Read Online Carter (Bourbon & Blood Book 3) by Seraphina Donavan - Free Book Online Page B

front row under the disapproving eye of her daddy. That shit was not happening. “You give shitty advice, Emmitt.”
    “I give good advice that you don’t like. Now shut up and spread that straw. I’d like to get to bed sometime before daylight.”
    “Why the hell are you up doing this right now, anyway?”
    Emmitt lifted another bale and carried it back to the larger of the stalls. “Had an emergency earlier today. Horse broke its leg. Had to put it down… Old man Jeffers. Between his bad hips and his dementia, I couldn’t leave him to handle it. So I borrowed a backhoe and got one of the neighbors to help me with it. Took all damn day.”
    Emmitt Hayes, the Surly Saint, Carter thought with a bitter laugh. “Half the town thinks you’re a hateful bastard and the other half thinks the pope should be knocking on your door.”
    “He’s a hundred damn years old. He could break a hip looking at that damn backhoe! What was I supposed to do?” Emmitt demanded.
    Carter didn’t say anything else. Just spread straw in the various stalls. Emmitt was just as locked down by what people in Fontaine thought as the rest of them were. That didn’t make his current situation any clearer though.
    Feeling his muscles burning from slinging the pitchfork around and feeling the bite of the handle in his hands, he realized he probably should have just stayed home and drunk the beer.

7
    J osie listened to the hum of power tools as she stood upstairs in her bedroom. True to his word, Carter had shown up with a load of wood and his tools and was out back repairing her privacy fence. Meanwhile, she was upstairs trying to figure out what to wear to seduce him when he came inside. Of course, he didn’t require a whole lot of seduction, but it felt good to dress for him, to put something on her body just so he’d have the pleasure of stripping it off her.
    The idea of having him in her bedroom was strange. She’d never had any man in her bedroom, period. Other than a few painfully inept encounters in her dorm room at college and then the boy she’d dated her last year at UK who only wished he could be called a minuteman, she’d never had men in her space. Certainly never a man like Carter, who seemed to leave his mark on everything.
    The backyard grew silent, the hum of power tools faded, the soft thump of the hammer was gone. Josie reached into the drawer and retrieved a black nightie that she’d bought on impulse and never worn. The silk slithered over her skin, falling to the middle of her thighs. The deep V in the front was supported by the thinnest spaghetti straps in creation, but the back dipped even lower. It barely covered her ass from above or below.
    She ran the brush through her hair just as she heard the back door open. Moving to the bed, Josie had intended to arrange herself in an alluring pose, but Carter had taken the stairs quicker than she expected. She was on her knees in the middle of the bed when she heard his low whistle.
    “You’ve been holding out on me,” he said. “That’s enough to give a man a heart attack.”
    “Maybe you should come closer in case I need to give you CPR?” she shot back.
    “I need a shower first,” he said. “I’m disgusting.”
    All she could think about was Carter naked in her shower, water pouring down over his tanned skin. God above. “Bathroom is through there,” she said, pointing to one of the doors just across the hall. “But the only soap I have smells like roses.”
    He walked toward her, kissed her hard on the mouth and as he pulled back, said with a grin, “I’ve smelled like worse things… Do not move from this spot, Josie Marcum. I’m going to get cleaned up, and when I come back in here, I’m going to show you just how dirty I can be.”
    It was a damn good thing she was on the bed already because when he said that her knees would have buckled. The heat of his gaze and the sensual promise of his words had all but laid her low.
    Carter disappeared across