Dragonfly Lake Holiday Bundle (ebook)

Chapter One—Single All the Way

Ben

Being a single dad of two little girls was not for the weak.

Balancing the single dad gig with a thriving veterinary practice? I’d been trying to do it for several years, and most days all I could do was hold on and get through the day, hoping everyone’s needs were met.

Take today, for example.

This chilly, rainy Sunday morning four days before Thanksgiving had started with an emergency call just before five a.m. from Bill Gibbons, a family friend since my childhood. His mare was in labor and needed help. I’d been waiting for my coffee to brew, preparing for my morning chores, planning to wake up the girls for feeding time as usual—our animals’, not the girls’—when the call had come in.

When a mare experienced dystocia, there was no time to waste—both her and the foal’s lives were in danger.

I’d woken the girls as my mind spun through options for childcare. I didn’t want to call Grandma Berty, because she’d stayed with Evelyn and Ruby last night until nearly midnight while I went to my weekly single dads’ night. At seventy-four, my grandmother needed her sleep.

Normally I’d call one of my techs, but Kat was sick, and Brad was out of town, so I’d had no choice but to grab a box of granola bars and some juice boxes and pile the girls into the truck with me.

“Daddy, I want to get a baby in Freckles’s tummy,” Ruby, my six-year-old, said from the backseat as I drove us home from what thankfully had ended up a successful birth.

My girls had hung out with Alice, Bill’s wife, during the tense birth, but they’d been able to witness the newborn foal standing for its first time just before we left. They’d been happily chattering nonstop ever since, still riding the high of that enchanting miracle.

I couldn’t help but be moved by it myself, even though I’d seen it dozens of times. I’d also experienced tragic results in similar situations, so I was all too aware we’d been lucky today.

“Freckles can’t have babies. He’s a gelding,” Evelyn, nine, told Ruby in her older-sister-knows-all voice.

“Bay Leaf then,” Ruby persisted. “She’s a girl.”

“A mare,” Evelyn corrected.

“A mare is a girl, and she can have baby horses,” Ruby said. “Please, Daddy?”

A laugh burst out of me, but instead of hell no, I said, “No baby horses for us for the foreseeable future, Ruby Tuesday. We’ve got our hands full already.”

“Grandma Berty said we shouldn’ta got the llamas.” Evelyn was wise beyond her years, an old-soul type, but she didn’t hesitate to keep me abreast of all my dear grandmother’s opinions. Which was good and bad.

In this case, the logical part of me acknowledged Grandma Berty could be right, but the animal-loving sucker in me would never give those llamas up. Not even escape artist Esmerelda.

“Betty and Esmerelda are part of the family,” I reassured my girls.

“So their last name is Holloway?” Ruby asked, pulling another grin from me.

“Of course it is,” I confirmed.

“I’m hungry,” Ruby said, flipping mental channels at the speed of a first-grader.

“We’ll get a real breakfast as soon as we feed the animals. How about pancakes?” I watched my younger daughter’s brown eyes light up in the rearview mirror.

“Yes!” Ruby said.

“I bet the chickens are even hungrier,” Evelyn said. The hens—all eight of ours and Emerson’s six—and Gordon, the rooster, were her responsibility, and she took it seriously.

“Maybe after we feed everyone and I get cleaned up, we’ll go to the diner for brunch,” I said, thinking it’d be nice to have Monty’s crew at the Dragonfly Diner cook for us. The birth had been touch and go. Getting the foal into the right position had been a challenge, and the adrenaline had finally receded, leaving me exhausted.

“We can’t go to the diner,” Evelyn said. “Miss Emerson is moving in today.”