She even left him a note that read Goats? What goats?
She wasn’t typically super flirty. Or flirty at all really. That just wasn’t her personality. But something about this guy with the Louisiana drawl and hot tattoos, not to mention the little I’m-pretty-adorable-aren’t-I grin and the dirty talk and the way he’d made her body sing, made her feel a little flirty.
Feeling better than she had in weeks, she headed for the penguin habitat that was being built just up the road.
The penguins were due to arrive in three days and it was making her very anxious. She’d hired a couple of the Omaha zookeepers to drive the penguins to her. She was in Autre to make sure the habitat was finished to her standards. The birds needed a place to live when they got here after all. In the ideal world she would be the one driving them down, but it was too long a trip for one person to make by themselves and there was no way to park a trailer full of penguins at a roadside motel halfway between Omaha, Nebraska, and Autre, Louisiana.
So she’d used some of her sixteen million dollars to hire a couple guys she’d worked with for the past two years and knew penguins well to make the trip. She was going to fly the men home so they were only driving one direction. They were leaving the new truck and trailer with her. You never knew when you might need to haul a few penguins somewhere.
She couldn’t believe this was her life and the kinds of things she was thinking about now.
She found the arched sign that read Boys of the Bayou Gone Wild and the road that turned into what Charlie had referred to as the animal park, though Griffin had rolled his eyes when she’d said it. Jill parked her car in the little gravel parking lot just inside the fence line.
Her phone dinged with a text just as she shut off the engine.
She looked down and smiled. It was from her best friend, Evan, back home in Kansas.
Evan: WTH? Have you been eaten by alligators already? Text me.
Jill knew her mother was trying to “be good” and not text Jill but was, instead, driving Evan crazy asking how Jill was.
Instead of texting, she put in her earbuds, dialed his number, and got out of the car.
“So that’s a no to getting eaten by alligators then?” he asked when he picked up.
“Well… it wasn’t an alligator.”
Evan frowned. “What are you…” He paused. “Wait. Seriously? You hooked up with someone? Already?”
She felt how big her grin was. “The welcoming committee here is really nice.”
“And I was worried you wouldn’t make new friends.”
“I was very friendly.”
“Did you make him lasagna?” Evan teased.
The one and only time she and Evan had crossed over the just-friends line had been years ago after the funeral of a very good friend and Jill had taken Evan lasagna to cheer him up.
“That was my mother’s lasagna,” Jill said. It wasn’t that Jill couldn’t make lasagna. She just didn’t want to. Lasagna was a lot of work. “And I don’t need lasagna to get other guys naked, thank you very much.” Hell, she hadn’t intended to get Evan naked that night. That had just happened.
Evan just laughed. “I guess what they say about southern hospitality is real, huh?”
Evan was pretty laid back and had definitely had his share of what’s-your-name-again-baby hook-ups back in the day, but she knew her friend would not approve of picking up a stranger in a roadside motel in small town Louisiana where she knew exactly two people, so she decided to change the subject.
Jill started up the path that led into the animal park. “Hey, want to tour my new office with me?” she asked. “I’m just heading to the penguin habitat. I haven’t even seen it yet.”
“Definitely. You know that this whole thing is really cool, right?”
She did. Mostly. When she wasn’t freaking out about the enormous pressure she was feeling.
The first thing she saw were the lemurs. She showed Evan.
“No way.”
“Yep. I told you how this started as a petting zoo, right?”
Evan nodded. “Your friend Griffin joined the vet practice there, in part because of the petting zoo. It was becoming more than the one vet could handle.”
“Right. The main vet got pregnant and wanted to cut back. But initially he was just taking care of otters and goats and that kind of stuff. Then Charlie came to town and decided to turn the whole thing into an animal park. Charlie not only got the lemurs but a sloth, some red pandas, and a bunch of other stuff. And Griffin.” Jill smiled. “Griffin and Charlie stopped up at the motel to say hi last night. I’ve never seen Griffin happy like that. I mean, he’s still gruff and stuff, but he’s actually happy now. It’s really great.”
“There’s a sloth?” Evan asked.
Jill laughed and continued up the path to the little hut where the sloth—Slothcrates, according to the sign—lived. She and Evan also saw the red pandas, a few peacocks, three porcupines, and four parrots.
“Up at the main barn, they also have a tortoise, several ducks, some hedgehogs, a few pigs, rabbits…a bunch of stuff,” Jill told Evan. “And apparently there was talk of adding a zebra or two. Griffin had rolled his eyes about that too, but I get the impression that Charlie gets what she wants from him.”
“Is Charlie on this welcoming committee?” Evan joked.
Jill felt her cheeks flush with even that little reminder of Zeke. She switched the phone’s camera to show him the penguin habitat she’d finally found.
Not that it was hidden. In fact, it was right out in the middle.
Dammit.
“Ugh.”
“What’s wrong?” Evan asked. “That looks amazing. From where I’m sitting anyway.”
“I just...” She sighed and looked at her friend again. “I knew that penguins in a small town in Louisiana would be a novelty. I know plenty of people will want to stop by and see them. The penguins are one of the most popular exhibits in Omaha, even.”
“And that’s bad because…”
She knew she was going to sound whiny. But this was Evan. He’d known her since they were kids. He’d definitely seen her whiny before. “These penguins are special. And not just because they’re mine,” she said quickly. “But this program they’re a part of has a lot of stipulations.”
“Okay, like what?”
“These penguins have been living a very solitary existence with A.J. as their only human contact. They’re used to peace and quiet. And they need to have baby penguins soon. If bringing them to Autre and a whole new environment is a risk, then introducing chaos and noise, with a lot of tourists and more human interaction, could derail the entire project.”
She should’ve thought about this more.
Though thinking about more than she already had seemed impossible. This had been keeping her up at night ever since she’d met the penguins a month ago.
“The project is pretty much just to keep them alive and make sure they have more penguins, right?” Evan asked.
“Yeah.” Jill shrugged. “But they haven’t bred in all the time A.J.’s had them, Evan. They’ve been kept away from any temperature fluctuations, weather threats, predators, even changes in their diets. Their environment has been extremely stable. But they haven’t bred. They have to reproduce in the next year or they’ll—we’ll—be out of the program. Can you imagine? The foremost expert on Galápagos penguins in the United States inheriting eight of them and then getting kicked out of a program to save them because…she can’t?”