The Good, the Bad, and the Pugly (An Alpine Grove Romantic Comedy Book 7)

by Susan C. Daffron

  Kat laughed. “I’m glad to hear it. Men always say women are hard to understand. Give me a break. They have no idea what we deal with!”

  After Brigid left, Kat took Judge for a walk around the forest and settled him into the outbuilding, which she referred to as the Tessa Hut because her golden retriever Tessa had stayed there when Kat inherited the house from her great aunt. Although the outbuilding was old, the kennel inside was secure and a number of dogs had stayed there without any problem. Compared to the kennels at the police station, it was undoubtedly a big step up in accommodations.

  Judge had done so much sniffing on the walk that he was practically hyperventilating. Apparently, that level of intense nasal activity took a lot of energy because Judge was significantly more subdued by the time they returned. After taking a long drink of water, the dog seemed ready to settle in for his morning nap.

  Kat walked up the steps to the house and was greeted by the sounds of loud barking from her own dogs. She went inside and looked down the stairs at the dogs. They were in the hallway behind a gate at the bottom of the steps to the daylight basement. Five tails wagged at her as she encouraged them to be quiet. Joel was in the kitchen leaning against the counter eating a sandwich. He raised a hand in greeting and continued chewing.

  She walked over to him and looked up at his face. “You said you needed to talk to me? What’s up?”

  Putting the sandwich down on the plate with a sigh, he said, “You aren’t going to like this.”

  “More delays?”

  “Remember how we only got a partial order of the block?”

  “Yes.”

  “It still hasn’t turned up. I’d like to send everyone home.”

  Kat pressed her hands together and tried not to jump up and down with glee. “You mean we’d be alone? With time to ourselves? Just us?”

  “Exactly. Well, except for the extra dog with the bad fur.”

  “He’s no trouble at all. Just a little stinky. I’m looking forward to a vacation from the sound of rusty old diesel pickups in my driveway.”

  Joel wrapped his arms around her. “I’m looking forward to a few days of seeing only you.”

  Kat leaned her head on his chest. “Me too. I’m a little tired of the rest of the world.”

  With a final squeeze, he released her from the hug. “There is one more thing though. You need to pull more money out. The next payment is due on Tuesday.”

  “Are you kidding? I just did that.”

  “Sorry. You wanted to add all that plumbing so you could wash dogs in the second building.”

  “This is getting so expensive. I think I need another antacid.”

  He bent to kiss her. “I’m going to give everyone the bad news that they’re laid off until the blocks are off back order. Then maybe I’ll actually try to get some programming done. I’m unbelievably behind on that project.”

  “That reminds me. The Las Vegas folks called for you. I left a note on your desk.”

  Joel snapped, “What? Why didn’t you tell me before?” He glanced at Kat and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. “I’m sorry. I need to call them, since they’re probably wondering where their software is. My friend John is going to regret ever recommending me for this contract.”

  “You’ve been doing a great job for them for months. They have nothing to complain about.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, even if it isn’t true.” He gave her a peck on the lips and put his plate in the sink. “See you later.”

  After Joel left the house to return to the construction mess, Kat went to the bathroom, took her antacid, and returned to the kitchen to make herself a cup of chamomile tea. Once she was armed with a relaxing herbal beverage, she took her mug and went downstairs to her office to face on her latest freelance article. Given the delays and additional construction costs, she needed to make as much money as possible as soon as possible. After sending an email to her editor asking about her next writing assignment, she felt a little better although her stomach was still letting her know she was anxious about more than just money. She was worried about Joel.

  After almost a year of living together, Kat had come to rely on Joel’s calm, quiet nature. To have him be so irritable about even little stuff was jarring.

  The worst part was that she couldn’t help with most of the things he had to do. It wasn’t as if she could program software for him. And her construction experience was pretty much zero as well. He justifiably didn’t really trust the guys working on the new kennels enough to just leave them alone out there. In fact, he had suspected that someone might have stolen some of his tools, which really infuriated him.

  They’d even had to fire one guy who had kept pitting Joel against her, which had led to some touchy conversations over dinner at the end of the day. After they compared notes, it turned out Leon had been playing some type of bizarre mind game with them.

  Leon would complain to Joel that Kat wouldn’t make a decision or they couldn’t move forward because of some problem related to a choice she’d made. Even worse was that when Leon didn’t like her answer to a question, he’d turn around and ask Joel, hoping to get a different reply that would make his job easier. The guy practically defined lazy.

  After they’d figured out what was going on, they met with Leon and fired him together. Kat had never sent anyone to the unemployment line before and it had been awful. Sure Leon was a jerk, but the whole experience definitely showed that she and Joel needed to work as a team on this project. She’d read that parents needed to present a united front to their kids. Apparently, the advice went double for guys who worked construction.

  After weeks of dealing with mud, culverts, driveway rock, concrete, and countless contractors, Kat just wanted everything to finally be done. But trying to rush finishing it probably would just increase their stress level.

  When Joel came back inside, she’d talk to him and see what he thought. The kennel construction was a long way from finished and his stress level wasn’t going to get any better unless something changed.

  Later, Kat was working on her article when Linus came over and thumped his huge brown canine muzzle on her thigh. He tilted his head up slightly, gave her an imploring gaze, and wagged his tail. Kat ruffled one of his big ears. “You want to go outside?”

  The dog leaped backwards to show his support for the idea as the other dogs came into the office and crowded around to make sure Linus had successfully alerted the human about the need for their afternoon walk.

  The front door opened and Kat could hear Joel stomping around upstairs before coming down the steps to the walk-out basement where their offices were located. A few minutes later, he appeared in the doorway, surveying the milling canines around her desk. “I guess it’s walk time?”

  “Linus was nominated to let me know.” With a thud, Kat put down the user guide she’d been looking at on a stack of other books. “Is everyone gone?”

  “They all left, and my old hammer magically appeared. It was just sitting there on a half-built wall. I think the person who ripped it off thought better of the idea after we canned Leon.”

  Kat paused in her book rearranging. “Well, that’s good. You were pretty upset.”

  “Those tools are practically the only thing I have left of my father’s. It’s probably sentimental and stupid, but I’ve built a lot of things with that old hammer.”

  Kat got up and gave him a hug. “I know, and I don’t think that’s stupid at all. I’m glad it turned up.” She leaned back to look up at him. “And even more glad we canned Leon. Want to go for a walk with us?”

  “Okay. I could use some forest time.”

  They leashed the dogs and went out the back door to the trail into the woods. Kat held Chelsey’s leash in one hand and Joel’s hand with the other. Lady the collie mix and Lori the border collie chased each other, circling around Linus and Tessa, who were attached to each other using a harness and leash arrangement. Linus acted as the “boat anchor” to keep Tessa fro
m running off after something, since the boisterous golden retriever had the attention span of a fruit fly.

  The sun was shining and Kat could feel her muscles relax as they meandered along the sun-dappled trail through the tall evergreens. She squeezed Joel’s hand. “I need to talk to you.”

  He glanced down at her. “You’re not going to tell me something bad, are you? I’m really not in the mood.”

  “I know. That’s what I want to talk about. Having all these people here working all day, every day. It’s too much.”

  “Too much what?”

  “Too much everything. Too much work for you. Too much noise and humanity for me. I think we need to look at the schedule again. Maybe slow it down.”

  He stopped and turned to face her. “But we talked about this. The faster the kennel gets built, the sooner you can take dogs and start making money. People keep calling. It’s not like you’re going to have a shortage of clients.”

  “I know. But making ourselves miserable isn’t worth it. As long as the kennel is done before it snows, I’ll be happy.”

  He smiled. “It’s May. I think that’s doable.”

  “Maybe we could take this week off, so you can get caught up with other stuff. Monday is a holiday anyway. I feel bad that you’ve been roped into becoming a full-time general contractor.”

  “Well, I did agree to do it.”

  “I know. But I think we underestimated how much work it would be for you.”

  “Probably.”

  Kat squeezed his hand again. “I don’t want you to be unhappy. I love you and I miss having you across the hall doing whatever nerdy things you do on your computer.”

  “I love you back. Let’s go home and figure out a way to make this work.”

  Chapter 3

  The V Bar H

  The next morning after tending to Gypsy, Brigid called Clay to let him know she was heading out to his place. The ranch was close to Alpine Grove, located north of town off the highway past the Kmart. Clay said it would probably take her about fifteen minutes at the most to get there, which was a relief after taking the long trek out to Kat’s place.

  Brigid turned on V Bar H Ranch Road, which was a long gravel road that traversed rolling meadows that were almost an electric green with yellow wild buttercups dotting the landscape. The road wound around through a heavily wooded area and then opened out into a clearing where a house and a number of outbuildings sat near a pasture lined with white wooden fencing. Several horses grazed in the field, giving the place a picturesque, bucolic feel. The scene looked like a picture on the cover of an equine magazine.

  The house was a two-story farmhouse with reddish cedar siding and a wrap-around wood porch. Behind it rose a huge red gambrel-style barn that had to be at least three-stories high. White lettering above the huge sliding doors said V - H. Clay was walking a horse toward a single-story red barn that had a large opening on one end.

  Brigid parked in front of the house and waved at Clay as he walked back toward her from the barn, having apparently stowed the horse inside somewhere. As she got out, he walked up to her car, took off his hat, and rubbed his hair with his hand. He put the hat back on and said, “Welcome to the V Bar H ranch.”

  “I’ve never been to a ranch before. It certainly does look the part. This is like something out of a movie set.”

  “Not the sets I was on.” He shrugged, “It’s not much of a ranch either. When I was growing up, we ran 250 to 300 head of cattle.”

  “Do you own all the land up to the highway?”

  “Not anymore.” He gestured toward the pasture where the horses were grazing. “This is pretty much it now. I’ve got sixty acres. It used to be four sections, but my father sold off the other two thousand acres, and this is what’s left.”

  “Sixty acres seems like a lot of land to me.”

  “It’s enough.”

  “So who owns the rest of it now?”

  “As it turns out, where our cattle used to graze is an important wildlife corridor, so a conservation organization came knocking. Now it’s part of a habitat-preservation deal for some bird.”

  “Well, at least it won’t be subdivided or turned into condos.”

  “That’s kind of unlikely for Alpine Grove. But since it’s off the highway, they’d probably build an ugly big box store like the Kmart or a fast-food joint. So yeah, I’m happy the land is going to remain the way it has been forever.” He gestured toward the barn with the gambrel roof. “That’s the barn I’m not really using anymore. I tried to clean out some of the junk this morning, but it’s still a mess. I’m not sure you’re going to want to deal with it.”

  “I’m sure it will be great. I’ve had lots of practice cleaning from moving many times.”

  “I hope you don’t like those clothes because cleaning out a barn isn’t like cleaning a house. If it’s greasy, grimy or smells bad, it’s probably in there.”

  Brigid looked down at what she was wearing. “That’s okay. These jeans are old anyway.”

  They walked out of the sun and into the barn, which even in the dim light Brigid could tell was enormous. When she drove up, she hadn’t realized exactly how big it truly was. She tilted her head to look up at the loft. “Does hay go up there?”

  “Not anymore. It’s in that open building back behind the horse barn. After the cows were sold off, I didn’t have to use the loft anymore. As you might imagine, hay is easier to deal with when you don’t have to move it up and down. I don’t miss that.”

  “Well, there’s certainly enough space. You could fit ninety-five kennels in here.”

  “How about we start with one?” He pointed toward the far wall. “I looked around and found some old gates”

  Brigid peered into the dim space, where a number of large, complicated rusty-looking machines were lined up. “You certainly have a lot of equipment.”

  “I’ve still got enough pasture to do a little haying in the summer.” He smiled. “And I don’t think anyone else could fix those old things at this point.”

  “So where do we start?”

  “I was thinking we could clean out this corner near the front door here and set up a kennel for the dog you have now.” He pointed at a huge pile of wood. “But we need to move that over back behind the equipment.”

  Brigid walked over to get a closer look. She bent to pick up a log and startled a large black spider that went scurrying into the darkness under the woodpile. Dropping the log, she made a shooing motion with her hands. “Do you have gloves?”

  “Over here.” He walked toward a door and indicated she should follow him. “This is the work room. If you need tools or gloves, they’re probably in here or in the tack room. That’s in the other barn with the horses.”

  After Brigid had donned some oversized leather gloves, Clay went over to an ancient tractor, climbed up, and started it. The machine coughed out a plume of diesel exhaust, rumbled, and snorted a few times.

  Brigid waved her hand in front of her face. “Ugh, that’s horrible.”

  “I’ll move it outside and it will clear out in a minute,” Clay shouted over the noise of the tractor. “If we throw the wood into the front loader, it’s a heck of a lot easier to use the tractor to move it to the back of the barn than to walk it over there yourself.”

  “I suppose so.”

  With a roar of the engine, Clay drove the tractor outside and turned it around to face the door. In the light, Brigid could tell the machine had been green once. Now it was green and rust-colored with a thick coating of grayish-brown dirt. Clay parked it and turned it off. With a final snort, the tractor sat in grumpy silence again.

  “Are all farmers deaf?” Brigid said.

  Clay yanked something out of his ear and held it up for her to see. “Earplugs.”

  They worked together throwing logs from the pile into the tractor’s front loader. Many trips later, the pile of wood had been relocated and Brigid’s arms felt like they were made of Jell-O.

  Clay handed h
er a rake. “Here. See if you can clear out any, well, whatever’s there while I go get the fence. I have some three-quarter-inch rock that we can throw into that space.”

  Brigid wasn’t sure about the rock, but she raked the dirt, clearing away various bits of wood and probably disrupting lots of well-established spider homesteads. She was completely exhausted and ready for a nap and yet Clay seemed utterly unfazed, which was irritating. Didn’t the guy ever rest? There was no way she was going to let him see how tired she was.

  As Clay pounded posts into the dirt with a tube-like contraption, Brigid backed away from the loud clanging sound. He wasn’t kidding about earplugs. What a horrendous noise.

  He disappeared with the tractor and came back with a load of gravel, which he dumped into the area. Then he stretched the fencing around the posts and attached one of the old gates.

  Brigid gazed at the new enclosure, then at Clay, who still seemed to have barely exerted himself. How could he not be tired?

  He gestured toward the gate. “Ta-da! It’s a kennel.”

  “Isn’t rock going to be uncomfortable?”

  “It’s better than dirt as far as keeping it clean. This is drain rock, so, well, that means it drains. You said Judge is getting baths, so he’ll be wet. This way, he won’t turn into a ball of mud.”

  Brigid smiled. “Good point. So is it really all ready for him to come out here tomorrow?”

  “Yup. Mission accomplished. You look like you could use a drink of water. Do you want to come inside for a minute? My dog probably wants out by now.”

  Brigid pulled off her gloves. “I wouldn’t mind washing my hands too.”

  They walked toward the house where behind the glass door a pretty yellowish dog with goofy ears was bouncing happily. Clay opened the door and the dog whooshed by them out into the yard.

  Brigid said, “Is it okay for him to be out loose like that?”

  “It’s fine. He won’t go anywhere. Scout needs to go check on his cats.”

  “His cats?”

  “There are some barn cats that live here and he thinks they’re his responsibility. Scout plays with them and herds them sometimes.”