Herd That (The Valentine Boys 1)

I was angry, so I allowed her to, worried that if I let myself think too hard about the information I’d just received, I would be going right back in there and planting my fist into Jake Hooper’s face.

“Sit, I’m driving,” she informed me.

I rolled my eyes and went to the passenger side, finding amusement despite the fact that I was still pissed. That amusement only heightened when I watched her move my seat up until she was practically sitting on top of the steering wheel.

She drove like an old lady, and moments after scooting my seat up, she pulled the seat back forward, too, forcing her body into a near ninety-degree upright position.

“You know,” I said as she straightened her mirrors. “I was okay to drive.”

“I know,” she said. “But I’m driving, and it’s easier to drive you where I want you to go than to give you directions seeing as it’s off the beaten path.”

“And where is it that we’re going?” I asked.

She shrugged, and I leaned back and allowed her to do with me what she would.

I wasn’t in the mood to drive anyway.

Honestly, I was in the mood for a beer and a goddamn nap, in that order.

“I need a beer,” I declared.

She whipped into a gas station. “I need a drink, too. Do you want a slushee?”

I shook my head. “No, thank you.”

She held her hand up in the ‘okay’ signal and bailed out of the truck, coming back five minutes later with two slushees in her hand.

She handed one to me, and then started sucking on the other one before I could say, “I told you I didn’t want one.”

“I didn’t get you one.” She shrugged.

It was then that I saw that the liquid inside wasn’t a slushee at all, but a… I brought it up to my nose, then grinned. “You poured beer in here?”

She nodded. “I went to the bathroom and poured the slushee out. I’m fairly sure the woman at the counter thinks I just downed the entire fifty-two ounces while I was in there… and driving.”

I snorted and gestured for hers. “What flavor did you get?”

“Strawberry, Dr. Pepper, and blue raspberry,” she answered.

I made a gagging noise in the back of my throat. “That sounds disgusting.”

She shrugged. “I usually only do it with the Coke slushees and the cherry. But they didn’t have those flavors here so I had to improvise.”

I just shook my head as she backed out of the parking spot she’d pulled into—badly, might I add.

“Now, you enjoy your beer while I take you somewhere,” she said as she drove five miles under the speed limit down the road.

I closed my eyes and sucked my beer out of a slushee straw, not saying a word.

Honestly, I quite liked this.

And when the road started bumping, and I felt the cadence of the tires change, I knew that we’d just turned onto a dirt road.

Still, I didn’t open my eyes.

I was too busy thinking about what I should do next.

I’d just literally talked to the landowner that I’d made a deal with this morning, telling him that I was close to having the money. Then I found out this morning that the insurance company was challenging our right to the money seeing as we’d never claimed it. They’d ‘released it to the state’ or some bullshit like that, and I now had to get a lawyer to fight the insurance company for my right to the money.

Honestly, all in all, I was not a happy camper. Especially since I learned that there was another person out there who was trying to buy the land that was rightfully ours right out from under me.

Needless to say, this morning hadn’t gone at all well.

That was until Codie arrived with a smile on her face explaining that she had indeed gotten the job.

That had been the only good part of my day, seeing her smile.

We hit a pothole the size of Texas, and I lifted my half empty slushee cup to be sure that none of it spilled.

“I love you, you know,” I said out of the blue. “I told myself after my dad did that to my mother that I wasn’t going to ever have that. That I wouldn’t chance it… but you made me fall in love with you anyway. You made me see that I was worth loving. That sometimes, though love is scary, it’s worth the heart palpitations.”

There were no words coming from the seat beside me, so I chose not to say a word.

“I can still smell the smoke in my nostrils,” I said softly. “The day that my dad tore our family apart, he ruined something inside of me.” I swallowed hard. “Fighting for this shit brings up such bad memories. My sister didn’t even want to pursue it.”