Page 66 of Keepsake
“Why?”
“You are going to catch so much hell in a few hours.”
She was right, and it was just the sort of attention that usually made me cringe. But for once I was too happy—and too sated—to care. Rolling off her, I immediately tugged her close again. She tucked her head onto my shoulder, reaching across my body to lazily rub my chest. It was delicious.
Unfortunately, the laughter and jeering from the next room had not died down. I covered Lark’s exposed ear with my hand before shouting “Shut it!” in the direction of the wall.
But that only made everyone—including Lark—burst into laughter. “Just ignore them.” Lark snuggled closer. “There are still two hours until your alarm goes off. You should sleep.”
I closed my eyes and wondered if I could. The way her soft hair brushed my chest was something I didn’t want to miss. Being this close to her made staying conscious worthwhile. But as Lark yawned and settled against me, my thoughts became slow and dreamlike.
“Nobody could have a nightmare after that,” Lark murmured. “Just sayin’…”
I chuckled into her hair. “You should have said something sooner.”
Minutes later, I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
17
Zach
As it usually did, my watch alarm went off when the sky was just a dark gray streak. Less usual was the way I woke up pancaked against Lark’s naked body.
She didn’t even notice my alarm, so I shut it off before staring down at her in wonder. Her dark lashes dipped towards those perfect cheekbones. The curve of her breast disappeared temptingly beneath the sheet.
And… I was hard again. With the memory of last night pumping through my bloodstream, no amount of physical labor was going to chase that away.
Another long day, coming right up.
I dipped my head to graze her neck, landing a kiss beneath her ear. “I need to go.”
“I know,” she mumbled.
“I sure don’t want to.” Truer words were never spoken. I kissed the smooth skin of her shoulder, wishing I could stay all day. “Later, we have to talk.”
“If you say so.” She didn’t even open her eyes, and I wondered if that was a bad sign.
“Get out here, Zach,” Kyle’s voice came from the hallway. “You’re definitely on shit patrol this morning.”
“Be right there.” I kissed Lark once more, this time at the hollow of her throat.
“Go, before you catch hell,” she murmured.
With great reluctance, I did.
Kyle was waiting in the barn with the shovel. He and Kieran did the milking while I took the least popular job. It was just the three of us today.
Shit patrol meant seeing to all the cow poop collected overnight in the barn. It traveled on a conveyor system from the gutter behind the cows into a pile outside the building. But the cows didn’t exactly aim for the gutter, and a great deal of shoveling was necessary to clean things up.
As Kyle pressed the shovel into my hands, he said, “This is for ruining all our sleep last night.”
Right. There were two directions I could take this: humor or silence. “It wasn’t alengthyinterruption,” I said. Not that I’d had a lot of experience in the matter, but I was willing to bet the whole encounter had set some kind of land-speed record. Lark and I had attacked each other as if the Apocalypse was imminent.
“The hell it wasn’t,” Kieran grumbled from across the room, maneuvering the milking hoses into position. “Maybeyouhad pleasant dreams after four thirty. But after treating the rest of us to basically a porno sound track, it was woody city in the bunk room.”
Right. Silence would have been the way to go.
“Welcome to the land of the living, man,” Kyle said. “Now we can teach you the secret handshake.
