The Wedding Date Disaster (Harbor City 4)

“Is it about your intentions toward my brother?” Will said, his voice rough with sleep.

He left the “and his bank account” unspoken, but it hung between them anyway. And here she was going to do Will a solid before he made a total fool of himself by explaining there was no such thing as a snipe. She should have known better. He was, after all, the evil twin incarnate.

“Good luck catching the snipe,” she told him, covering her annoyance with a sickly sweet tone.

“You’re not coming?” he asked.

She hadn’t planned to, but after that comment? Oh yeah, she was going to be there to make sure they got all the angles of Will making a snipe-hunting fool of himself on video. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Chapter Thirteen

Will was turning into a sucker. That was the only explanation that made any sense to him as to why he was playing along with this snipe-hunt country hazing. There was no way in hell that banging two sticks together while whistling in three short bursts with exactly thirty-three seconds of silence between each trio was going to result in capturing anything, let alone a fake animal. Especially not while walking in the middle of a field where the cows were looking at Will like he was three bales short of…whatever hay bales added up to.

Not

to mention the description of a snipe kept changing.

On the drive out to the cow pasture, he’d gotten about ten different descriptions, all varying just enough to make the whole thing completely ridiculous. He would have called them on it, too, but Hadley was walking ahead of him and he kept getting distracted by the view. She had her hair braided, the end coming out from underneath a baseball hat advertising Feed and Seed, and she was wearing a pair of jeans that just might give him a heart attack.

“What did you say these things looked like?” he asked for the millionth time to see what kind of answer he’d get. Really, listening to their descriptions of the snipe put it somewhere between a feathered weasel and a rabid penguin.

“They’re birds,” Hadley said, twisting the end of her braid around her fingers as she slowed her pace so they were side by side. “But they don’t fly very well.”

“They consider cow patties a delicacy,” Knox said. “So be sure to get as close to one as you can, then stand real still and whistle.”

There was no way to take Hadley’s youngest brother seriously. Knox had been cracking jokes the entire ride out here in his truck. They weren’t even good jokes—they were dad jokes.

Will whacked his sticks together, which he’d been told earlier was the key to attracting a snipe’s attention. “And why are you using your phone to video this?”

“It’s part of the family game night Ironman.” Knox grinned at him, not even trying to pretend any of this was real. “If you catch a snipe, you win the whole thing, no matter how many games you’ve lost.”

He had two choices here. Call Knox and Hadley on their bullshit or keep playing along and use this opportunity to get more inside dirt on Hadley. Maybe if he could figure out what made her tick, he could find a way to convince her that her plans for Web’s money weren’t going to work out. He’d tried the direct route. It hadn’t worked. He needed to go a more subtle route, which really was not his forte. He’d always been the bulldozer and Web had been the charmer.

“You ever think that you take this a little too seriously?” Will asked.

Knox, who was practically a Labrador in human form, happily shook his head as he started recording again. “Nope.”

“So why aren’t you hunting, Hadley?” Really, why should he be the only one going through this? “Wouldn’t that increase our chances of catching a snipe?”

Turning, she stopped walking and stared him down. “I don’t hunt.”

“Oh, come on, Hads,” Knox said, obviously thrilled at the idea of making fools of both of them. “It’s not like you’d keep the little fella. This is a catch-and-release operation.”

Will paused, resting the large sticks against his shoulder, and let his gaze travel from the rounded tips of her well-worn work boots to the frayed brim of her baseball cap. “I never took you for someone who backed down from a challenge.”

“I don’t know,” Knox said, laying it on thick. “Maybe city life has made her go soft.”

“Really?” She stood there, one hip cocked out, her arms crossed, and glared at them both. “That’s what you’re going with?”

Taking full advantage of the response he knew she’d give, he turned to Knox. “Don’t suppose she was this stubborn growing up?”

“You have no idea.” Knox pocketed his phone with a chuckle. “She walked away from dessert for a week rather than take one bite of butternut squash.”

“And here I thought she’d never been in trouble a day in her life.” Hard to be in trouble when you were trouble.

“Oh, that is so not the case. There was the time she got caught sneaking back in the house after—”

“Knox!” Hadley—her cheeks pink—hollered at her brother.