A Baby...Maybe? & How to Hunt a Husband Read Free Page B

on his bull before the livestock show next year.”
    â€œI’ll get back to him on that.” He took a deep breath. “Plug the phone back in. I’m ready.”
    Rex went back to his office, sat down and spent the rest of the morning fielding calls. If the calls had been serious ones like that of the high-school kid, geared toward information about the insemination process, or extracting semen, or what the cost of inseminating a cow with his prize bull, LuLu, might be, that would have been fine. But many calls were all about the size of a bull’s penis and whether or not Rex also provided growth hormones for men who wanted to become as large as the bull on the billboard.
    Later that afternoon, he went back out to the billboards. Maybe he had only imagined what they looked like. After all, it had been pretty early in the morning when he had first seen them. He couldn’t even remember if he’d had his first cup of coffee yet.
    No, it was just as he remembered. A bull with an over-inflated penis and a sex-starved cow in the first throes of bull-love. Rex saw red all over again. He searched for his most recent missing cell phone. He searched between the front seats of the cab, under the seats, the back seats. The phone he finally foundinside a Burger Bay bag was from three cell phones ago.
    He powered it up and punched in Clay’s number for the second time that day. “Get your sorry ass out here at ten tomorrow morning.”
    He drove the truck to the car wash and gave them explicit instructions to search every fast-food bag, every container, every nook and cranny for cell phones. He spent the rest of the time in the car-wash waiting room fielding sly innuendoes about the size of his bull, while women old enough to be his grandmother were sliding their gazes down the front of his jeans.
    It was too much for a man to take.
    Â 
    C ARA DROVE to her parents’ house after a horrible day at school. She didn’t want to go, she only wanted to go home and get into a hot bath. A lavender bubble bath laden with rosemary bath oil. She’d slather her face with a cucumber facial mask and relax for a while. That’s all she wanted to do. She wanted to wash away the meeting she’d had with Mr. and Mrs. Simpson about their son, Carl. Sometimes being a kindergarten teacher wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She loved teaching, but dealing with a set of parents who thought their destructive son was cute and who felt his biting and hitting other children should be ignored, made her more determined than ever to have her own child and raise him the right way. Show other parents how the job should be done.
    But instead of going home and washing her horrible day away, she headed toward her mother’s, like the good daughter she was. Right now she regretted calling her mother at lunchtime just to say hello. She should know by now there was never any simple hello when it came to her mom.
    â€œI bought you the most adorable white blouse,”Cecilia had gushed. “Come by after school and pick it up.”
    â€œNot today, some other time.”
    â€œIt’s so pretty. It would look beautiful with your complexion.”
    â€œIt can wait until next week. You know I’ll be on spring break and will be able to spend so much more time with you.”
    â€œI suppose it can.” Cecilia had sounded hurt and put out. The classic I do everything for you, my ungrateful daughter, and this is the thanks I get. “Even though this is Friday night, and technically your spring break starts after school gets out this afternoon.”
    There was no winning with her mother. The pitfalls of being an only child meant that Cara had no sibling who could share Cecilia’s overenthusiastic mothering techniques. It meant that she was the only one Cecilia lavished all her attention on. It meant that she had to be accommodating whether she wanted to or not, because Cecilia had a way of