She was still a juvenile—I’d been right about that—and she weighed a solid fifty pounds. According to the vet, Jacob Gunnell, pet mini pigs had recently become a fad on account of some celebrity or other, but once the pig grew out of the cute little baby phase and the owners realized a mini pig was still a whole asspig, it generally got dumped. Apparently pigs made terrible pets if you didn’t know what you were doing.
Horseshit. Stevie was a goddamn angel.
Sure, she was every bit as smart as a dog and just as likely to get into trouble if left alone too long. She required intellectual stimulation, entertainment, and friendship.
Which was why I now had three pigs.
In the six weeks since Stevie had been hurled into my life, I had learned a lot of things about pigs. Great and terrible things.
The great: Pigs enjoyed music, and Stevie happened to have good taste. She also liked going for walks, saying hello to people, and belly rubs. She learned how to ring a bell when she wanted to come inside from her pen in the yard, and pigs were easily house trained.
The terrible: Pigs shit right by the water source. That was nasty. They were omnivores and considered anything in reach of their mouth to be food—and they werealwayshunting for food. Roots, bugs, a baby bird that happened to fall from the nest at the exact wrong moment...Yeah. I had to lie down after that one. I still felt nauseous when I thought about it.
But look at that face. How could I be mad at a face like that?
“There’s a lock on the fridge.”
I looked up from watching Stevie, Lindsey, and Christine devour their morning pellets to find my sister standing in the doorway, still in her pajamas, with her blond hair piled on her head in a messy bun and a steaming mug of coffee cupped between her palms.
“Yeah, you missed a ruckus this weekend while you were fooling around in the mountains,” I told her. “Stevie figured out how to open the fridge and made a mess of things. I installed the child lock last night. Code is one-one-one-one.”
Amy arched her eyebrows at me over the rim of her mug. “One-one-one-one? Kind of an easy code to crack, isn’t it?”
I raised my eyebrows right back at her. “She’s a pig, Amy.”
“Right. My brain isn’t on yet.” Laughing, she turned back into the house. “I need more coffee.”
I followed her in, knowing she’d gotten up at the crack of dawn for the sole purpose of making me breakfast and packing me a lunch to take with me on the road, and also knowing it wouldn’t do any good to tell her she didn’t have to, that I was a grown-ass man and could take care of myself, because she’d just remind me she was staying here for free and wanted to earn her keep.
Earn her keep. I hated when she said that. It was an echo ofhim. We had both been raised on the idea that a child should be grateful to have been brought into this world to begin with, and that roof over our heads and food on our plates didn’t come for free. Maybe Dad believed kids had to earn the right to exist, but as far as I was concerned, Amy never had to earn the right to be my sister.
“How was camping?” I asked as I poured myself a second cup of coffee.
Amy pulled the egg carton from the fridge, along with a rash of bacon, which neither of us said a damn word about because compartmentalization was part of farm life. “Not camping. Backpacking,” she corrected.
“Backpacking? You mean you carried your tent and all your food the whole way?” I shook my head. I couldn’t wrap my mind around why anyone would want to do that.
Being born and raised in Oklahoma, I considered myself to be the typical country boy. Outdoorsy to me meant hunting and fishing, both of which I had done my fair share of. Sports meant football or the rodeo, and I had done both of those, too—football in high school, and then rodeo for nearly a decade until I turned my career toward training horses.
Moving to Colorado two years ago gave me a new perspective on outdoorsy and sports. Outdoorsy meant spending long days and even weeks in the mountains, far from roads and hospitals.Sports meant anything from rock climbing to trail running to backpacking.
Honestly, the towering peaks intimidated me a bit. They sure were pretty to look at, but I felt no need to go exploring in them. Those mountains were none of my business.
But Amy, she’d had the opposite reaction. One look at that ridgeline and she’d wanted to know everything there was to know about those mountains. And since I couldn’t provide that information, she’d found people who could, joining up with a women-only club for hiking and backpacking.
“It was great.” Amy cracked three eggs into the sizzling frying pan. “It ended up being four of us, and all three of them had a lot more experience than me, but they were real nice about it. I took a ton of pictures. I’ll show you when you get home from work tonight.”
“I’d like that,” I said absently, my mind on the more pressing issue of my baby sister out in the Rocky Mountains with nothing for protection but three other women. “No one brought along a boyfriend? Or a brother?”
“It’s a women-only group,” she reminded me. “That would have been rude.”
“Maybe, but being out there all alone doesn’t seem safe.”
She snorted. “I wasn’t alone. Meg, Amber, and Jessica were with me, like I said. Anyway, there’s nothing more dangerous to a woman than a man, so it would be kind of reckless to bring one with us, don’t you think?” She sent me a smirk over her shoulder before turning her attention back to the eggs.
I glared at her back, but couldn’t fault her logic, even though I knew she was joking. Mostly. “What about bears?” I demanded. “Bears are pretty dangerous, aren’t they?”
“We were prepared for bears.”
