Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
She stayed there for a solid minute before she finally pushed inside.
Again, my breath hitched.
She shuffled across the wood floor, then stood beside the bed for so long that I almost asked her what was wrong.
But then she crawled into the bed with me and scooted underneath the covers.
Still, I didn’t move.
I almost felt like I was having an out-of-body experience.
She snuggled close, and for the first time since we’d gone our separate ways over two hours ago, I felt my heartbeat slow.
Everything was right in my world.
I wasn’t awake when she slipped out of the bed, but I was awake by the time the door closed behind her.
I glanced at the clock next to the bed and saw it was six-fifteen in the morning.
I smiled.
I hadn’t had that kind of rest in a long time.
Sadly, with my alarm clock about to go off, I decided to beat it.
Shutting it off, I headed to the en suite bathroom and turned the shower on full blast.
I stretched my arms up high over my head, then used the bathroom, washed my hands, and brushed my teeth.
By the time I was done, the shower was pumping out steam.
Stepping inside, I let the water saturate my hair and body before reaching out and getting a pump of the salon-grade shampoo that I always kept on hand for when Nettie finally came.
Since she didn’t use it all that much, I’d taken to using it, just on the off chance that she might come.
I wasn’t super fond of smelling like a fruit orchard, but the alternative was having eighty dollars’ worth of hair product just sit there.
When I was done in the shower, I got ready for work.
Jeans, long-sleeved henley, and thick socks.
Today, I’d be at the vet practice performing surgeries all morning.
Walking out of my bedroom in my socked feet, I headed to the coffee pot and turned it on.
I didn’t have one of those fancy-ass coffee machines.
Nope, I used a Mr. Coffee one that I’d taken from my dad when I first moved into my own place.
It made ten cups of coffee, and I usually went through three-quarters of them by mid-morning.
To say that I was addicted to the stuff would be an understatement.
By the time I was ready for work with my coffee in hand, Nettie still hadn’t emerged from her room.
I walked toward her door and pushed it open, finding her sitting up in bed staring morosely at the comforter.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
She jerked her head up, face lighting when she spotted me standing there.
I didn’t miss the way she lazily trailed her gaze up the length of my body.
I kept in shape. I knew that she appreciated the shape I kept.
“Do you want to come to work with me?”
She blinked.
Then her face cleared. “Yeah.”
“Let’s go.”
She got ready in fifteen minutes, and we were out the door and on the road with me being only a little bit late.
“What are you doing today?”
I glanced over at her quickly to see her practically bouncing in her seat.
“I have a C-section this morning on a Pomeranian,” I said. “And I think we have a bowel exploratory surgery from a Great Dane that ate a chicken bone. He has gut rot.”
“Oh, that’s sad. Are you going to be able to save him?” she asked.
“No idea,” I admitted. “Maybe if it’d been caught earlier? Possibly. But with him not eating, and throwing up, and it being almost a week, probably not. But the dog’s parents are pretty broken up about it because he was at a doggie daycare for the last week. And they want to do everything possible.”
“Hopefully you can fix him up,” she said. “Who works for you now?”
“The same crew that’s been with me for about two years now. Holly is the newest, she’s the second vet that I hired,” I explained as we got closer and closer to town. “Carlene, Rhett, and Young are still there. We have a couple of night workers that are seasonal. They just left.”
I saw an uptick in boarding and vet visits during the winter months when the skiing crowd came in. The upper crust of society that skied usually brought their pets with them. Sometimes they boarded them while they were in town. Sometimes they just stopped in for a checkup. Sometimes shit went wrong while they were staying in their McMansions on the hill and their pets needed emergency care.
When the warmer months hit and the snow left, so did the uptick in clients.
Not that that meant that I had less work. That just meant I had less clients in-house.
I actually had more work when it came to farmers needing help with their horses and their cows, especially during birthings.
But I didn’t keep the night workers when their boarding facilities took a dramatic dip.
Honestly, it was a relief.