Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay by Babette Jongh (best summer books .TXT) 📗

door to the lockout and went inside. The door, with its compressed-air spring, clapped shut behind him. After a moment of silence, Abby called out. “Can you tell who’s supposed to get which food?”

“I’m not color-blind,” Quinn called back. She heard one of the metal cupboard doors slam shut. “And I did graduate from kindergarten, in case you’re wondering.”

“Just checking.” For lack of anything better to do, she checked her phone and found another text from Reva. Mama deer looks okay and everyone says to give her time, but she isn’t doing well. Though her injuries are minor—cuts and scrapes and bruises—she won’t eat or drink. She misses her babies and knows they will die without her, if they haven’t already been killed by predators overnight. I’m calling an Uber and going to find those babies. Wish me luck. I may get kicked out of the program for doing this, but I have to.

Abby replied to Reva: Be careful!

Then she sat back and told herself to be patient about her inability to help Quinn with her farm chores. Waiting for Quinn to do the work was worse than doing the work herself. She hadn’t bothered to tell him that she usually prepared a bird salad for the morning feed. She figured she’d probably sneak back and feed them their salad in the afternoon, once Quinn left—and maybe after she’d had a nap.

The aviaries consisted of four separate octagonal structures on a raised concrete foundation. The wire-covered enclosures were connected by a common lockout entrance in the center, a safe zone designed to keep birds from escaping. While each aviary had a walk-through door for humans, feeding could be done through smaller access doors to the food bowls and water bottles. Running water, an industrial sink, and a heavy-duty hose with an adjustable spray nozzle made cleaning the aviary complex one of the easiest farm jobs. Inside the safe zone, each wire enclosure was fronted by a tall metal storage cupboard (color-coded, of course) for food and other supplies.

She realized that the birds’ sounds changed when Quinn fed them. The parakeets’ chirps went from frenzied excitement to contented chirps. The sun conures started talking in their high-pitched voices. Sun conures weren’t known for their ability to talk, but at least some of these six were able to produce a few words. “Hello, good morning,” a couple of them said in their automated-sounding voices. Another screeched, followed by a pretty-good rendering of “Are you hungry?”

“Dammit!” Quinn yelled.

One of the Amazons laughed and said in a surprisingly human-sounding voice, “Oops! So sorry!”

A metal door slammed shut inside the lockout. “You fucking little fucker!”

Without getting up, Abby moved the scooter forward to get a better view through the aviary wire. “Are you okay?”

Quinn had wrapped a cleaning towel around his right hand. He peeled the towel back for a quick look, then pressed it to the wound again. “Damn bird’s got a beak like a can opener.”

“Band-Aids are in the light blue cupboard with the cleaning products.”

“Fuck you, too,” he said, his tone surprisingly light given that he might be missing part of a finger. “Band-Aids might not be enough to put my finger back together again, but I appreciate your helpfulness.”

“Fuck you!” Freddy, the big macaw, yelled cheerfully. “Fuck all y’all!”

Aunt Reva would kill her if Freddy started cursing again. A cursing parrot didn’t make a good steward for school field trips, and it had taken Reva more than a year after Grayson’s death to cure Freddy of that habit. “Please don’t curse around the parrots,” Abby chided. “They’ll pick it up and start repeating it, especially when they shouldn’t.”

Quinn peeled back the towel again, then opened the blue cupboard and rustled around.

“I think the first-aid kit is on the second-to-top shelf,” she said. “Do you need help finding it?” She walked the scooter forward with her heels.

“Don’t. Move.”

The warning tone in his voice didn’t deter her, but the three stair steps that led up to the aviary did. “Okay. I’ll stay out here, if you say so. Just let me know what I can do to help.”

“Try not to hurt yourself.” His voice sounded growly and just a little bit sexy. “That’ll do fine.”

“If you want to wait till later to hose out the enclosures,” she called, “that’ll be okay.”

He came outside and rammed the bolt home on the aviary’s door. “I’ll do it this evening. Isn’t it time for you to take a pill or something?”

Actually, it was past time for her morning pain medicine, but she hadn’t wanted to take it until she and Quinn had finished the chores, because it made her sleepy. “Let me look at your hand.”

He took the handlebars of her scooter and pushed her toward the house, wheelchair-style. “I’ll let you look at my hand if you’ll promise to stay inside the house and let me finish the chores in peace.”

The paved walkway ended at a series of concrete stepping-stones surrounded by a sprawling ground-cover plant with deep-green leaves and purple flowers. With a huff of irritation, Quinn left the scooter behind and swept Abby up into his arms, then carried her the rest of the way to the farmhouse. Abby couldn’t resist the urge to lay her cheek against his shoulder and breathe in his scent. Though he’d been working all morning, his warm, damp skin still smelled of soap, and his silky hair smelled of cheap but fragrant shampoo—green apple and coconut; strange combo but nice enough.

So yeah, he smelled good. And he’d looked mighty fine—from his tight butt to his bulging biceps to his wide shoulders—when she had watched him shovel stalls. But what made her tingle all over was the feel of his muscled arms cradling her against his hard chest as if she weighed nothing. Heady stuff that challenged her determination to get her own life together before she considered a relationship with anyone.

Inside the farmhouse, he hitched her up a little higher against his chest. “Bed, or couch?”

“Couch,” she