“No, I’m not stupid. Especially not when she’s pregnant.” Jerome’s wife had been a lawyer before deciding to stay at home with their kids, and the only thing she loved more than her family was a good argument. Debates, she called them. Trey had only met her a couple of times and, if he was being generous to himself, their debates had been a draw. The only one Trey could even pretend he might have won was the one on education reform.
Jerome chuckled. “It’s agreed, then. You can park at my house. We’ll get dinner and take a bus to the stadium.”
Trey had been efficiently backed into a corner and rewarded for it, but he still couldn’t believe he was driving south for another weekend. Still, he’d have to make sure he stopped at the farm on his way and check on his tenant.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TWO WEEKS AFTER deciding to buy her land, Max was unloading bales of straw from her truck with her new intern when she saw what looked like Trey’s car come down the road. It was all she could do not to drop a bale on her foot when the sedan eased to a stop next to the farmhouse. She went back to her straw bale, still doubting it was Trey but not knowing who else it could be.
“Aren’t you going to see who it is?” Sean asked.
“If it’s who I think it is, he’ll come find me.”
Sean gave her a curious look, but didn’t press the matter. He’d only been working here a week, but that wasn’t the reason he allowed her privacy. Sean was a nut no squirrel could crack, and he offered Max the same opportunity to cling to her secrets. Sidney and Norma Jean—her third intern, an older woman who was thinking of starting a farm with her husband—generally chatted while working, but Sean had no use for small talk. Or any talk. Max knew he had big plans for his future in farming because she’d asked about them during the interview. But short of being required to share information to get a job, he wasn’t going to expose any part of himself.
She preferred his silences when they were comfortable, but he was a hard worker and had found his hustle by day three, so she didn’t begrudge him the uncomfortable silences, either. Farming didn’t require conversation skills and he’d not yet broken her rule about not being able to get along with an employee.
Max wiped moisture off her brow with a handkerchief from her pocket. The sky was overcast and the air was cool, but she’d worked up a sweat unloading hay bales.
Ashes announced the arrival of Trey, who was walking toward them. Half a Friday at work plus several hours in the car and Trey still looked like a men’s magazine cover model. Through his open coat she saw that his suit was a dark navy with a subtle pattern to it, though there was nothing subtle about the magenta check pattern on his shirt. Instead of looking fussy, he managed to look sleek. And as out of place on her farm as a banker coming to foreclose.
Knowing that he yelled at the television during basketball games and hid in the woods when he was upset, even as an adult, meant that she knew intimacies about him beyond the expensive clothes. Vulnerabilities that made the self-assured man striding toward her more impressive, because she knew the confidence had come through hard work and the composure through careful study.
Max greeted Trey and introduced him to Sean, who shook Trey’s hand before going back to his work as though both of them had disappeared from his consciousness.
“What are you down here for?” she asked Trey. She shoved her dirty hands into her pockets before she could give in to her desire to touch his arm. She shouldn’t feel this pull toward him, especially when they hadn’t shared anything more intimate than her spontaneous kiss of his cheek.
“A friend offered me Duke tickets.”
Clarification was unnecessary. A person would have to be living in a chasm not to know about the game. Or keep themselves purposefully ignorant. While getting gas this morning, she’d had to wait to pay until the customer in front of her and the clerk could finish their conversation about defensive strategy against the fast break. Both had been Duke fans, so at least she hadn’t had to wait for them to debate which team was better.
“Anyway, I thought I’d stop by to see how my—what was it you called this piece of dirt?—my ancestral landholding was doing.” His neck stretched a little when he lifted his head to look around. His strong jawline was slightly darkened with stubble from the day.
“Do you want another tour?”
“What?” He jerked his head back to her. “No, I thought I’d just look around.”
That’s what a tour would be. She bit her tongue.
“It doesn’t look much different than it did when I left.”
Max blinked several times at how easily he had wiped away her hard work. Then she looked around and tried to see it from his eyes. Everything she’d planted was in the greenhouse waiting for transplant. The fields visible from the driveway looked different to her than they had just two days ago, but that was because she’d started preparing them for planting. To her eyes, the soil looked eager.
“It’s not going to look like it did in the picture until summer.”
“Yeah,” he drawled with an embarrassed smile, “as a country boy, you’d think I’d know that.”
Maybe that was what was bothering him—he’d been removed from this land for years, maybe since he was a teenager, and suddenly it was his. Trey didn’t strike her as the kind of person willing to be ignorant of anything he had a hand in—even if he was trying to take his hand out.
“The offer of a tour is still available.”
“No, I should get going. I need to find a place to stay.”
“You’re not staying with Kelly?”
“Kelly has a one-bedroom apartment.” He shook his head. “No, I’ll get a hotel room.”
“You could stay here.” Max gulped, but the words were said and couldn’t be unsaid. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, trying to get a read on how he took her invitation. Given that weeks ago when she’d been working up the courage to kiss him he’d walked off her front porch and driven away, he wouldn’t take her words as anything more than an invitation to sleep in the guest bed. Which was how she’d meant it. But now...her fingers twitched inside her pockets.
She shrugged and tried to fake nonchalance. “It may be too far a drive from the farm to Chapel Hill, but I’ve got a spare bedroom. It used to be your room, in fact.”
Again she wished she could take back the words and replace them with something else—in this case a more explicit invitation, good sense be damned. Just because she’d gone back to the dark ages in farming technology didn’t mean she couldn’t be a modern woman and just come out and put the moves on a man she was attracted to. Hey, Trey, last time you were here, I didn’t invite you up to my bed like I wanted to and I’d like to correct that mistake.
Maybe she should say something less direct. “It’s still the same bed and mattress, but there are new sheets and I’m calling it a guest room.”
God help her, she was a coward.
Trey’s phone rang, saving her the embarrassment of having him turn down her offer. He seemed like a polite man; he probably wouldn’t have pointed out that the hotel room would offer him a more enticing bed than a fifteen-year-old full-size mattress with new sheets. Maybe she should have pointed out that she bought new pillows.
He was sighing heavily as he put his phone back into his pocket, but his eyes were bright and interested. “How would you like to see some hustle tonight?”
“What?”
The side of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. “Jerome has a stomach bug that’s apparently sweeping across his campus. I now have tickets to the hottest game in town and no one to go with.”
Huh. “Wouldn’t Kelly want to go?”
“Kelly’s an NC State fan. He’d root for the court to develop a crater and for all the Duke and Carolina players to fall in. At least you’re a mostly neutral party.”
Max knew pretty much every native North Carolinian had an allegiance to one of the big basketball schools. Even the ones who didn’t care about basketball came from a “Duke family” or a “Carolina family.” She’d thought Kelly didn’t care about basketball and Max hadn’t been interested enough to ask, though she knew Hank had been a State fan.
“Can I wear my Illinois T-shirt?”
Trey’s responding laugh was incredibly satisfying, relaxing his entire body as if the pressure of being back on the family farm had been lifted from his shoulders.
“I was just going to buy you dinner,” he said through his smile, “but we’ll stop somewhere along the way and buy you a Carolina shirt, too.”
* * *
THE SKY-BLUE Carolina T-shirt looked terrible with Max’s orange hair. If Trey was going to be poetic, he’d say it was like the sun in a summer sky. If he was being honest, he’d say it looked like a child threw blue paint on a canvas and then spilled the orange paint on top. As absurd a color clash as she was, the enjoyment he felt sitting next to her in the stadium was more ridiculous. When he’d handed her the shirt, she’d promised to be the loudest, proudest Carolina fan in the stands. And her follow-through was amazing; she was putting the college kids to shame.
Every time she jumped to her feet to cheer, he had a moment of panic that her nachos or drink would spill onto his lap. The one time he mentioned his fear to her she followed an elbow to his side with “Watch the game. Let me worry about my snacks.” But she held his gaze for longer than necessary before she turned her attention back to the game, leaving him to wonder if she also thought the energy in the stadium was more than just about the excited crowd.
He tried to be attentive to the action on court. The problem was that watching boys barely out of high school run held no competition to the color explosion bouncing up and down next to him. If Carolina was lucky, they’d score layups over the Duke defense. If Trey was lucky, Max would turn to him, a smile on her face. Those eyes were just as stunning when she was clapping her hands in the midst of the heat of the stadium as when she’d been defying him to question her presence on the farm in the chill of a sunny winter’s day. A couple times she stood up to cheer and her breasts bounced right at eye level.
What the hell am I doing here?
Imagining those eyes fixed on his while she straddled him, her breasts bouncing in his hands, was enough to make him wish he could dump her cold drink on his lap.
What the hell am I doing here, thinking that? Nothing but complication lay down that road. He was going to sell her the farm and be done with anyone and anything south of Richmond. D.C. was full of attractive women. He’d concentrate on thinking lustful thoughts about them. On Monday.
The students sitting next to him pitched forward, their fists in the air as they leaped to their feet and the Dean Dome erupted with jeers. A foul had been called on Carolina.
Small scuffles erupted on the court as players jostled one another a little too roughly. Beside him, Max whistled and booed, stamped and clapped. All he could think about was when she was going to brush up against him again.
The game was close. This was the last year playing college ball for some of the star players on the court and they seemed determined to make this last home game against Duke a game to remember. Trey’s coworkers, no matter which college basketball team they rooted for, would ask how the game was. And Trey’s response would be “Fine,” while thinking, The woman next to me was amazing!
He had to look at one of the big-screen TVs to see why the crowd leaped to its feet this time and why Max held her hands over her head, the cotton of her T-shirt catching on the underside of her breasts and peaking at her nipples. Fortunately, they ran the replay twice. A Carolina player had attempted a high pass, which was blocked by a Duke player and went in for a Carolina basket. The euphoria following such an unexpected play carried through a steal for another Carolina basket. Chapel Hill’s downtown would be packed with drunken students. He was glad not to be in his twenties and to be heading back to the peace of Max’s farmhouse instead of to the post-game drunken celebration on Franklin Street.
Trey couldn’t wait for the last five minutes of the game to finish.
When the game was finally over and he was singing the alma mater while walking down the stairs behind Max, Trey considered how the evening would end. He knew how he wanted it to end. Despite her rapt attention on the game, he was pretty sure how Max wanted the night to end. And not because she’d invited him to sleep at the farmhouse tonight. He had tried but been unable to forget how the color of her eyes had changed as she’d stared at him as he stood on the barn porch.
Or maybe he was making shit up so there would be a pleasant aspect to sleeping in the farmhouse tonight.
They crammed on a bus with what felt like a million other people, everyone hyped about the win over Duke. What space wasn’t taken up by bodies was taken up by excitement, tinged with anticipation. For the thousands streaming toward Franklin Street, the night was just beginning. Durham, eight miles down the road and home to Duke University, would be silent.
Trey remembered how much fun wins over Duke had been and how eager he’d been to be a part of the jostling crowd. One morning after a game, his mama had called him at 5:00 a.m., pulling him into a hangover he’d been trying to sleep through, to yell at him for jumping over a bonfire. She’d seen him on the nightly news. He’d been young and certain of the righteousness of his desire to get the hell out of Carolina, confident he’d never come back.
The bus bounced over a pothole and Max bounced into him. He wrapped his arm around her waist to steady her and lowered his face to her knit hat. His raised arm keeping him steady on the bus was falling asleep and with the heat of the masses and his winter coat he was roasting, but the feel of Max held tightly against him was worth the burn.
The car ride home gave him plenty of time to think about the significance of wanting Max. On one level, his desire was easy to explain away. While her skin was too freckled, her hair was too orange and her eyes were too pale to be called pretty, she was mesmerizing, like some kind of fierce farmland sprite. She was fun to hang out with and he respected her work ethic. He’d be a lonely fool for the rest of his life to want anything more in a woman.
But the wanting was ill conceived. She wasn’t some woman he was picking up in a bar and taking home for mutual pleasure. She was living in the farmhouse and farming land he owned. Whether they wanted it to or not, their relationship would last long past the orgasms. She might have expectations of him. Hell, he liked her enough personally to have expectations of himself.
If they were going to have sex, it was going to be complicated sex.
He downshifted to a stop, looking both ways for cars and deer. He should really do the right thing and go up to the guest room and toss and turn on the ancient mattress with new sheets. Max’s mattress was probably no better, even if it did have Max on it.
They parked beside the farmhouse and he waited with Max while she let Ashes out into the yard. The dog came back in, went up to Max for a pat on the head and returned to his bed in the living room next to one of the baseboard heaters. When Max looked at him, eyes warm and wanting, he knew he would make the wrong decision. If she asked, if she even stepped forward with her hand out in invitation, he would end up in her bed instead of his own.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MAX HEARD ASHES huff as he collapsed in a heap on his bed. Now or never, Maxine. Tomorrow Trey would get in his car and drive back to D.C. She had let her cowardice get the better of her once and he’d walked away. If she wanted to wake up in the morning, look at a handsome man in her bed and think, Look who I did, she had to make more of a move than she’d made before.
She wasn’t asking him for forever.
When he turned to face her, good-night forming on his lips, she took a step forward, reaching for him. This time, instead of
turning away from her, he took a step toward her, too, his arm out and mirroring hers. Neither of them said a word. He lowered his lips to hers and the decision was made.
His skin was warm in the chill of the farmhouse. Despite the hard planes of his face and the scratch of his stubble, his lips were soft. His grip was firm on her waist, his fingers digging into the muscles of her belly, though the pressure was pleasurable.
He pulled back a couple inches and she leaned into him. Right now, she wanted to follow him wherever he would take her. He put his fingers to her lips before she pressed them against his for another kiss. “I want you.” He paused. “Wanting you doesn’t change that I will sell this farm and never return to North Carolina again.”
She pushed his fingers away from her face with one hand and dug the other into the hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him back down to her. “I know. That’s one of the things I like so much about you,” she said, kissing him. He opened his mouth again—maybe to say something, maybe not—and Max ran her tongue around the edges of his teeth.
Together, they stumbled through the living room to her bedroom, barely missing Ashes and banging into one of the doorjambs along the way. Walking while kissing and trying to fumble with the buttons on Trey’s shirt was going to get one of them hurt, but she didn’t care. Especially when she got access to his undershirt and, with one yank, had his shirts off and full access to the hot ridges of his stomach.
The backs of his knees hit the bed and he fell backward, with her on top and a loud “oof” escaping his lips. “I should complete the Tar Heel fan fantasy and leave your shirt on,” Trey said while pulling her T-shirt up and over her head. “But I’ve been wondering about a certain line of freckles since you stood in the kitchen wearing that low-cut top.”
Once her shirt was off, he rolled her over onto her back so that he was on top. A rush of cold air blasted her chest—bare except for her bra. She wanted this. She wanted him. Her bedside lamp flickered on and she blinked into the sudden brightness. Trey kissed a freckle in the indentation at the base of her neck. She tensed with anticipation. “If I don’t follow that path of freckles,” he said as he kissed his way down her sternum to the line of her bra, “I think I’ll be lost forever.”
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