Change of Hart (Wells Ranch, #3)(21)
Sure, Mom had given me crap about jumping over cattle guards a few times. But I never missed. Worrywarts.
“Anyway”—Blair grabbed my forearm, holding me back so Jackson could get ahead—“look what I stole from my mom’s craft kit.”
With a shoulder shrug and shimmy, her backpack fell to the ground, and she crouched in the middle of the gravel driveway to dig through it.
“Ugh, where is it?” She huffed, tipping her backpack upside down and letting the contents spill across the rocks. A giant bag of gummy worms, a rubber duck, at least thirty pencils, and an apple so bruised it was almost unrecognizable were only a few of the random objects that caught my eye.
“Blair, what the heck are you doing?” I laughed and grabbed a stuffed bear keychain holding a heart with her name on it. “Cute. A little Blair bear.”
“Look, I never find souvenirs with my name on them so how was I supposed to turn this little guy down when I saw him?” She snatched the bear from me. “Anyway, that’s not what we’re here for.”
She continued rummaging through the pile of items for a moment, and I watched with a stupid grin on my face.
“Ta-da!” she exclaimed, holding up a bag of googly eyes. “Let’s stick these on the most random things we can think of in your house.”
The way her eyes were lit up, there’s no way I could say I thought her prank was silly. Nothing like the ideas I came up with, which usually involved potentially dangerous situations and pissing at least one of my brothers off.
“You’re going to give Grandpa a heart attack if he opens a cupboard at four a.m. and there’s a bunch of googly eyes staring back at him.”
She giggled, starting to cram everything else back into her backpack. “This isn’t any worse than the time you snuck a whoopie cushion onto his chair at the dinner table.”
“Good point,” I said, kneeling beside her to clean up the mess—namely the concerning number of colorful rubber bands strewn everywhere. “Why do you have a thousand hair ties in here?”
“Because I have to put my hair into a ponytail anytime I need to focus. But I constantly lose them, so I keep a bunch in my backpack.”
I dumped a handful of hair ties into her bag. “Huh. I’ve only ever seen you with your hair up at school. It’s down when you barrel race.”
“Because I don’t really focus then. I don’t know…it’s different for some reason. Like…I just do it.” She shrugged, zipping the backpack shut and tossing it over one shoulder as she stood.
“I think that’s called being a natural, Blair Bear.”
“Oh, shut it.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, kicking rocks at me—clearly thinking I was teasing. “Come on, it’s time for our great eye-scapade.”
“Great, I can’t wait,” I said, drawing out the I while winking at her.
We walked the rest of the way to the house plotting our attack. Dad, Grandpa, and Austin would be out on the ranch working. Jackson was probably holed up in his bedroom already. But Mom could be anywhere, and she was always catching us in the middle of pranks, which meant being sent to muck out stalls.
As luck would have it, she was in the garden when we strolled up the porch steps. And the moment the screen door slammed shut behind us, Blair was kicking her sandals off and sprinting toward the kitchen. I followed down the hall, tossing my backpack on the counter and watching her crafty mind work. An impish smile tugging at the corners of her lips as she pulled her hair into a high pony.
“I’m eyeballing everything in the fridge,” she announced, unzipping the bag of stick-on googly eyes.
“Okay, um…” I racked my brain for ideas.
She interrupted my thoughts by slapping a handful of eyes into my open palm. “Don’t think. Just do.”
We stuck googly eyes to just about every possible item in the kitchen before carrying out our mission through the rest of the house, until the bag of two hundred was empty, and we fell to my bedroom floor. The wood was warm underneath us, thanks to the afternoon sun streaming in through the open window, and Blair tapped her bare foot on the hardwood to the sounds of Dolly Parton coming from the garden.
“Denver! Blair!” My dad’s voice boomed up the stairwell.
Blair looked at me with a grimace, mouthing oh, crap.
“Do we run?” I asked quietly.
“Nah, we take it like men.” She pretended to wipe sweat from her brow as she sat up, her shoulder brushing mine. Then with a salute, she said, “If we die, it was nice knowing ya.”
I snorted and reluctantly got to my feet, pulling her up with me. The two of us marched down the stairs, preparing for the wrath of my dad. Bennett Wells was the polar opposite of my mom—gruff and quiet, as opposed to her outgoing personality. But he also loved Blair like a daughter, and that regularly saved my ass from a whupping. Even when he was mad because I’d failed a test or forgotten to do one of my chores, she’d jump in and defuse the situation.
“What the hell is this?” Dad stood next to the open fridge, pointing to a jar of pickles with googly eyes. Both the eyes and the contents of the jar were wiggling slightly—likely from the force of his opening the door—and I clamped my mouth shut, doing my best to hide my reaction.
Blair, however, couldn’t stop a giggle from escaping, even as she held a closed fist to her lips. It was funny. Every jar staring back at us. Even the milk jug had eyes…and a smile Blair must’ve drawn with a marker when I wasn’t looking.