“I wonder if the one in the back pasture is frozen yet,” Amber mused with a speculative look at Devon.
“No,” he said.
She stuck out her lower lip. “But Devon.”
“If it is frozen, it’ll be impossible to find it with the snow on top of it, and someone will have to shovel it before we can skate anyway. And no one is getting on it without confirmation that it’s frozen solid enough to bear weight. Give it a couple days. Maybe for New Year’s.”
Her eyes brightened. “Ooh. We could do that as an attraction next year! New Year’s Day skate at Muttonchop Farms. Come out and meet the sheep, buy some knitwear or wool, drink some hot chocolate, eat a donut….” She glanced at Noah. “Can you make donuts? Are they as good as your pancakes?” She’d eaten hers as little knife-and-fork sandwiches with the bacon and maple syrup in between.
That was Amber for you. Casually assuming Noah would still be around in a year with no better New Year’s Day plans than to make donuts for a farm event. Because she already knew Devon wanted him there. Because Devon was as predictable as his routine, these days.
“I have never made donuts,” Noah said. His cheeks were pink, and he cast a shy look at Devon from under his Muppet eyelashes and added, “But I have time to learn.”
How the fuck was Devon supposed to cope with this?
He’d always been a romantic at heart. He thought you had to be if you wanted to be a professional athlete. You had to believe in fairy tales, a little bit.
But he’d let that go when the addiction got him. It was tough to be romantic when you were alternately sweating and shivering and shitting yourself as you dried out from nearly drowning in the consequences of your own bad decisions.
It looked like the romance had come back to him whether he was ready or not. The thought left him as warm and fuzzy as a week-old lamb.
He wondered, as Noah threw his head back in laughter at one of Amber’s early Devon Learns to Farm stories, if Noah liked The Muppet Christmas Carol.
NOAH’S FATHER came to pick him up just before eleven.
Devon had offered to drive him back to his car, but he plainly had plenty to do around the farm, as evidenced by the phone call he excused himself to take after breakfast—something about feed delivery, maybe?—and God knew getting the car out of the snowbank and running might not be a simple task. Noah’s dad had called a tow to meet them there.
But before that, while Devon dealt with whatever he was dealing with, Amber took Noah on a tour to meet the sheep.
“You can’t seriously be afraid of them,” Amber said, hunched against the cold as they stood at the side of the pen.
“They’re huge!” Noah pointed out.
“So are hockey players,” Amber countered.
Which, well. “Yeah,” he agreed, “and now I have brain damage.”
Amber blanched like she’d accidentally put her foot in it, but Noah only grinned. It was what it was. “Oh my God.” She huffed and shoved at his arm. “It’s like they made you in a factory just for him.”
The warmth of the backhanded compliment washed over him, and he burrowed deeper into his jacket. “If that’s the case, I guess I better meet the family.” A potential horrifying pun occurred to him. “Oh God, you don’t eat the sheep, do you?”
“I’m a vegetarian,” Amber said, as though Noah hadn’t just watched her eat a quarter pound of bacon. “But no. Why would we give them names if we were going to eat them? We just raise them for wool, though we’re talking about doing cheese production. Everyone likes cheese.”
“Everyone does like cheese.”
Amber elbowed him. “Come on. I’ll bring out Flower for you. She’s Devon’s baby.”
As if she knew somehow, from the hour they’d spent together, that that would get Noah to capitulate.
Noah didn’t know what he expected from the term baby, but it wasn’t a gangly thing stuffed inside a roll of wool stuffed inside a knitted sweater with a tulip on it. Flower was just over six months old and already about a hundred pounds. She nudged his hands like a dog would, as though hoping for treats, and crunched down happily when Amber gave him a chunk of carrot for her.
“Her mom was a late bloomer,” Amber said.
Noah wiped his hand on his pants and tilted his head in question.
“Giving birth in June. Most of them lamb in February or March.”
Noah looked into the pen. It wasn’t difficult to work out which sheep were ewes; they didn’t have horns. “So those sheep are all pregnant?”
