Donahue jumped back down, shot a look over his shoulder at her that was distinctly grim.
“I thought you said you didn’t have any livestock,” Donahue said.
“I don’t! I don’t even know what a mammoth jack is. It sounds like something that’s been extinct for several million years crossed with a rabbit.”
“Ha-ha. That’s ’bout as good a description of him as I’ve ever heard,” Grimes said, going around to the back of his truck and lowering a ramp. “Mister, you want to give me a hand with this?”
“She says it’s not hers.”
“And this paper right here says it is, bought and paid for.”
While the men were at the back of the truck, arguing ownership, she crept down the stairs of the cabin and came around to the side of the truck. She couldn’t see anything. She climbed up on the deck, as she’d seen Matt do, only with less grace. She looked through the slats.
The saddest pair of brown eyes she had ever seen looked back at her from under bushy eyebrows. Long scruffy ears were turned toward the men, listening. For a moment it almost seemed like maybe it was some sort of prehistoric creature crossed with a rabbit.
“A donkey,” she whispered. She stuck her fingers through the slats and felt a soft, velvety nose touch her.
“Git your hand out of there!” the man shouted at her, and she jerked back so quickly she nearly fell off the wheel well. “Darned critter is meaner than a rattlesnake. He’ll take off your arm at the elbow.”
She stared at Grimes, aghast, and thought of the soft muzzle that had momentarily touched her fingers.
“Look, there’s obviously been a mistake,” her neighbor said.
“No mistake,” Grimes insisted. “Right name. Right address. Stand back. I’m going to open the gate.”
“She doesn’t want a jack. And neither do I. I’ve got a pasture of full-blooded quarter horse mares right next door, just foaling out, and I’ll be damned if I’m planning a crop of mules next year.”
“You better have a strong fence up then.” The man spat. “He’s hornier than—”
Donahue cut a look to her falling-down fences, and then interrupted Grimes before he had a chance to educate them about exactly how horny her donkey was.
Her donkey.
“How much to take him back wherever he came from?”
Her neighbor was reaching into his back pocket, taking out his wallet, which seemed to her to be a slightly autocratic thing for him to be doing, though it was a little late to decide she wanted control of the situation.
A certain whiney note appeared in the donkeydeliverer’s voice. “Geez. It took me near three hours to load the sum-bit—”
“Just name a price,” Donahue said coldly.
“Two hundred and fifty?”
“Get real.”
“Okay. One fifty then. Not a penny less.”
“I’ll give you fifty bucks to turn that truck around, with the donkey onboard.”
He was a mean donkey, Corrine reminded herself. He’d take her arm off at the elbow if she gave him the opportunity. And apparently he had an immense appetite for things other than grass. A mean, disgusting donkey.
Whose muzzle had felt like velvet against her fingers.
And whose eyes had been so unbearably sad.
“Wait,” she said, when she saw the money about to change hands. “Wait. I want him.”
Something pitiful flashed in the donkey man’s eyes as he saw his chance to make a quick fifty bucks disappearing.
Matt Donahue turned and looked at her. “You want who?”
Since only Donahue, Grimes and the donkey were in her yard, her answer was bound to be insulting. Yet it gave her great pleasure to say, “The donkey.”
He came toward her in long strides, his eyes flashing fire. “Do you have any idea what my brood stock is worth?”
She shook her head, having only the vaguest idea whatever stock he was talking about was probably not registered on the NASDAQ.
“One of my mares is worth more than this whole place. One mare.”
She felt herself stiffen under the slight. She turned to the other man. “Unload my donkey,” she ordered.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said glumly.
“Do you know anything about donkeys?” her neighbor asked her.
“No,” she said proudly. “But I bet they eat grass and I have plenty of that.”
“At the moment you don’t have a fence that could hold that beast.”
She resented her donkey being called a beast in that tone of voice. “Unload my donkey,” she said again, her teeth clenched.
The man gave Matt a look that begged for his help, but he was ignored. Apparently Mr. Donahue’s neighborliness did not extend to unloading unwanted donkeys.
Cautiously Grimes walked up the ramp and inched back the gate of his stock rack.
The donkey made a whuffling noise.
“Easy there,” Grimes said roughly.
She could hear the fear in his voice. What on earth was she doing? She was having a man unload a donkey in her yard that he was afraid of. It was obviously some kind of mistake that the donkey had been delivered here. Why make it worse by having him unloaded?
Was it the grim set of her neighbor’s jaw that kept her, stubbornly, from calling out to Grimes to never mind? To take the donkey and his fifty bucks and leave? Or was it the meanness in Grimes’s eyes that made her reluctant to leave the donkey’s fate up to him? Whatever the reason, she remained silent.
There was a loud scuffle, punctuated with swear words. And then, a shriek of pain, the sound of a heavy body falling, and the unmistakable thunder of hooves across the bed of the truck.
Matt leapt forward as the donkey burst from the truck and hurled himself down the ramp, kicking up his heels at his delighted and unexpected freedom.
It was short-lived. Matt grabbed the trailing rope and was dragged halfway across the yard skidding on his chest before he managed to get his legs back underneath him, and dig in his heels. His every muscle taut, he braced himself and used his entire body to force the donkey, fighting and kicking, around.
They moved in a circle, Donahue at the center of it, the heels of his boots planted in the ground, the muscles in his well-honed body rippling with the effort of trying to control the donkey who tore at the rope in his hands.
And
