Lizzie put her hand over her mouth with shock. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No, I’m going to take care of her. But thank you.”
It took all his self-control not to lean in and kiss her like he used to. Instead, he settled for reaching up and brushing her cheek—and leaving before she could marshal a “friends don’t do that.”
Holy hell, what was his father up to now.
Back when Edward had been a smoker, he had frequently woken up in the morning in mid-reach, his arm and hand going for his Dunhill Reds before he was conscious of having so much as rolled onto his side.
Now he did the same, only he was going for the bottle of Advil.
Shaking four gelcaps into the palm of his trembling hand, he put the pills in his mouth and swallowed them down with the dregs of the vodka he’d taken to bed with him. Grimacing as his version of breakfast headed to his stomach, he lay back on his pillow.
He’d given up smoking during his recovery. Actually, the abduction had been the first step in breaking him of the habit.
Ironic, that nearly getting killed was probably responsible for helping him to live a longer life.
He toasted the bottle into the air. “Gracias, muchachos.”
Before his brain could get locked into that endless loop of hideous, Day It Happened sequences, he shifted his legs to the floor and sat up. He didn’t look at his right thigh or calf. For one, the ragged seams of his Frankenstein flesh were burned into his mind. For another, he didn’t sleep naked anymore, so there was nothing showing.
The cane was necessary to get him upright, and his balance was off not just because of the injuries, but the lack of sleep and the fact that he was still drunk. Limping to the bathroom, he left the lights off so the mirror wasn’t an issue, and he used the toilet, washed his face and hands, and brushed his teeth.
The confirmation that God still hated him came when he stepped outside the cottage ten minutes later and was blinded by the bright sunlight—and his hangover headache.
What time was it? he wondered.
He was halfway to Barn B when he realized he’d taken the bottle of hooch with him. Kind of like a safety blanket.
Rolling his eyes, he kept going. Miss No-Cussing-Ever might as well get used to him and the booze now—no reason to present her with an illusion of daylight teetotaling that would only get shattered later. If she couldn’t deal with his habit, she might as well leave on her first day.
The sound of a squeaky wheel turned his head to the right, and a split second later, Shelby came out of the far end of the barn, her body cocked at the waist behind a tremendous load of horse manure in an old rusty wheelbarrow.
Guess Moe had put her to work already.
“Hey,” he called out.
Without losing a beat, she waved over her shoulder and kept going to the compost area behind the nearest outbuilding.
As he watched her, he envied her strong body—and maybe noticed, absently, that the sun on her hair turned the many blond streaks nearly white. She was wearing a navy blue T-shirt, a pair of dark blue jeans, and the same high-quality boots she’d been in the night before. And after disappearing around the lip of the walling, she reappeared twice as fast as she should have, considering the amount of manure she’d had to dump.
So she was efficient, too.
As she approached, her eyes were bright and alert, her cheeks flushed with the effort. “Almost done. I’ll start on ‘C’ next.”
“Jesus, Moe has you—sorry,” he said before she corrected him. “Damn, Moe has you working already? And don’t tell me I can’t use ‘damn.’ I’ll drop the God and the JC references, but that is as far as I’m going.”
She let the feet of the wheelbarrow settle on the cropped grass. “Orange juice.”
“Excuse me?”
Jeb Landis’s daughter nodded down at his bottle. “Y’all can keep the ‘damn,’ but I’d like to see you with something other than—”
“Have you always been so judgmental?”
“—vodka in your hand this early in the day. And I’m not judging you.”
“Then why do you want to change a stranger’s behavior?”
“You’re not a stranger.” She wiped her brow with her forearm. “It’s not even nine a.m. I gotta wonder why you think you should have a drink so early.”
“I was feeling dehydrated.”
“No running water in your house? There was last night.”
He sloshed the liquid around. “This does the job just fine. Think of it as my version of vitamin C.”
She muttered something under her breath as she leaned back down to the handles.
“What did you say?” he demanded.
“You heard me.”
“No, I didn’t.” Which was not exactly true.
Shelby just shrugged and kept going, that body of hers moving underneath her simple clothes, performing its duty without any apparent discomfort.
And then it dawned on him. “Shelby.”
She paused and glanced over her shoulder. “Yes?”
“You said you’d gotten all the horses.”
“Yup.”
“In A and B.”