Saddled and Spurred: A Blacktop Cowboys Novel by Lorelei James Read Free Book Online

the truck door in a panic. “Harper? What happened? You all right?”
    No! I’m a goat-murdering cover-up artist!
    She blinked at him. Opened her mouth, but she could not force the confession out. Could not.
    Chicken .
    Good thing Bran didn’t have chickens or else she might’ve killed them too.
    He aimed that squinty-eyed Eastwood gaze at her and she almost cracked.
    Almost.
    “You been sitting in the truck long enough that the exhaust fumes have turned you loopy?”
    She laughed, a bit hysterically. “Where were you? I thought maybe I was late and you’d started chores without me.”
    “Nope. I was out of coffee and made a store run. Lemme take this in the house, and then there’s a couple of things we need to talk about before we get started.”
    Harper’s heart dropped to her toes as Bran momentarily disappeared inside the trailer. What if he’d seen the whole goat episode and was waiting for her to confess to gauge her honesty?
    Mired in guilt, she didn’t hear him come up behind her. She must’ve jumped a foot in the air when he said, “We’ll do a livestock check first.”
    She froze. Livestock. Did that mean the horses and goats? Her stomach lurched. She wrestled with the right way to break it to him.
    His boots crunched across the driveway.
    No time to waste. She had to tell him. Now. She chased him down, because the man was scarily fast. “Look, Bran. There’s something I need—”
    He whirled around, putting his gloved finger to his lips. “Hear that?”
    Harper lifted the band of her wool cap off her ears and listened. Sure enough, she heard something solid hitting metal. Over and over.
    “What the hell?” Bran put his hands on his hips, cocking his head in the direction of the sound. After he heard it again, he hustled toward the old barn, which housed the great goat catastrophe.
    “Bran. Wait.”
    He ignored her and kept walking. Running, actually.
    Harper shuffled along behind him, dread dogging her every footstep as the noise got louder. Hey, maybe the sound was her guilty heartbeat, like in that Edgar Allan Poe tale. She rounded the corner of the barn beside the pen just as Bran unlatched the door to the metal shed.
    I can explain. Really. I didn’t mean to kill them.
    But as soon as the shed door opened, two shaggy white forms bounded out. Bounded out, doing a little happy goat jig.
    Harper gasped.
    Bran spun toward her. “Do you know why my goats were locked up in this shed? Jesus. They kicked the living shit out of it.” His gloved hand traced the bumps in the metal, dents that’d been made from the inside out. From something trying to get out.
    She gaped at the goats, flashing back to The X-Files Chupacabra episode that dealt with a Mexican bloodsucking goat. Were these goats somehow . . . possessed? Able to come back to life?
    “Harper?”
    “Omigod! I thought they were dead!”
    “Run that by me one more time?”
    She couldn’t tear her gaze away from the two frisky goats that were jumping— jumping! —on top of the metal shed, once again playing follow the leader.
    Hey. Was one of them smirking at her?
    Bran grabbed her sleeve, forcing her to look at him. “What in the hell is goin’ on with you?”
    “What is wrong with me ? What is wrong with your goats? They’re evil! And they’re laughing at me! Look at their smug little goat faces! Go on. Look at them!”
    “Harper. Take a deep breath. You’re babbling.”
    “You’d be babbling too if you’d killed two goats this morning and they miraculously came back to life!”
    Those steely gray eyes narrowed. “What do you mean you killed them?”
    Harper briefly closed her eyes. “When I arrived here you weren’t around, so I went looking for you. I ended up by the goat pen and I saw them standing on the shed. I thought it’d make a cute picture. Before I could snap off a single shot, they fell off the roof onto the ground! I ran in, hoping I could save them, but they weren’t moving, so I dragged them into the