Startled by a Wildflower

Amos Madden glanced over to his left, as he drove his tractor up the dirt road that had led him from his farm, and eased it to a stop. He frowned and pulled the tractor over, killing the motor and swinging himself down from the seat.

Why was the door to the old Kelly place open?

"I'd better not find squatters," he muttered darkly under his breath, as he made his way toward the old, ramshackle house that still stood, although that was all it was doing, and not very well.

He halted next to the porch's side railing and called out sharply.

"Whoever's in there, come out now!"

Amos was about to move around to the open end of the porch and go inside, when a beautiful woman came through the door with her arms crossed and a daring look in her eyes.

"Alright, I've come out. Now, what?"

Amos Madden was completely unprepared to encounter a fascinating, barefoot flower child, with long, light brown hair, green laughing eyes, and a 1987 wood-paneled Ford station wagon that she insisted on sleeping in with her cat, Mango. Within moments, she unraveled all of his logic, claiming to have won the property in a poker game, and responding to his insistence that she couldn't stay in a house whose ceiling was threatening to fall in, by confusing him so thoroughly that she somehow talked him into fixing it for her.

He had no idea what to do with her, but he couldn't allow her to stay there alone... not where the Vogel brothers might find her.