Page 25 of Hotshot

“Were you ever a Girl Scout?” I asked suspiciously.

“Yes. For three days. I got kicked out for changing the lyrics to some goody-two-shoes line in one of their songs. What a crock. I couldn’t in good conscience sing a bullshit song about being best friends forever while sitting next to Kath Woodrow. Evil demon. She put a spider in my lunch box and told Dale Kittridge I had a hole in my underwear. I know what you’re thinking. She’s a sweet little old lady now, but she was a little shit eighty years ago. I’d trip her on Main Street if I thought I could get away with it.”

I barked a laugh. “Don’t trip Mrs. O’Neil, Grams. And please don’t repeat anything I told you.”

She made a zipped-lips motion and changed the subject.Phew! It was almost time to return to my regularly scheduled life in Denver, and I didn’t want to end my weekend on a low note.

Mistakes were lessons that occasionally came with price tags, like hangovers from hell and cloudy memories of flirting with a sexy cowboy.

Cue my fifteenth round of embarrassment shivers. If the universe gave even the smallest shit about me, my head would miraculously not feel like the human equivalent of a bowling ball attached to a cornstalk and better still…Hank Cunningham would develop a sudden case of amnesia and forget he’d ever met me.

4

HANK

“You have urgent calls on lines one, two, and three, sir. And an important message.”

I glanced from the red lights beeping on my desk to my new assistant hovering in the doorway with a Post-it note in her hand. Christ, I was in over my head without a life preserver, and though I knew how to swim in these waters, it had been a few years since I’d had to.

And c’mon, why give me three calls and a message at the same time? If it didn’t smack of paranoia, I’d swear there was a conspiracy going on where every vendor or contractor in the area had agreed to sync up and call me at once.

No…this was an internal situation. I had a bad feeling my dad’s Wood Hollow employees had devised a secret sneaky plan to drive me insane.

From the outside, everything seemed to be going well. My secretary, Emily, a pretty brunet in her midtwenties with a cool ink sleeve on her right arm and a penchant for the color purple always greeted me warmly, asked how I was doing, and offered to bring me coffee. I’d thought that meant she liked me. But the coffee kind of sucked, and you didn’t purposelytry to overwhelm your boss with competing “urgent” calls and important messages on the hour if you liked him, did you?

“Uh…thanks, Emily.” I took the yellow sticky note and fixed it to my monitor. “Which call is most important? One, two, or three?”

She smacked her gum, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully. “Gosh, that’s hard to say. Three’s my lucky number, so I’d go with that. Can I get you anything else before I go home?”

I peeked at my watch. “It’s not five o’clock yet.”

“Oh. That’s like…fifteen minutes from now. Did you want me to stay till then?”

I nodded. “Yes, that’s part of the deal. Eight to five and an hour for lunch.”

Her smiled dimmed. “Okay. I’ll be at my desk if you need me.”

I gave her a thumbs-up as I adjusted my Airpods and tackled the blinking lights.

Report: the call on line one dropped, number two was a solicitor, and number three was the contractor in charge of the entire Wood Hollow building project. Long story short, I should have taken Emily’s advice.

By the time I finally got to the Post-it note, she was gone for the night along with the rest of the staff. Apparently, no one at the mill worked past five p.m. We had a new shipment coming in at dawn tomorrow and if I wanted to be sure it didn’t get unloaded in the parking lot, I had to be here at the ass crack of dawn.

Get this…I hadn’t been able to bribe anyone to come earlier. I’d asked the manager to handle it, but he had a dentist appointment and wouldn’t be in till ten. It was glaringly obvious that if I wanted anything done, I had to do it myself. There was no way I could continue at this rate and remain sane in this town.

And that was why I needed the hockey player. Denny was my ticket out of here.

My cell buzzed, pulling me back to reality.

“Hankster! How’s it going in the land of maple syrup?”

I smiled for what felt like the first time in hours and sat back in my chair. “Hey, Cassy. I’m okay. How about you?”

“Great. I wanted to thank you referring the Crane kid. I hooked him up with Jazzy. Remember her? She’s that Appaloosa I was telling you about. She’s just as sweet as Bess, and Max took to her right away.”

“That’s good news,” I replied.

Cassy agreed and launched into a report about the goings-on at the stable and a new client she’d taken on who’d recently been in an accident. She was an animated single mom in her forties who’d started out assisting me at the stable and had basically taken over. Temporarily. I couldn’t decide if I was grateful or jealous.