Defending Hearts

by Shannon Stacey

  He kept up a conversation with Cocoa the entire time he was cooking, too, which amused Gretchen. The dog was thrilled to be out in the yard while supper was prepared, instead of in her bed, and it was obvious she credited that to Alex by the way she gazed up at him in adoration. Occasionally she’d circle the grill, hoping he’d dropped something, or she’d do a circuit around the yard to see what was up, but mostly Cocoa sat and listened to Alex talk.

  Gretchen wondered what he was talking to her about, but she refused to sink so low as to try to sneak up on them to eavesdrop. Instead she left them to their conversation and pulled out the macaroni salad Gram had made earlier in the day.

  Everybody loved Gram’s macaroni salad, and she never made it while people were actually in the house, because she didn’t want anybody else to have the recipe. She’d made a big batch this time, so Gretchen was hoping there would be enough left over to save some for Jen and Kelly. Some of her happiest memories were the times they all gathered around Gram’s kitchen table with bowls of macaroni salad.

  When Alex began laying cheese over the burgers, Gretchen started pulling condiments out of the fridge and setting them in the center of the table. Mayo, ketchup, mustard. She couldn’t find the pickles, though, so she assumed they’d used them up and went to the pantry for a new jar.

  Alex walked through the door, juggling the platter of cheeseburgers, a plate piled with toasted buns, and the spatula, while Cocoa danced around his feet. “I don’t know what you put in the hamburger, but these smell amazing.”

  “I don’t even know. Gram just grabs a few jars out of the spice cabinet and mixes it up. I’ve never really paid attention to which jars.”

  “I might have to ask her. Where did she go?”

  “She had to make a phone call, but it’ll only take her a few minutes.”

  He set the burgers and buns on the table, then walked over to the sink to set down the spatula. Gretchen watched him as she gripped the top of the pickle jar. Then, as she met the resistance of the unbroken seal, she stopped. It was ridiculous. Downright stupid, even. She could open her own damn jars.

  The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Can you open this for me?”

  As soon as he turned, a questioning expression on his face, she wished she could take the question back. If she told him to never mind and popped the seal, he’d think she was an idiot. Instead she was forced to hold up the jar as he moved close to take it from her.

  He had nice hands, she thought as he gripped the jar. They were large, with long fingers that curled over the lid. As he began to twist, she let her gaze travel up his tan forearm to the well-toned biceps below his T-shirt sleeve. As she stared, the muscles flexed and she wished she had more condiment jars in need of opening.

  The loud pop of the seal made her jump, and Gretchen stifled an embarrassed chuckle.

  “Thanks,” she muttered, reaching for the jar. She was afraid if she said any more or raised her voice, she’d sound as breathless as she felt. He’d opened a pickle jar, for goodness’ sake. There was nothing sexual about that.

  But when her hand went to close around the glass and her fingers had to practically thread through his in order to take it, she felt a rush of heat through her body that couldn’t be described any other way but sexual.

  Was it her imagination or did his hand linger a few seconds longer than necessary?

  “I’m just in time,” Gram said from the doorway. “Those burgers look perfectly grilled, Alex.”

  He winked at Gretchen before turning away, and all she could do was stand there and hope Gram hadn’t seen it. Any of it.

  When they sat down to eat, Gretchen kept her eyes on the food. Maybe the wink was just a way of saying the you’re welcome to her thank you, without having to tell Gram she hadn’t been able to open the jar of pickles. Or maybe she hadn’t imagined his touch lingering, and he was flirting with her.

  What the hell had she been thinking? It was one thing to want a man to open her pickle jar, so to speak, but Alex couldn’t be that guy. She’d even explained that to Jen and Kelly. But somehow, when she was around him, she forgot there were logical reasons she should be opening her own damn pickle jar.

  “This macaroni salad is amazing,” Alex said, dragging Gretchen away from her thoughts.

  “It’s kind of famous around here,” Gram said, not even trying for modest.

  “I’m not surprised. I thought the burgers would be the star of the show because they’re delicious, but this macaroni salad is, without a doubt, the best I’ve ever had. What do you put in it?”

  “She won’t even tell me,” Gretchen said.

  “I don’t trust you not to tell Kelly or Jen. And they’ll tell somebody else—maybe even Cass, who’ll start making it at O’Rourke’s—and then everybody will have it.”

  “Gram likes when people make a big deal out of it at potluck dinners.” Gretchen smiled. “If we opened a café that served nothing but Cheryl Decker’s meatballs with a side of Gram’s macaroni salad, we’d probably be rich.”

  “I remember the meatballs from the Eagles Fest spaghetti dinner,” Alex said. “They were extremely good, but I think I’d go with Ida’s macaroni salad as the entrée, with a side of Cheryl’s meatballs.”

  Gram beamed, which made Gretchen want to roll her eyes. But she noticed he left a little more lettuce on his plate than usual, choosing seconds on the macaroni salad instead, which meant he wasn’t just blowing smoke. He must really like it a lot to go off his usual meal plan.

  When they’d cleaned up the kitchen, the last thing Gretchen wanted to do was go sit in the living room, where she’d spend the entire evening trying to avoid making eye contact with Alex because of the stupid pickle jar.

  “I’m going to go take a look at the pumpkins,” she told them. “Because I went into town today, I didn’t earlier, and I didn’t get out there yesterday, either.”

  “I’d like to see them,” Alex said.

  “What?”

  “The pumpkins. I’d like to see them.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because I’ve heard a lot about them, but I haven’t seen them. And I’ve seen pumpkins at little pumpkin patches for Halloween, but I’ve never seen a field of them growing before.”

  “You could take a picture,” Ida said. “I don’t know if I have any good pictures of the pumpkin patch for my photo album.”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  Gretchen looked back and forth between them, trying to come up with a single logical reason why she shouldn’t take Alex out to the field with her. But there was nothing, so she had no choice but to give in.

  So much for avoiding being with Alex for the rest of the evening.

  —

  By the time Alex went upstairs for his camera and met Gretchen outside, she was leaning against her truck with her arms crossed, giving off the impression she’d been waiting for him for hours.

  She was being especially prickly, which amused him because it meant she was trying to hide something, or at least deflect attention away from herself. And he’d bet anything it had to do with the jar.

  That moment had thrown him off, too. Something had changed in that split second, but where he was the kind of guy who wanted to explore it and see what it meant, Gretchen was trying to shut it down and pretend it never happened.

  He couldn’t do that. Whatever it was had definitely happened, even if he couldn’t quite figure out why it had affected him so much.

  So he’d opened a jar of pickles for the woman. So what? It wasn’t the first time Alex had opened a jar for a lady, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. But all he could think about was their fingers almost interlocked around the glass. The way that blue gaze had locked with his. The slight parting of her lips.

  “Are you ready?”

  She sounded as imp
atient as she looked, but he just smiled at her. “Yeah. We’re taking the truck? Don’t you usually take the ATV?”

  “I take the four-wheeler around the farm because it’s better on gas. But with two of us, we’ll just take the truck. Probably safer for that camera, too.”

  The camera had been through more hostile situations and terrain than she could possibly imagine, but he didn’t bother arguing. Riding behind her on the ATV, with her between his thighs—because he didn’t think for a second she’d let him drive—was probably more than he could handle at the moment.

  The road was bumpy and the truck didn’t exactly have a state-of-the-art suspension system, so Alex did very little talking and a lot of bracing himself as she drove out past the tree line to the field she’d turned into a pumpkin patch.

  To his eye, the field looked to be at least a couple of acres, if not three, and there were a lot of pumpkins. “You take care of this by yourself?”

  She put the truck in park and got out, so he followed suit. “They’re more work than I thought they’d be, but it’s manageable. The field’s well suited for them, which helps. You can see the rain barrels set around, and it took me forever to lay out the soaker hoses. If we have a dry spell, I have to water them, so it was worth the work. I haven’t really had an insect problem—knock on wood—so I’ve gotten the hang of it.”

  “When do you harvest them? You don’t do it all by hand, do you?”

  She laughed. “That’s how you harvest a pumpkin. A sharp knife, a strong back, and a wagon hooked to the tractor. And I usually start in September, as they become ripe.”

  “And they keep until Halloween?”

  “Mostly. The earliest ones, we don’t usually save that long. Gram has a seasoning recipe that makes the best roasted pumpkin seeds you’ll ever taste. And she starts the pie filling. Even though I have the field broken up in sections so I can keep up with going through and turning them so they don’t get a flat surface, some of them aren’t pretty enough to be Halloween pumpkins. Those Gram uses to can up her famous pumpkin pie filling, and the local stores sell the jars leading up to Thanksgiving.”

  Alex stopped walking, looking around him. “I’m impressed, Gretchen. Do you have any idea how amazing you are?”

  She stopped, too, turning to face him with color burning on her cheeks. “If you put seeds in good ground and tend them, stuff grows. That’s not amazing. It’s just farming.”

  “A lot of people would have given up, you know. Once the milking doesn’t pay enough and the cows are gone, the farms slowly slip into disrepair or get taken by the bank or the government. Or people go out and get nine-to-five jobs and it just becomes a house with more outbuildings than most.”

  “I’m not really qualified to do much out in the job market,” Gretchen said, turning slightly so she was looking out over the pumpkins instead of at him. “By the time I found a job and commuted to it and . . . I hate being inside. My paychecks wouldn’t have been big, anyway, so if I’m going to scrape out a living, I’d rather do it outside.”

  “It’s Ida, too,” he said. “With her knitting, and I guess the pumpkin pie filling, which I hadn’t heard about. The way you both just find a way to keep the farm going is pretty amazing, whether you want to accept that or not.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Our needs are pretty simple. Gramps didn’t leave us with a mortgage on the farm, so we mostly need to pay taxes, heat the house and put food on the table.”

  He was willing to bet the taxes weren’t cheap and neither was heating that house, but he let it go. She wasn’t going to admit she and her grandmother were special, no matter how hard he tried to convince her otherwise. “How did you decide on pumpkins?”

  “We grew a few near the garden every year for pies, and they did really well. I decided to try it and I’ve planted a little more of the field every year. This is it, though. This is all I can manage by myself. The rest of the fields we just hay off.”

  “What about corn? Don’t people love fresh corn?”

  “We were doing corn for a while, but you can’t go a mile around here without passing by somebody selling corn on the side of the road, and we’re too far off the beaten path to compete with the farm stands out on the main road. And even if I hired seasonal help, I don’t have the equipment to compete with the bigger outfits who supply the stores, so corn wasn’t making money. We still have some, of course, but it’s mainly just for us. The more food we grow, the less we have to buy.”

  He loved watching her as she talked. When it came to the farm, she was a fascinating blend of practicality and passion that he had to admit he found sexy as hell. Very conscious of the camera in his hand, he wanted nothing more than to capture that aspect of her personality on film, or the digital version of it, anyway.

  “I wish you’d let me photograph you.” She scowled, and he tried to head the inevitable rejection off at the pass. “At least let me take a few. Not for my work, but for you. For Ida, actually. I could take a picture of you with the truck. I bet your grandmother would get a kick out of having that framed and sitting next to the photo of your grandfather.”

  “I hate pictures,” she said, but he could tell his words had hit home. There wasn’t much she wouldn’t do for her grandmother.

  “It would be a perfect Christmas present. In the photo of your grandfather, you can see the barn and cows behind him. I could take one of you right now, with the pumpkins behind you and the truck. It’s not only side-by-side images of Ida’s husband and granddaughter, but it’s a history of this farm. It shows the resilience and how, even when things change, this place and the people you are remain the same.”

  When she looked out over the fields, pride shining in her expression, he knew he had her. “I think she’d like that.”

  —

  Gretchen assumed she’d walk over to the truck, say cheese and then they’d go. After ten minutes of moving the truck a little bit this way and facing it a little bit that way, she knew it wasn’t going to be so simple.

  “Photography lives or dies in the lighting,” he explained.

  “I’ve already run over two pumpkins,” she shot back. “It probably took my grandmother less than a minute to get that picture of Gramps and it’s a perfectly fine picture.”

  “Natural lighting in the evening is tricky.”

  She would have driven off and left him there to walk back, but now that he’d sold her on the picture, she knew he was right about it being a perfect present for Gram. She’d probably get all weepy with the happy tears and hug her, which was a good thing on Christmas morning.

  “Okay, that’s good,” Alex called, and Gretchen turned the truck off. She’d put up with this now because it would be worth it in December.

  After slamming the door for good measure, Gretchen leaned back against the cab and crossed her arms. “Cheese.”

  She didn’t hear a shutter sound, but after a second, Alex looked at the screen on the back of the camera and frowned. “You look like you want to strangle the person you’re looking at.”

  She smiled. A real one.

  “You’d be surprised how many hours I’ll invest in getting a perfect shot,” he said casually, fiddling with the camera. “Hours and hours.”

  She rolled her eyes and uncrossed her arms, letting them dangle at her side. That felt weird, so she put her hands on her hips. That was even more weird, so she let them dangle again. “I don’t know what to do with my arms.”

  “Most people don’t.” He finished whatever he was doing with the camera and looked up at her, smiling. “Let’s see. Don’t lean against the truck like that. It makes you slouchy, and your height and your posture are too beautiful for that.”

  Even though he probably meant that in a professional way and not as a personal compliment, his words melted away Gretchen’s annoyance with him. She stood up straight, but she still wasn’t sure what to do wi
th her arms. She crossed them again.

  “You’re killing me, Gretchen.”

  “Not yet, but I’m thinking about it,” she teased, which made him laugh.

  “Okay,” he said. “Pull the braid over your shoulder so we can see it, then slide your fingers into your front pockets and hook your thumb over the pockets themselves. Now lean back against the truck again, but only your butt and only enough to hold your weight. Everything from the waist up stays tall.”

  She followed his instructions while trying to stay relaxed. If she thought too much about what she was doing, it felt stupid, but she trusted him to know what he was doing. He’d certainly won enough awards for doing it.

  “That’s good. Now bend one leg a little—whichever one you want—but keep your spine off the truck.” He nodded and then lifted the camera. “No, don’t do that smile. Just relax your face. Good. Now I want you to think about this land. Imagine how proud your grandfather would be of what you’ve done and how you’ve taken care of things the way he raised you to do.”

  He would be proud, she knew. He was always proud of her and, though he wasn’t one for offering open affection, he never let her doubt for a second how proud he was of her. And he’d be proud she was doing right by Gram, too. This farm had been her home since she married Gramps at eighteen, and there was nothing Gretchen wouldn’t do to make sure she never had to leave it.

  “Got it.” Alex lowered the camera and smiled at her.

  “How do you know? You haven’t even looked at the screen yet.”

  “I just know. Plus, I’ve been taking pictures longer than cameras have had LCD screens, so I learned early to just go with my gut.”

  She took her hands out of her pockets as he moved toward her. He was fiddling with the camera as he walked, and when he got to the truck, he held it up so she could see the screen.

  For a few seconds, she had trouble grasping that it was actually her in the picture. Leaning against her truck, with pumpkins in the background, was a beautiful woman. She was relaxed, but pride in her surroundings still came through in the way she held herself. Her face was strong, but softened by a nostalgic glow and a warm smile.