Текст книги "Nuts"

Автор книги: Alice Clayton

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 12

The next afternoon I headed out to Maxwell Farm again, with even more anticipation this time. I was looking forward to the picking of the vegetables, the signing up for the farmshare, the kissing of the lips. Mostly the kissing of the lips.

I hadn’t seen him since the night I’d made him dinner, since the fire department interrupted something that was already smoldering. I’d been busy with the diner—working double shifts, replacing the back door lock, and getting back into the swing of cooking in a professional kitchen. I had new burns on my forearm from wrestling with a meat loaf, a Band-Aid on my thumb when I mistook it for a carrot . . . and a girlish urge to giggle every single time I went into the walk-in. I fought the giggle right now, just thinking about it.

When I arrived at Maxwell Farm, the fields and parking lot were a flurry of activity. I grabbed the square of ginger spice cake I’d brought Leo from the diner and set off across the gravel. It was the day everyone came to pick up their farmshare box, and I nodded to several people I knew. It was late afternoon, the sun shining down through a cloudless sky, and groups lingered around cars, almost like a farm-to-table tailgate. Kids played with barn cats, parents chatted leisurely with other moms and dads, and the easy community feel was palpable. It was a feeling I was familiar with, but I’d never really felt it . . . on the inside before. Since my family owned the most popular diner around, if anyone should feel like they belonged, you’d think it’d be me, right? But now, as a few familiar faces smiled in my direction, and a few casually friendly waves were sent my way, I felt something suspiciously like hometown pride. Interesting.

People were leaving the main barn with large baskets filled with all kinds of produce, cartons of eggs, paper-wrapped cheese, and walnuts. Smiling, I headed inside.

There, in the middle of everything, was Leo. I was struck once more at how truly handsome he was. Women around me were similarly struck, and I felt an odd urge to strike them myself, as a matter of fact . . . He chatted easily with everyone as they came up in line for their box, asking questions about their kids, making recommendations on how to pair this with that, telling them what would be in season in the next few weeks.

The women understandably hung on every word. He was kind, his grin was warm, and his forearms were spectacular. A vintage long-sleeved Beastie Boys T-shirt was shoved up to his elbows, his skin tanned from working outside, faded, ripped jeans hanging low on his hips. When he lifted a box of rhubarb down from the truck behind him, a sliver of skin peeked out, and I saw a woman fan herself with a leaf of romaine.

His eyes rose toward the crowd, and then found mine. His easy smile changed, one corner of his mouth lifting in a sexy grin that made my pulse skippy. He waved me up through the chatting throngs, past the romaine lady, and I felt my cheeks warm at being singled out. He pointed over toward the side, where wooden crates were stacked.

“Hey, Sugar Snap,” he said in a low voice, and my pulse skipped again.

“Hey, Almanzo” was all I could answer. And he called me dangerous.

He leaned in. “Little House?”

“Busted. Are you a fan?”

“Kid sister. She used to make us play Little House in the summer in the big barn,” he replied, his eyes twinkling. “You hiding something behind your back?” he asked, and I proudly produced the sweet treat I’d brought for him. “For me?”

“You seemed to like the walnut cake, thought you might like something a little spicier,” I said. Loudly enough for romaine fanner to hear me? It’s a fair bet.

He grinned, lifting the corner of the parchment and peeking inside. “Smells good.”

“Tastes even better,” I answered, giving him an honest-to-goodness eyelash bat. He nodded, set the cake inside the cooler behind the table, and then turned back to me with an expectant look.

“You ready for this?”

“I think so? Not sure exactly what we’re doing here.” Liar. You knew exactly what you were hoping was on tap for the day.

“Simple,” he replied, stepping out from behind the stand with a crate. “We’re going shopping. Take over here for me, will you?” he asked, slapping the guy next to him on the back and handing him a clipboard.

As he led me out of the barn, he pointed out the giant deep freezers and coolers behind the workers. “Depending on the share you purchase, you can get everything and anything you want, when it’s in season. Some people opt in for a small share—just produce and sometimes specialty items like mushrooms or canned tomatoes. Some people go in for the full share, and they get protein each week. Sometimes pork, sometimes beef, always chicken, either whole roasters or already cut up. Usually eggs, and sometimes cheese.”

“You guys make cheese here too?” I asked, surprised at the scope of the operation.

“We don’t, but we work with other farms in the area to make sure the shares are really well rounded. We partner with Oscar Mendoza, the guy who runs the creamery the next farm over, to bring cheese, milk, butter, and all that for our customers.”

As I looked around, I noticed several baskets with big glass bottles of milk, smaller bottles of thick, heavy cream, and paper-wrapped butter, all stamped Bailey Falls Creamery.

“It seems like you don’t even have to go to the grocery store if you’re a member,” I said. This was how shopping used to be, back in the day.

“That’s what we hope. For the most part, you can feed your family entirely from locally sourced, clean-eating food,” he said, his voice full of pride. “Supermarkets have their place; that’s never going to change. But we like to think this can be just as convenient, and over time, it costs less than conventional stores.”

“And you know the guy who’s growing your food,” I said, warming to the idea that I would be preparing food that Leo’s hands pulled from the earth. Granted, I seemed to have special access to his hands this summer, but I was still tickled by the general idea. Also, his mouth. I’d like to be tickled by that mouth. Dammit, where was that romaine leaf? I needed fanning.

And speaking of his mouth, his was now turned up in a mischievous way. “What are you thinking about right now?” he asked.

“Honestly? Food.”

“Just food?”

“And your mouth,” I admitted.

His eyes widened, then narrowed. “C’mere.” He dragged me and his basket behind the barn, into a tiny cleft of the rock wall. And then his mouth pressed into mine in a flurry of licks and nibbles, and soft little moans and sighs.

“If I said I was thinking about more than your mouth, what would that get me?” I panted between fiery kisses.

“Trouble,” he replied, looking to his left and seeing a few people wandering close to where we were. “Come on, let’s go fill your basket.”

“I feel like that might be farm code for something way more fun than picking vegetables, but I’ll indulge you.” I laughed, straightening my dress, making it look like I hadn’t just been pressed between a rock and a hard farmer. “This would be the time to tell you I want the full share.”

“You got it.” He winked and, grabbing my basket, led me out into the fields.

We wandered up and down the rows of the vegetable patch, and I marveled at everything that was just coming up. I tasted lemony sorrel and snappy fennel, and picked handfuls of tiny baby eggplant, a Japanese variety striped purple and white. In this week’s share everyone was getting new lettuce, more of those brown sugar strawberries, some rhubarb, and, new this week, the first blackberries. I was mentally testing recipes, deciding what else I’d need to spice up my home dinners, and what else I could use at the diner.

And as we walked, Leo pointed out various landmarks. Where they’d tilled an unused field and discovered a hundred-year-old coffee can filled with old pennies. Where an original well was still hidden by rotting wood planks, but was now safely fenced off. The well was repurposed and used now for irrigation in the herb garden. He’d laid raised beds in the same pattern originally planted, using an old landscape blueprint he’d found in the attic of the big house, when gardens were plotted to exacting standards.

“Back then, marigold would have been planted all the way around. It’s a great insect repellent,” he explained as we made our way through the herbs. “You needed dill, right?”

“Yeah, I’m turning some of those little cukes and green tomatoes we picked into zombie pickles,” I said.

“Should I know what that means?” he asked, kneeling down and picking a handful of dill.

“I’d hope not. Chad asked me to teach him how to make pickles. So he and Logan are coming by the diner after we close this weekend, and I’m going to show them how. The zombie part is harder to explain.”

“They want to learn how to pickle?” he asked, incredulous. He bundled the dill together, wrapping the ends with a bit of kitchen twine. “Is this enough?”

“Perfect,” I said as he offered it to me like a bouquet. And like a bouquet, I sniffed it. Mmm. Nothing smelled like warm, fresh herbs. “And you’d be surprised how many people want to know that stuff. The most popular class at the Learning Annex at UCLA is canning and pickling. A bunch of my clients used to take classes there. All these gorgeous plastic women with more money than they know what to do with, and they’re learning how to make fifty-cent fridge pickles.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh yeah. Your slow foods movement here is all about getting back to the land and local and sustainable, but it’s also a rampant food trend. And nobody knows trendy like LA wives. It makes sense, though. No one in our generation knows how to do much of that stuff.”

“Stuff like . . . ?”

“Pickling. Canning. Putting up preserves. Also sewing. If I lose a button on anything, I’m screwed. My mom knows how to sew, but I never bothered to learn. And she’s in the minority—most women these days are at least two generations away from those skills. Does your mom know how to sew?”

He threw his head back and laughed. “You’re adorable.”

“Exactly. But I bet her mom did—money had nothing to do with it. People used to know how to do these things, and now they don’t.”

“The Learning Annex. Interesting,” he said thoughtfully, rubbing his beard. “Can I come to the pickle class?”

“It’s not really a class,” I said, playing with the dill fronds. “But, sure. If you want.”

“I want.”

I ran my fingers over the frothy green herbs, feeling the silk slide across my skin. I want. I enjoyed the way that sounded, more than I cared to admit. But what I didn’t enjoy was the telltale buzz that suddenly zoomed by my ear.

“No! No no no!” I shrieked, dropping my dill and my basket and running halfway across the field before Leo knew what had happened.

“Rox! Hey, Rox!” he yelled after me, but I was running full out. “Roxie!”

I looked over my shoulder to shout back, “I told you, bees are assholes!” And because I looked over my shoulder, I tripped over a left-behind bucket, and down I went into the softly tilled dirt.

Catching up to me a few seconds later, Leo crouched down next to me. “Are you okay?” he asked, scanning me hurriedly.

“Of course.” I sighed, holding my hands over my face. “I really have this thing with bees.”

He pried my fingers loose, but didn’t release them. He inhaled deeply. “Must be that honey.”

I held my breath, aware of every point of contact between us. On the ground, surrounded by walls of green ruffling in the breeze, we seemed cut off from the world, and asshole bees—just me and this farmer and a skirt rucked up around my thighs.

He leaned down, releasing my hands to brush my hair back from my forehead. “If you get stung, guess what happens?”

“The world ends,” I answered promptly, and he gave me a pointed look.

“You get stung. That’s it. It hurts, sometimes worse than others, but then it’s over.”

I raised up on my elbows, deliberately pushing into his space. “I’d rather not get stung at all.” And then I kissed him. My lips brushed his once, twice, and I was gearing up for a third when I heard a rumble nearby.

He groaned, but held me to him for one more kiss. “Unless we want the afternoon tour to catch us taking a tumble in the catnip, we should probably get up.”

“Probably.” Reluctantly, as I could hear voices getting closer, I let him pull me up and we went back to where my fifty-yard dash had scattered vegetables every which way.

After Leo helped me gather them back up, he sneaked one more kiss just before the tour crested the top of the hill. We waved from where we stood, and headed in the opposite direction. We wandered from this field to that, chatting about anything and everything. He told me all sorts of trivia about the property, asked me endless questions about different ways I might use certain products from the farm, and we laughed more than I can remember doing in a very long time.

“It’s great that you have access to all this history, knowing the hows and whys of how this estate came into being,” I remarked as we started back toward the barn.

The day was winding down. From up high on the ridge, the only thing we could hear was the wind and the birds chirping. My hands were dirty from digging in the beds, fingertips stained green from tugging on a stubborn parsnip.

“We didn’t come here that often; mostly in the summer,” he said, stopping and looking down at the big house, silhouetted against the setting sun. The Hudson was just on the other side, wide and unhurried, and he pointed in the opposite direction. “I’d spend hours out here, running through the woods, playing with the dogs. There’s a creek on the far side of the property, and I can’t tell you how many arrowheads I used to find along the banks. I’d come home covered in chigger bites and absolutely filthy, usually to the horror of my mother and her friends.”

“My mother used to run the hose in the backyard to make a mud pit, and we’d sit there and make mud pies.” The mud felt so cool on those hot summer days. “She always said mud was good for the skin. And I quote: ‘All kids should get dirty, especially little girls.’ ”

“I can hear her saying that.” He laughed, catching my hand. He examined my dirt-embedded fingernails. “So she would love this.”

“She’d be thrilled,” I confirmed as he turned my palm up and ran his thumb across my love line. I shivered. “I bet your mom thinks all that playing in the dirt paid off in the end. Look how awesome this place is.”

He traced another line down the center of my hand, then looked off into the distance. “Let’s go make sure there’s some eggs left for you, before they’re all gone.”

He didn’t say anything else about his mom, and I didn’t ask. We headed down the hill toward the barn, Leo carrying my basket for me, our arms brushing occasionally.

It felt nice.

There were a few cartons of eggs left, and I was delighted to see that they not only were a beautiful speckled brown, but there were a few pale blue eggs tucked inside. My share that week also yielded a big wheel of local farm cheese, a pound of fresh butter, some locally raised trout, and two roasting chickens. And some of that thick-cut Maxwell bacon. I did enjoy a thick-cut Maxwell.

By the time we finished up, the parking lot was nearly empty. It was almost dusk, and as he said good-bye to the last stragglers, I wandered into the back corner of the original dairy barn, with its enormous stone silo. It now housed a reading bench, a bookshelf, and a collection of framed photographs spanning the history of the farm. I stood in the doorway, marveling at the workmanship that had gone into the silo. How perfectly constructed it was, with a nod here and there to design, even though it was made to simply store grain.

I heard Leo saying good night to some of the guys who worked the farm, then heard his footsteps. Which came to stop just behind me. I walked through the old oaken doorway of the silo, and he followed. Once the door closed behind us, it was quiet. And dark.

“So which came first, the barn or the silos?” I asked, looking at the soaring stone walls. Perfectly cylindrical, the four silos were almost three stories tall and could be seen from all over the farm.

“The barn,” Leo answered, walking toward me.

I backed away slightly, letting my gaze linger on the stone walls, and not the farmer who was now circling behind me.

“And when did you say the barn was constructed?” I asked, moving closer to the curved wall.

“Weren’t you paying attention on the tour the other day?”

I traced the line of one of the fieldstones, fitting my fingertip into the groove between it and the one on top. Though the day had been warm, inside the silo the stones were cool. “I was mostly paying attention,” I admitted.

“Mostly?” he asked, now directly behind me.

I shivered a bit, and not from the cool rock wall. I could feel the heat of him on my body, not yet touching, but fitting against my skin.

“I was a little”—I inhaled sharply, as those strong hands lifted my hair off my left shoulder, leaving my freckled skin exposed—“distracted,” I finished weakly.

Because now he bent his head down to my skin, nuzzling into my hair. Little flickers of desire were starting to smolder all over. Thinking someone felt the same attraction you were feeling was one thing; knowing that it was mutual was an entirely different kind of awesome. His nose brushed against my shoulder, and my fingers opened wide against the stone.

He pressed one solitary kiss into the hollow between my shoulder and neck, and my brain went a bit fuzzy. His lips, warm and wet, continued a path up along my neck, dragging his mouth, a little bit nibbling and a lot bit incredible.

His hands settled on my hips, curving around and up as his thumbs brushed the skin exposed by the dip in my dress. My back arched as my body reacted to having him so close. Once again he nuzzled at my neck, his breath now heavy in my ear.

“If you still want to talk about construction dates and historical significance, I’m happy to oblige,” he told me, then swept another line of kisses along my jawline.

I turned my head to let the man do the job he was clearly so good at. “I like history,” I replied, my voice husky.

“History . . .” he said, closing his mouth around my pulse point. Pretty sure my heart tried to move closer to his lips. “. . . has its place.”

“I like the present too.” My hands finally tangled in his hair. “The present can be just as interesting.”

And in the current present, Leo’s hands were sliding up the sides of my torso to splay his fingers wide across my rib cage, just barely brushing underneath my breasts. I stopped breathing. I also stopped caring that I was unaware of how many people might be outside that heavy oaken door. A door that, while extremely thick, might not be thick enough to muffle my cries if Leo touched me where I needed him to.

Every part of my body shivered as his fingers slid up, up toward my breasts, which felt heavy and full. I sighed when the tip of his pinkie grazed my nipple. I sighed when I arched into him and felt him at my back, strong and hard and oh . . . hard. I sighed when his teeth nibbled just behind my ear, his teeth and his tongue and his sweet scruff rasping my skin. And I sighed when one of his hands left my breasts to sweep my hair back again, rolling my head to the side to expose the base of my neck. And I cried out when he left a trail of openmouthed kisses down the center of my back, and then licked my spine on the way back up.

He. Licked. My. Spine.

That night I tossed and turned for a different reason than usual. The breeze had dissipated, leaving the night warm and sticky. I had all the windows open with a fan blowing, trying to bring in a breath of wind. I tossed and turned because I was hot, I tossed and turned because I was an insomniac, and I tossed and turned because I was horny as hell after Almanzo Wilder very nearly worked me over in a century-old silo. And if it wasn’t for a tour group very nearly catching us in flagrante desilo, I’d have totally let him.

I turned over onto my stomach, burying my face in my pillow as images scorched my overheated mind. His hands, sliding my dress halfway up my thighs. I exhaled loudly into the pillow, and rolled over onto my side. A minifilm played out in my mind, where Leo and his torture beard tickled my spine as he kissed a path straight down from the base of my skull down to where my dress began, and then licked my spine on the way back up. A dress that was one of my favorites, but if he’d torn it off and left it in a heap on the floor, I’d have shouted hallelujah and made sure that he found my bra and panties equally as offensive.

He licked my spine.

I huffed over onto my back, right leg bent up and left leg stretched to the side, trying to feel some kind of breeze, some kind of air, some kind of relief from the way my brain was burning up with fantasy flashes of sweaty, sexy bodies frolicking through a vegetable patch and doing the naughty next to some peeping tomatoes.

How do you spell relief?

T-O-U-C-H M-Y-S-E-L-F.

Well, a girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do . . .

My left hand was clenched into a fist up by my head, and my entire body was clenched in a ball of tension. I forced it to unclench, forced my fingers to relax and waggle back and forth a little bit, rolling my wrist as I let my hand come down down down, ghosting along the white sheets, along the edge of my tank top and my overheated skin.

I ruffled the little bit of lace, feeling my skin pebble. I dipped my hand underneath the fabric, arching into my touch.

He licked my spine.

A moan escaped my mouth as my nipples instantly hardened, sensitive and tight. I tugged at my shirt, and my breasts tumbled out. As my left hand danced across my skin, my right hand dipped below, sliding inside my panties.

He licked my spine.

What was it about that that made me go stupid? There were certainly other body parts, much more secret, wicked, and certainly more intimate, parts. Or maybe the spine was my new erogenous zone. Maybe my entire body was my new erogenous zone. Maybe I was now zoned solely by Leo Maxwell.

But meanwhile, back on the ranch, there was only me touching my . . . mmm.

My breath caught as I felt my body coming alive under my hands. Desire pooled in my tummy, spreading all through me. What did he sound like when he came? Did he shudder, silent and strong, or did he groan, panting my name as his hand slid back and forth over his rock-hard—

I was fantasizing about what he looked like when he was touching himself . . . while I was touching myself? So hot.

I was on fire. I slid my fingertips down, finding my own heat. Slick and wet, I almost arched off the bed, my hips rolling as I moved my fingers, seeking that perfect balance of pressure and—sweet Christ, that was good! I cried out his name as I danced right on the edge, the pressure building in my belly . . .

Buzz.

Buzz. Buzz.

I looked to the right, saw my phone light up with an incoming text. Leo’s name flashed across the screen. Leo was incoming—if only! I groaned at the interruption, but in case he’d happened to text me a picture of his prize-winning . . . rooster . . .

I snatched up my phone.

I’m outside.

Oh.

And I can hear you.

Ohhh.

You said my name.

Oh. My. God.

Let me in.