even going to try to be careful with them. There was no use shutting the gate after the cow got out. Resigned to their untimely demise, Casey shoved her feet into the boots and headed downstairs.

      “Good morning.” Casey was met with a cornucopia of breakfast food smells when she entered the kitchen.

      “Mornin’,” her host greeted her. “Coffee’s hot, mugs in the drying rack are a safe bet.”

      “Bless you.” Casey poured herself a cup of coffee.

      “If you need milk or sugar, they’re somewhere in the fridge. Just fish around.”

      “I take it black.” She took her coffee to the table.

      Brock was manning the stove in a “Kiss the Chef” apron, while Hannah, who had already had her breakfast, was on the floor formally introducing Lady and Hercules in the light of day. They had met informally in the cellar, but this was the first time that they were nose to nose, so to speak. Lady was lying down on the floor, her head between her two outstretched front legs, obviously trying to do her best to make friends, while Hercules was yapping as loudly and as ferociously as he could manage in order to assert his dominance in the relationship.

      “Hercules—that’s not nice.”

      “How do you take your eggs?” Brock asked her.

      “Are they eggs from free-range chickens?”

      “The chickens live out back. Is that free enough for you?”

      “Lucy and Ethel!” Hannah supplied the names of the chickens.

      “I Love Lucy and ladybugs. That’s what she loves.” Brock looked over at his daughter.

      “And animals,” Casey added.

      Brock turned his body away from the stove and toward Casey. This wasn’t the first time he’d wanted to get a better look at her in his favorite shirt. It engulfed her, but it looked good on her. Her hair, seemingly more red than auburn in the daylight, was mussed and wild, and he could swear that she had the brightest green

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