“How about we forget that conversation ever happened?”
“Can we forget the part about you comparing my one-hit-wonder to George Strait’s fifty-odd number ones?”
“I still think he sings amazing songs.”
“I don’t disagree.”
“My sister had your single on repeat for about a month back in the winter. You did a good job with it.”
“That almost sounds like a compliment, Collin.”
“Well, you’re no King George,” he said and bumped his shoulder against hers.
“Of course not. George has a penis. I have a vagina,” she joked back. “And boobs, don’t forget the boobs.”
“I haven’t been able to forget about the boobs in about a week.”
Something sizzled in the air between them. A bit of awareness, Collin thought, or maybe it was just the heat of the Missouri summer night.
“So what brought you into town tonight? Desperate for Merle’s scintillating conversation?”
“No.” She laughed. “He said something about wanting my single for the juke. I had my manager send a copy of it for him.”
“You’ve just made it onto Merle’s permanent nice list.”
“Doesn’t that mean I get free beers at Christmas?”
“Doubtful. But he might let you snack on the cherries and lemon and lime wedges he puts out between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.”
“The only time of the year he likes to make girly drinks,” Savannah said, and Collin thought he detected a hint of nostalgia in her voice. “I used to love Christmas in Slippery Rock.”
“The faux snow or the tinny elf music they pipe into the streets?”
“Don’t forget the hot cider, the light displays and the polar bear plunge.”
“Maybe you should come back this year.”
He thought she nodded, but the moon had hidden behind a few clouds and he couldn’t tell.
“Maybe I’ll stay through the holidays.”
They sat together looking out over the water for a long time. Cicadas buzzed in the low grass near the shore, and a few cars passed slowly on the street behind them.
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“Tired of me already?” She tilted her head to look at him, and he thought he saw a bit of uncertainty flash across her gaze in the moonlight.
“College. Levi, Aiden and Adam took the scholarships at the big schools. James did, too, and then went straight into the police academy. You chose the small school and commuted instead of living on campus.”
There were so many reasons. His parents had been in one of their let’s-be-a-happy-family modes and were staying at the orchard that fall, and he’d been convinced they would drop everything, leaving his grandparents in the lurch again—which they did. He and Granddad were planting the first of the pear and peach trees. Mara wanted the big school with the great tech department, but the scholarship she’d gotten hadn’t covered all the expenses. Him living at the orchard had meant more money going to her.
Those were the reasons he’d used to convince Granddad and Gran to let him commute.
He’d never told them the real reason: he belonged at the orchard. It was the place that made him feel strong, the place that made him feel as if he belonged.
It was the place that had saved him and the girls when they were children. The thought of leaving it, even if it was just during the school semester, had left him cold.
“From the time the three of us came to the orchard, it’s the only place I wanted to be,” he said, not wanting to tell the same half-truths to Savannah.
“You didn’t always live there?”
He shook his head. “We lived with our parents in a small apartment in Kansas City until I was ten. Samson, my father, was a traveling salesman.” That was one lie he’d gotten good at telling and it slipped from his mouth before he could stop it. Collin blew out a breath. “Actually, my parents weren’t big on the family thing. They were always looking at how much easier it would be without kids. So we came here and they kept going.”
She reached for his hand, and her skin was cool against his. “I didn’t know that.”
“That my biological parents were deadbeats? It’s one of those secrets most of the people in town know but no one talks about. Mostly, I think they’ve forgotten that Granddad and Gran are technically our grandparents and not our parents.”
Collin laced his fingers with hers, content to watch the moon slide from behind the clouds to shine down on the dark lake. Savannah laid her head against his shoulder. She was the first person to whom he’d told that much about the past. He didn’t want to dig any deeper into it. Didn’t want to open the wounds of a terrified ten-year-old, so desperate for help that he’d called a stranger’s number from a ragged address book.
“Parents suck.”
“Some of them,” he said. Then there were the people like his grandparents, who’d gone above and beyond to be parents when no one else had wanted the job.
He didn’t care that Savannah wasn’t the right person for him, or that she would possibly leave at some point in the near future. He liked the feeling that he could be honest with her, and not because she didn’t have anyone to tell his secrets to, but because he trusted her to keep them. He didn’t understand a lot about Savannah, but he understood she wasn’t the type to kiss and tell. For a while longer, he just wanted to enjoy his time with her and maybe tack on a few more memories for the days after she left.
“Do you have plans tomorrow?”
She shook her head against his shoulder. “No. Why?”
“Since you’re no good at the milkmaid thing, but you’re interested in rural life, I thought I could show you around the orchard. Apples, peaches and pears just have to be picked. No milking machines involved.”
“It’s a date,” she said.
Collin placed a soft kiss against her forehead. “It’s a date,” he echoed.
* * *
“SO WHAT YOU’RE looking for is an apple that is firm but not hard, with good red color.”
Savannah reached above her head. She was standing on a ladder at the tree next to his and drew a branch down before snapping off a piece of fruit. “What about the gold flecks?” she asked as she dropped the apple in the bag hanging from her shoulder.
“We grow Honey Crisps here, so yellow and gold flecks are good.”
“I thought you ran an organic orchard. Aren’t these GMO?”
“You know about genetically modified crops?”
“I picked up a few things during high school, yes. So?”
“Honey Crisps are a hybrid, not a GMO, so they fit here. These are the apples the chain will want, but we have other fields of heritage apples. A few acres of Arkansas Blacks, Cortlands and Orange Pippins. Those were Granddad’s favorites.”
“What is your favorite?” she asked, putting a few more apples into her bag.
“For pure sweetness, the Orange Pippins are my favorites. You?”
“I don’t really know the difference. At the store, I usually pick up Honey Crisps, though.”
They continued picking, a job Collin usually farmed out to local high schoolers. They had already worked most of the weekend, though, and only a few trees were left for this week’s picking, so he’d sent them to the garden to pick berries.
It was nearly eleven and Savannah had been picking apples with him for more than an hour while the hot May sunshine pushed the temperature gauge up several degrees. Collin wiped his face with the hem of his T-shirt before pulling his ball cap from his back pocket.
He’d grabbed one of Amanda’s old caps from the porch when Savannah had pulled up, but she’d stepped from Mama Hazel’s sedan with a floppy gardener’s hat, making him laugh. The straw thing had looked unwieldy as hell when she was carrying it a
round the farmyard, and she’d had to hold it in place when they’d driven up here in the four-wheeler, but she hadn’t complained once about it since they’d started picking.
Collin reached for the last apple ready for the farmers’ market and then climbed down from his ladder. He reset it next to Savannah’s.
“I think this is it,” she said, putting one more apple in her shoulder bag.
On the ground, she dumped the bag into the bushel barrel. Collin inspected the tree from the ground.
“You do good work,” he said. “If you’ll work for eleven dollars an hour, you’re hired.”
Savannah stretched her arms over her head and swayed her body left to right. She flexed her hands. “I can’t feel my fingers and my back may never unstiffen, and I only earned twenty-two dollars? You need to rethink your pay scale.”
Collin shrugged. “On the plus side, you get to be outside in the sunshine instead of cooped up in a dark recording studio.”
“True. I’ve gotten more vitamin D in the last three weeks than I probably got in the past two years.” She brushed her hands down her pants, lifted the floppy hat from her head and hung it by its string over her shoulder. “Plus, I get to wear Mama Hazel’s gardening hat. It’s like a giant umbrella right over my head.”
“And the jeans, don’t forget the jeans.”
“Well, capris.” She glanced down at the denim pants that reached just past her knees. “I noticed the other day that you wear shorts a lot.”
“Ninety-plus temperatures and long jeans don’t mix well. Speaking of...you want to take a break under a shade tree? I think we’ve done all the picking we can over here.”
“What about the peaches and pears?”
“They need a couple more weeks yet, but I’ll take you over there later, if you’d like.”
She nodded. “I would like. Now, what about that break?”
“Gran made sandwiches and I have cold sodas in the cooler. Can I interest you in a picnic at the lake?”
“Sounds perfect.”
They climbed in the Gator and drove down the dirt track that led from the orchard grove to the beach. Being here didn’t mean another midday swim or sex. It was just lunch.
But the water looked awfully inviting.
Collin parked beneath an oak. Together they sat on the little tailgate of the recreational vehicle. Collin passed Savannah a wrapped ham sandwich and a cold bottle of soda.
“So what is the official title for an orchard owner? Orcharder? Orchardist?” she asked after a while.
Collin finished his sandwich and took a long drink. “Orchardist. Pomologist. Usually, I just go with farmer. It covers the basics, even if my fields are groves.”
“I’d go with one of the ‘ists.’ Sounds more professional. You could charge more for apples from a pomologist,” she said, and there was laughter in her voice.
“Unless someone called for a pulmonologist and I came running. Somehow I don’t think choosing an apple has the same educational background as diagnosing lung diseases.”
“What’s that saying? An apple a day keeps the doctor away?” Savannah finished her lunch and kicked her feet under the tailgate. She shot him a sideways glance. “And I’ll bet some doctors wear shorts under their white lab coats.”
“Shorts would be a prerequisite for me.”
She watched the sunlight play over the blue water for a long moment.
There was a light breeze near the shore that rippled through the oak trees and pushed the water against the shoreline. These were the kinds of summer days Collin liked best. The heat was nearly unbearable, but the breeze and the inviting water meant a respite was never far behind.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked after a while.
“Shoot.” He figured she had more questions about the orchard, but her question floored him.
“Was it hard to figure out where you belonged, once you were here, I mean?” Her hands rested against the tailgate and her knuckles were pale, as if she was gripping the underside of the metal tightly.
“I never gave it a lot of thought, actually,” he said. He’d been too relieved to have a place where social workers didn’t knock on the door at all hours and where the adults didn’t disappear for days on end.
The last thing he’d wanted was to go back to that dark apartment as the main caretaker for his younger sisters, so he’d set out to make himself indispensable to his grandparents. He’d followed Granddad around the groves asking questions, watched as he’d noted the yields, paid close attention when he’d pruned the branches that no longer bore fruit. And every night he’d thanked the God he very nearly didn’t believe in for bringing them there.
“We came at the end of a school year, so there was a lot to do. I liked being outside, and every boy loves climbing trees. We had our own lake, or that’s how it seemed to me.”
She nodded, and the movement was sharp. “Sounds like perfection.”
He considered that. Not always. Not when Mara stubbornly refused to help with their baby sister. Not when Amanda cut her two-year molars. Not when Samson and Maddie would randomly show up at the orchard, stay for a few months and then disappear again without as much as a goodbye hug. He told her as much, leaving out the part about his parents. No need to go down that road. He was over it.
“Your grandparents sound like saints.”
In his opinion they were more like saviors. “They loved us, and we loved them. That made the difference. What about you? I’ll bet Mama Hazel was just as hands-on when you came to the ranch.”
“Definitely. I wanted to stay with her forever before she said a word to me. There was such gentleness in those big brown eyes, and her hands were soft, and she smelled like sugar cookies.” Savannah closed her eyes as if experiencing the memory. “Bennett scared me at first, I’m not sure why. Probably his deep baritone. And Levi seemed like he’d been made for me to climb all over, which I’m sure he hated.”
She’d stopped talking, and Collin had a feeling there was more. He wondered if her transition to Slippery Rock had taken a more twisted turn than his own.
She’d been younger than him, but he didn’t know anything about her life prior to the ranch.
“You were seven when you came here, right?”
She nodded. “I was nine the first time Levi brought you home, and I knew from the second you walked in the door there would be no more wrestling around with him. Girls weren’t allowed into the boys’ club.”
That would have been the fall after the three of them had come to live at the orchard. He, Levi, James and the twins, Aiden and Adam, had bonded on the monkey bars during that first recess.
“So that’s why you never spoke to me before that night at the bar.” It made sense. He’d stolen her best friend, her brother, in a way.
Savannah shook her head. “You were the one who never spoke to me. Those blue eyes of yours never seemed to recognize when I was in the room.”
That wasn’t exactly true. He’d noticed the quiet girl with the light-colored skin and the big brown eyes and the riot of messy black curls. She’d grown into the hair and eyes, and her skin had darkened a little, but he still saw the little girl hanging behind the doorjamb from time to time.
“Well, I’ve noticed you now,” he said, and the words sounded huskier than he intended. He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger. It was soft, silky, and felt a little bit like a tiny piece of rope. “This is different.”
She twirled another strand around her finger. “I had it micro-braided once I got to LA. It’s a little edgy. I like edgy. Plus, I could never get the natural curls to do what I wanted when I wanted.”
“I like it,” he said.
Savannah’s gaze met his, and her eyes darkened. She swallowed. “We should maybe get out of this heat before we do something we’ll r
egret.”
He leaned a little closer to her, but she slid off the tailgate and ran toward the lake, stripping off her shirt and dropping her capris at the edge of the dock. She wore another bikini, this one navy, and she slipped into the water in a smooth dive.
Collin tossed his T-shirt in the bed of the Gator, threw his wallet on top of it and toed off his Nikes at the dock before slicing through the water.
It felt blessedly cool in the blue depths, and he stayed under until his lungs burned before kicking for the surface. He’d swum quite a distance from the dock, but saw Savannah farther out along the shaded shoreline.
He flipped over on his back, watching puffy white clouds skim across the bright blue sky. Jumping in the lake was the better idea, and he’d have to thank Savannah for that. They barely knew each other, had had all of two significant conversations. They couldn’t just jump into bed again.
Speaking of, the next time they did...he wanted a bed. A big bed with soft pillows and all the time in the world to explore her curvy body. He felt himself harden despite the cool water. Collin kicked his legs and started for shore, trying to push the image of Savannah naked on a big four-poster from his mind.
Collin forced his brain onto farm work rather than Savannah work, hoping to deflate the raging hard-on the cold water of the lake couldn’t.
He reached the dock and pulled himself up, watching her swim along the tree line. She’d turned back while he was floating and was nearly to the dock herself.
His mental calculations of organic pest control methods didn’t work. He still wanted her.
Savannah pulled herself up onto the dock and sat, dripping, beside him. She’d changed the belly button ring to a blue stone, and he wondered if she always matched her body jewelry to her clothing. She seemed like the kind of woman who would.
He’d never imagined he would be the kind of man who would like the kind of woman who did something like that. And yet here he was, sitting on a dock, wanting her.
Famous in a Small Town Page 15
