Love Among the Llamas

  Love Among the Llamas

  Annie Reed

  Published by Thunder Valley Press at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2013 by Annie Reed

  Cover Art Copyright © Depositphotos | Byheaven

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This story is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Love Among the Llamas

  Annie Reed

  Yesterday morning, I got in my car at seven twenty-five, same as always. I popped in a CD – The Best of the Doobie Brothers this time – and cranked up the volume to keep me awake, same as always. I stopped by Starbucks for a grande decaf latte, same as always. Took the freeway to where I-80 merges with Interstate 395, that grand old mess of looped interchanges and exits Reno locals call the Spaghetti Bowl. Same as always.

  Only not quite.

  Instead of veering right and taking the next off ramp, a left at the light three blocks down, and a right two blocks over into the parking garage, I stayed in the left lane and kept on driving east on the interstate.

  And just like that, I quit my job.

  Crazy, huh? Maybe I always was crazy and nobody ever noticed.

  I had plenty of time after that to think about what I was doing. Once you get past Sparks going east on I-80, there's a whole lot of nothing but empty road since all the early morning traffic's going the other way. All those cars carrying commuters to their jobs, and none of them was me.

  My heart hammered in my chest there for a while, let me tell you. I almost turned around at the next two off ramps I passed. But what was I leaving behind, really? An almost-empty apartment. A barren love life. A dead-end job for someone who’d only notice me by my absence.

  I giggled a little about that. I could just imagine my boss's face when I didn’t show at eight. At five after, he'd be checking his watch. By ten after, he'd be growing frantic.

  At eight-fifteen, my cell phone rang.

  I threw the phone out my car window – I didn't have an iPhone, just some cheap thing I got at Walmart – which only made me giggle harder. Bye-bye old life, hello you wide new wonderful world full of possibilities, you.

  Of course, this part of that wonderful new world of possibilities was more of the same old, same old. Dry, sagebrush-filled, hot-as-hell in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. Nevada was a desert state. I should know. I'd been born here. I used to think the place was ugly, what with all that dry dirt, but yesterday morning, with golden, early-in-the-day sunshine streaming through my windshield, the world just felt different. I didn’t know where I was going, where I’d stop, or what I’d do tomorrow. I figured I’d just drive until I got tired, had to pee, or I ran across something interesting.

  As it turned out, I stopped when all three things happened almost at once.

  Although, to be fair – the llama was what really made me stop.

  I’d seen horses up close. Cows, too, and even sheep, but I’d never been nose to nose – or nose to neck – with a llama. But there, on the outskirts of Hazen, Nevada, a town that was little more than a blip on the road, I saw the words "Lighting Llamas" engraved onto a huge, curving sign over a rutted gravel driveway.

  I pulled off the road and stopped beneath the sign. I rolled my window down and tried to decide if I wanted to get out of the car. I mean, there was a llama right there in the pasture next to the sign. Big, brown eyes, long eyelashes, creamy ivory fur. All I had to do was get out of the car, but for some reason I couldn't make myself do it.

  The cicadas in the sagebrush on the other side of the road were buzzing up a storm. The day was already hot with the promise of getting nothing but hotter, and here I was, heading south in a car whose air-conditioning was spotty at best. What in the world had I been thinking?

  I'm not sure why I turned off I-80 at Fernley except I had some vague notion about driving to Las Vegas, but now that I'd actually stopped driving, the whole idea seemed insane. It wasn't like I'd had any recent trauma, any life-changing event that made me want to chuck it all and start over. I had two credit cards to my name and just enough in my bank account to pay rent next month. I wasn't some heiress off on a wild adventure. I wasn't a secret witness skipping town. I was just a woman in her late twenties – okay, okay, twenty-nine, are you happy? – who was tired of her everyday life.

  But had my everyday life been so bad? Maybe if I turned around and went home, called my boss and told him I'd overslept because I had a migraine, he wouldn't fire me.

  Right. And there really is a Santa Claus, Virginia.

  "I am so screwed," I said to no one in particular.

  I about jumped out of my skin when someone answered me.

  "Could be worse," a male voice said. "Doesn't look like you've got a flat, and your engine's still running. You ain't having a baby in there, are you?"

  "No!" Good lord, no. You have to have a boyfriend – or at least a man with a working organ and a willingness to use it – to have a baby.

  I craned my head around and saw the owner of the voice standing near the back of my car. My heart quit pumping double time out of fear and started thumping for a whole new reason.

  If I'd been a Hollywood casting director looking for the next Sam Elliott lookalike for the next big budget Western (do they still make Western anymore?), I could have stopped my search right then. The guy was tall but not too tall, lanky but a strong-looking kind of lanky, with a craggy face that looked ruggedly handsome rather than old and worn out. He had on a cowboy hat (of course), but the hair beneath it was wavy brown shot through with the beginnings of what I imagined would be a full head of steel grey hair when he hit sixty. He had a thick moustache and his chin looked like he hadn't shaved in a couple of days. He had on a well-worn blue plaid shirt and faded jeans, and (of course, again) dusty cowboy boots.

  "Well, that's good," he said, his smile digging deeper crags into his face. "I ain't never delivered a baby before. Not if it don't have four legs and a powerful long neck, at any rate."

  He was talking about llamas. "Is this your place?" I asked. I wasn't sure if a the place where a person raised llamas was called a ranch or a farm, and I didn't want to insult him.

  He nodded at me. "That it is." I heard the Little Lady even though he didn't say it. Good lord, the guy really was right out of Central Casting.

  I frowned at him. "You're putting me on, right? Do you really talk that way, or is it just something the tourists expect?"

  His eyes widened for a minute, then he looked at the ground at his feet. I heard him chuckle. "Okay," he said. "You got me."

  I knew it! Sure, I didn't know how I knew it, but I did.

  When he looked back up, he was still grinning, but he had color that didn't come from the sun in those rugged cheeks. "Hope you don't hold it against me," he said. "But not a lot of people stop out here." He shrugged. "I'm hoping to make something out of this place someday. I'm still trying out the patter."

  "No problem," I said. After all, I was trying out a new life, too. Sort of. If I didn't chicken out and go running back to my old one.

  The second of my reasons for stopping made a sudden appearance. I'd polished off my decaf latte before I hit the Fernley exit, and now I needed a bathroom. In a hurry.

  "Hey, is there a place around here where I can use a restroom?" I asked. I hadn't seen a gas station or fast food place since Fernley. I really should have stopped there and taken care of
things, but I wasn't exactly thinking straight.

  "Nearest gas station is ten miles back toward town."

  Ten miles. I didn't think I could make ten miles.

  He must have seen the hesitation on my face.

  "Or you could come up to the house," he said. "I promise I'm not a llama-raising serial killer."

  "Sure you're not," I said. "Isn't that what all serial killers would say?"

  "Except for Dexter. He'd admit it."

  That he would. Dexter was one of my favorite–

  "Hey, wait!" I said. "You watch Dexter?"

  "Satellite dish," he said. "When you live out in the middle of nowhere, it helps to have cable. Or the equivalent."

  Huh.

  My bladder twinged.

  Good grief. It was either the llama-rancher's bathroom or go pee behind a clump of sagebrush and hope I didn't run into a rattlesnake. Why, again, had I thought driving across the Nevada desert in the middle of the day without any kind of provisions or plan or even a change of clothes was a good idea?

  "Lead the way," I said.

  It turned out the llama rancher had a dusty old pickup truck, no surprise, but his ranch house looked like any other suburban house I'd ever been in.

  "It's pretty new," he said to me. "I've got a buddy who's a developer in Fernley. He was doing pretty good until the housing market went bust, so I hired him to build me a new place. What do you think?"

  "I think I'm back in Reno," I said. But in an upscale neighborhood. The house had high ceilings and spacious rooms, tiled floors, and a magnificent view of the desert landscape out of floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room. Even the bathroom was upscale, with an open area shower instead of a walled-in stall or a dinky little tub.

  And that was the guest bathroom.

  I tried not to snoop too much while I used his bathroom. The place was surprisingly neat for a man's house. Not that all men were slobs, but I didn't think every man who kept a scented candle on a holder in his guest bathroom. I sighed. He was either gay or married, and either option left me feeling more disappointed than I should have been. After all, I was just passing through, and the only reason I'd stopped was for the llamas, right?

  Of which I'd only seen the one.

  My Sam Elliott look-a-like llama rancher was in the living room when I got done. "So where do you keep the rest of your llamas?" I asked. I'd followed his truck down a rutted dirt road nearly a half mile before I realized it was his driveway. The fields on both sides of the driveway had sheep in them, but no llamas that I could see.

  "The rest?"

  "The sign did say Lighting Llamas," I said. "Not Lightning Llama."

  He nodded at me and grinned. "Got me there." He gestured toward the bank of windows. "There's another field out back, over that little rise. I have four llamas back there, a male and three females. This time next year I hope to have seven."

  I tried to see a a boundary fence and realized I couldn't. "How much land do you have here?"

  "A little over eighty acres."

  Wow.

  "And you live here all alone?"

  I'd peeked inside his medicine cabinet – I couldn't help myself – and there hadn't been anything feminine on the shelves. No eye shadow, no lipstick, no makeup of any kind. Not that that meant anything. I mean, it was the guest bathroom.

  His grin turned into a full-out smile, the kind of slow smile that said he knew I'd peeked and he wasn't upset about it. "Yup," he said. "Hazen's not exactly a hot spot for meeting women, and I work too hard to make the drive into Fernley more than once or twice a month. The only reason I saw you down by the highway today was because I was riding the fence line, checking for breaks."

  He was standing pretty close to me now, but I wasn't picking up any serial killer vibes. The vibes I was getting were all first-date nerves type of vibes. Not that I'd been on a first date in a long time, but I dimly remembered the feeling, and I was pretty sure this was it.

  "You check the fence line in your truck? I thought ranchers rode a horse to do that."

  He chuckled. He had a nice chuckle, I decided.

  "You've seen too many movies," he said. "Truck's faster and I don't have to clean up after it."

  "Good point."

  He tilted his head a little to look at me like he was giving me a serious once-over. I couldn't quite read his expression yet, but I liked whatever expression it was I saw in his hazel eyes. "You're not like any other woman I've ever met," he said finally.

  "Because I like Dexter?"

  "Nope." He drew just a little closer. "Because you stopped to see my llamas, and you haven't complained once about only seeing the one."

  True. Of course, right about now llamas were the last thing on my mind. The first thing on my mind was how nice he smelled, even though he'd been out in the heat in a battered old truck, and the next thing was how I'd been wrong all along when I thought he might be gay. Definitely not gay, not if the way he was studying my mouth was any indication.

  As we stood there, I realized he wasn't going to make a move without a little effort on my part, so I leaned forward just the tiniest bit. I don't know where I got the courage or the knowledge. My love life has never been what you'd call exciting or even vaguely adventurous, but here I was, in a strange man's house out in the middle of the desert, and I wasn't the least bit concerned he'd go all serial killer on me.

  Yes, I most definitely had gone crazy.

  That thought was wiped out of my mind when he kissed me. It wasn't a grand, passionate kiss that swept us both off our feet, nor was it an electric zing kind of a kiss that left me breathless. No, it was a perfect gentlemanly kiss, just enough pressure of his lips to let me know I'd been kissed, and enough of a brush of his mustache to tickle. He didn't touch me except with his lips, and before I knew it, the kiss was over.

  I opened my eyes and looked into his. "That was nice," I said.

  He gave me an aw, shucks smile. "Yes, ma'am."

  I felt like punching him in the shoulder – a friendly punch, mind you – but I held off as something occurred to me. "What's your name?" I asked. I'd never kissed someone before whose name I didn't know.

  "Chet," he said.

  "Kate," I said, feeling like I should hold out my hand for a shake. I managed to control the urge. A stronger one was taking its place. An urge to carry on with the kissing, and carry on soon.

  Chet backed away from me, and I felt a sharp twinge of disappointment. It disappeared when he reached up to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear. "So," he said. "How would you like to go meet the rest of my llamas?"

  As a follow-up to a kiss, "meeting Mr. Right's llamas" was definitely not part of the dating handbook. I didn't care. This day was all about doing things outside the norm.

  "I'd love to," I said.

  * * *

  Chet's llamas were the coolest things I'd ever seen. I even got to pet them, although Chet warned me that llamas, just like camels, tended to spit. I supposed I was lucky. None of them did.

  After we finished communing with the llamas, we drove back to the house and Chet fixed me lunch. He made ham and cheese on rye, which tasted like heaven considering it had been a while since my meager before-work granola bar and latte. We took our time eating, and I got to hear about how Chet had inherited the ranch from a great uncle.

  "He was Basque," Chet said. "He'd had this sheep ranch going out here for something like forty years. Never made a lot of money, just enough to keep himself from going under. His wife died twenty years before he did. I used to come visit when I was little. I was the only one of the kids in my generation who did, so I guess that's why he left it to me."

  "Did he have llamas, too?"

  Chet shook his head. "That's something I brought in. I'd heard that llamas were good at keeping the coyotes away from sheep, so I bought a couple. Then I found out gelded males made the best watch llamas. Well, by then I had another little llama on the way, and I just couldn't bring myself to do that to the little bugger,
so I decided to raise them instead. That's when I got the idea for naming the place 'Lightning Llamas,' but so far you're my first guest."

  I ate the last bite of sandwich. "You're a wonderful host for a man who doesn't get much company."

  He was looking at me like he had after we'd kissed. I reached across the corner of the dining room table and took his hand.

  "So tell me, Kate. Where are you heading?"

  I felt a little embarrassed by my early morning decision to chuck my life out the window and just drive, but he'd told me about his life, so I told him about my morning. When I was done, his eyebrows were climbing his forehead, and he let out a low whistle.

  "I'm impressed," he said.

  "You are?"

  "My friends thought I was nuts to give up what I had to move out here and raise sheep for a living."

  "What were you doing before?"

  He chuckled. "Selling copiers. Never did quite seem to fit. I'm guessing your life didn't fit you, either."

  No, it didn't. "I think realizing I'd been going through the motions – the same exact motions – every day, day in and day out, finally did me in. I just couldn't do it one more day."

  He looked down at where I still held his hand. "You didn't answer my question, though."

  "I didn't?"

  "Nope." He took a deep breath. "Where were you heading when you decided to stop here?"

  "Originally? Vegas. But I'd just about talked myself into going back. I guess you could said I was at kind of a crossroads."

  "Crossroads at the Lightning Llama. Sounds like the title for a bad Western."

  "Or a bad romance," I said, then wished I hadn't when he gently took his hand away and stood up from the table.

  "Well, I guess you better get a move on, then," he said. "Vegas is still a pretty good drive from here."

  He took our dishes into the kitchen. I hesitated for a moment, then followed him.

  "Did I do something wrong?" I asked.

  He stood at the sink, rinsing the dishes off and not looking at me. "I'm too old to do casual," he said. "You've got your whole life in front of you. Me, I'm making a second life for myself out here. It's not much, but I enjoy it. I want to keep on enjoying it after you leave, you understand?"