Page 12 of CowSex

“I was trying to hidefromyouin the barn.”

He frowns and shakes his head.

“What? You don’t even know me, why would you hide?”

“Because you’re in my cabin.”

His brown eyes widen as he says, “Yourcabin?” Then he throws his head back and laughs.

“Yes,mycabin. I’ve rented it for the next six months.”

His laughter cuts off, and his eyes narrow on me. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I search around in my pockets for my phone, find it, open the saved email from Alma-May, and shove it in his face. He snatches it from my hand and stares at it; I have to hold in a laugh as he moves the phone farther away from his eyes so he can focus better.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, you can say that again.”

He shoots me a look, well, it’s more of a death glare actually, so I give him one right back.

“We cancelled all the bookings.”

“What?”

I take my phone back from him.

“Guys, can we take this up to the house? I’m kinda freezing my ass off out here,” Nelson asks.

“My pleasure,” the homeless old cowboy, who’s obviously too vain to wear glasses, replies before he turns and walks up the driveway.

Nelson sends the two officers home and walks beside me up to the house as I tell him about my renting the place for the next six months and exactly what happened when I turned up here tonight.

IENTER THE CABIN BEHINDSheriff Nelson and follow him into the kitchen. Homeless man is opening a beer, he offers one to the sheriff but ignores me, so I take one anyway.

I don’t look in his direction, but I can feel his eyes burning holes in me.

“Before you both start hootin’ and a-hollerin', you might want to remember that I’m the one with the badge, and I’m telling you both to be quiet unless I ask you a question. Are we clear?”

I feel like a little kid being told off, but I nod as I take a swig from the beer bottle. The beer’s shit and warm, but I’ve made a point of taking it without permission, so there’s no way I’m leaving it.

“Carmichael, why are you here?”

“It’s my house.”

“Yeah, I heard Ms Emily left it to you, but I thought you lived in some big fancy place in Aspen?”

“Well, yeah, I do. But I decided to come down and take a look at the condition of the old place. I was thinking of renovating before deciding whether to sell it or rent it out like Emily’d been doing the last few years.”

I stare at the woodgrain pattern on the timber floors and start to feel sick at what he—Carmichael, the cowboy—is saying.

“Miss Elliott has emails to show that she paid to rent this place out for the next six months. How’d that come about?”

“Well, I don’t know the answer to that, Nelson. After Emily died and I found out she left the place to me, I asked Alma-May at the rental agency that handles the bookings to cancel everything after October. I assumed that it’d been done.”

I watch Nelson rub his chin as both he and I take in what the not-so-homeless cowboy is saying.

Emily—God rest her soul—died and left this cabin to the homeless cowboy who is neither homeless nor a cowboy, but calling him one seems to piss him off, so I’m sticking with it. I rented this place for the next six months, my booking should have been cancelled by the not-so-efficient Almay-May, but somehow wasn’t, and now, here we were.