InnocenceForSale.com/Amy (Innocence For Sale Book 1)

by Ada Scott

  “No. I won’t do that.”

  “Then I’m leaving. Goodbye.” She grabbed the handle to her suitcase and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going to be? I need to see you tomorrow.”

  “None of your business. You’ve got my number. If you want my body again before my flight, you can send me a message and tell me I have to come to work.” Her suitcase rattled on the ground behind her as she walked out the door and headed for the elevator.

  “Please tell me you’ll talk with me tomorrow. This is something real between us, Amy,” I called.

  She slumped and I could see her face screw up as if something was trying to burst out of her mouth, but she didn’t say anything. She stepped into the elevator and the doors slid shut behind her.

  I retreated to my room, laid myself down on my bed and, for the first time in my life, I cried over a girl.

  If I thought I had bad sleep when I was trying to avoid Amy, that was nothing compared to how it felt when I thought I might never see her again. There was no response from her all night, and when I woke up with the sunrise after maybe an hour of nightmares, there was still no text from her.

  I paced the penthouse for a while, sending messages and checking my phone the whole time. She’d worked her way into my heart without even trying, she simply belonged there. I never knew she existed before this week, and now the thought of never seeing her again was unbearable.

  Around mid-morning, I had a flash of inspiration and went to my computer. I opened up all the major crowd-funding websites on different windows and searched through all of them. There couldn’t be that many people trying to save a farm this way.

  It didn’t take long to find her listing. It was put up by “Amy E,” the story matched what she’d told me, and it had a single donation of fifty bucks helping it on its way to the goal of three hundred thousand. Also included was a gallery of images showing the farm, wheat fields with some foothills in the background, a farmhouse, a tractor going through some other field. This was Amy’s home.

  I donated three hundred thousand dollars to the cause. Now no quirk of IFS terms and conditions could take her home away, yet I couldn’t bring myself to command her back here. I needed her on her own free will.

  She still wouldn’t respond to any messages or answer her phone. After lunch, I went to the airport, several hours ahead of when I would have dropped her off today had things not gone to shit so spectacularly last night.

  I paced back and forth in front of the huge check-in area until I could barely stand anymore, fooled every few minutes by a flash of blonde hair that never turned out to be Amy. Then I saw a woman walking towards the gate that said “Passengers Only Beyond This Point.” It was her, she’d checked in already and I’d somehow missed her in the line. I ran to catch up to her.

  “Amy!”

  She spun around and my heart lifted when I saw the recognition in her eyes. There was no hate and anger there, but those windows into her soul quickly clouded over with sadness.

  “Please don’t go, Amy.”

  “I have to,” she said. “Time’s up.”

  “Fuck that. I’m so sorry for last night, for the bet, for everything. I wouldn’t have done any of it if I had known you. But then, I wouldn’t have met you in the first place. It was a fucked up way to meet, but don’t let-”

  She reached up and touched me on the cheek, tears welling up in her eyes. “I forgive you.”

  “Then…?”

  Amy shook her head. “I have to go. I’m sorry. I was… foolish to open my heart up this week.”

  “But Amy… I love you.”

  “I love you too. But I can’t be with you, not when I’m the girl you bought.”

  “You’re more than that. You always were.”

  “Goodbye, Kris,” she said, barely-contained sobs making her voice waver.

  “Stay with me.”

  “I can’t.”

  She rose up on the tips of her toes and gave me one last sweet, lingering kiss on the lips. I felt the tears on her cheek.

  “Goodbye,” she repeated, and walked out of my life.

  Amy

  August 2017

  I resettled the last new plant into its own pot and gave it a splash of water. When I returned from New Eastport, and after the celebration of our “miraculous” deliverance from the jaws of the bank, I set myself to work on my aloe vera inheritance.

  It was a welcome distraction. I needed a lot of time to myself to think, and the aloe vera was nice and quiet. It never interrupted my train of thought.

  We were out of the woods as far as our mortgage was concerned. We even had a bunch of money left over that my mom didn’t know about yet. If I could make a business out of my plants and my story, the way Kris said I could, then my family would have a business that would provide for us for years to come too.

  So I set about quantifying exactly how much aloe vera I had and reorganizing the haphazard shelving so it could grow and be stored as efficiently as possible. The toughest bit of understanding the state of my hopeful business was trying to figure out how fast the plants grew and how many new plants they generated in a given period of time.

  I’d need to know that if I was going to have any idea how much I could sell. If I sold too little, I was missing out on sales. If I sold a little more, my total supply of plants would never increase. If I sold even more, then I’d be shrinking the size of my “plant factory.” It was important to get this right.

  In the corner of the greenhouse, my Bluetooth speaker played some music and I bobbed my head to the beat while squatting down to wash the potting mix off my hands using a hose. At the edge of my hearing, I swore I could hear a happy jingle like an ice cream truck playing under the sound of my music.

  I tilted my head to try to hear it better as I turned off the squeaky tap that fed the hose. Drying my hands on my shirt, I pulled out my phone to pause the music coming from the speaker.

  There was definitely ice-cream-truck music playing, but that was crazy talk. There was little point any trucks traversing our street, everybody lived too far apart here. Kids had miles of their own backyards to play in, they didn’t gather on the streets. It made even less sense to come up each and every long driveway.

  I popped my phone back into my pocket and picked up a rag to use to finish drying my hands as I stepped outside the greenhouse. Sure enough, there was a white truck with colorful writing on the side coming towards the farmhouse, kicking up a faint plume of dust behind it.

  With a raised eyebrow, I wiped my hands on the rag and watched the truck pull up in front of the house. From this angle, I could read the writing on the side. In big swirly letters, it said “Creampie King.”

  The engine and music switched off and the driver exited on the opposite side. I heard a door sliding open on the truck, then shutting and he came out from behind his vehicle carrying some kind of small package.

  I dropped my rag and held my hands to my mouth in shock when I realized it was Kris. Whether he caught the movement out of the corner of his eye or heard me gasp, his head turned in my direction. Our eyes locked.

  He dropped whatever he was carrying and came closer… no, I was running towards him without even thinking about it. I only pulled my hands away from my face a split second before I leapt into the air and into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist and my own arms around his neck.

  I pulled my head back and kissed him on the lips, then buried my face against his neck, crying with happiness. He held me tight and rocked from side to side a little before eventually letting me slide to the ground again but never letting go.

  “Kris… is this real?” I asked, looking up at him.

  “I think so,” he replied.

  “How did you find me? Did Ada tell you?”

  “Ada? No, she wouldn’t say a thing. It’s a long story. I guess… I hope… did you want to be found?”

  I nodded, then wiped my eyes on his shirt. “I’m sorry! I… I was just so… ov
erwhelmed. That night that Daniel almost… well… it was too much all at once. It took me weeks to wrap my head around everything, and then… I was too embarrassed to try to contact you. I thought you’d move on pretty easily.”

  “How could any sane man move on from you? I love you, Amy.”

  I smiled at him and, through the blur of my tears, saw the way he basked in it. “I love you too.”

  He kissed me again, his hands moving down past my hips to my legs, then back up again before wrapping around my back. I sighed when our lips parted and let him take some of my weight for a moment before getting my feet under me once more.

  “What on Earth is this truck all about?” I read the logo on his shirt. “Creampie King?”

  “Everybody I know thinks I’ve lost my mind. Who goes from tech startups to the dessert industry, right?”

  “I was thinking, how many billionaire ice cream truck drivers are there?”

  “Only one, but it was simply a means to an end. Finding you.”

  I offered him a confused smile. “What?”

  “Well, you weren’t on social media, the number I had for you turned out to be for a phone that belonged to Ada and she was no help, but I did have the pictures of your farm from the crowd-funding page. I knew you were somewhere in the corn-belt. So I started asking around, seeing if anybody recognized the area. All wheat fields look the same but those hills in the distance finally lit a candle in somebody’s mind.” Kris pointed at the Black Hills Range.

  “But you can see those hills for…” I shrugged. “A long way.”

  “Yep. I needed an excuse to go door to door until I found you.”

  “That could have taken forever.”

  “Well, it only took a couple months. I would have kept on going as long as it took to find you, to ask you to give us another chance,” he said.

  “Aw.”

  “And, well, you remember you said I wouldn’t be able to make a business out of creampies?” He gestured grandly at his truck. “You’re looking at the fastest growing creampie business in the country. Believe me when I say, I’ve given a creampie to every man, woman and child in a fifty mile radius. For free.”

  Educated as I had been from my experience with InnocenceForSale.com, I was caught off-guard by laughter that would have been strong enough to make me cry if I hadn’t already been doing so. My stomach hurt with it.

  “And even a goat or two,” he continued.

  It was too much for me, I had to hold on to him to stay upright.

  I wiped my eyes, the laughter trailing off into fits and starts. “That can’t be a profitable way to run the business.”

  “It’s not as bad as you might think. I include information for people to buy more off the website, and those orders are fulfilled from a distribution center. It runs at a mild profit now.”

  I shook my head. “It’s no Annoying Creampie Jamming, but you just can’t set a foot wrong in business, can you?”

  “I set some feet wrong in other areas of my life though. I saw you refunded the money from your crowd-funding campaign. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “It wasn’t about the money, it never was, Kris. The farm was already saved. I didn’t want money because you were feeling guilty. It didn’t feel right. I had more than enough money left to…”

  “To what? What have you been doing with yourself?” he asked.

  “You inspired me.”

  It was his turn to look confused. “Inspired how?”

  “To think big. Come have a look.”

  I grabbed his hand and led him in the direction of the greenhouse. Opening the door, I stepped in first and took him to the bench to spread out my drawings.

  “What’s this?”

  “These are some ideas for packaging, for my aloe-vera-infused cosmetics line. Moisturizers, lip-stick, lip balms, all that kind of thing.”

  Kris flattened the papers one by one to look at them better, a little smile playing on his lips. “This is brilliant. You’ll get all the benefits of your almost-free supply and your story, and the margins in this industry can be crazy. That’s way better than pot plants at the farmers’ market.”

  “I thought so too! I’m working with a co-packer to get the recipes finalized so I’ll know how much aloe vera translates to how much of each kind of product. There’s so much to do.”

  “This is really impressive, Amy. You’re full of surprises.”

  “You’re kind of surprising yourself.”

  “So, I was wondering…” he began.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we put all the shit behind us? You never were just ‘the girl that I bought,’ but now you’re really not. You want to go on a date with me? You know, just two equals, two small business owners with high hopes and more than a passing attraction for one another?”

  “Yes! Of course!” I hugged him and inhaled the kind of cologne that probably no ice cream truck driver could afford. He hugged me back. “When?” I asked.

  “Tonight. I’ll need to get changed and offload the last of my creampies for the day. You know anybody in the area who would want a creampie?”

  I smiled, holding back the chuckles. “Hmm, let me think. Well, there’s Agnes Smith. She lives two farms down that way. She’s in her seventies and I bet she hasn’t had a good creampie in decades.”

  “OK, consider it done.”

  I cringed a little. “But my mom might be there too.”

  “Ooh, that’s awkward.”

  Kris

  The last thing I wanted to do was leave Amy again after spending so much time finding her in the first place. However, with the knowledge that I was going to see her again in only a couple hours, I managed it.

  She wanted time to figure out how best to explain “us” to her mom. When I delivered my last creampies of the day to this hilarious older lady named Agnes and saw Amy’s mom there, I poured on the charm but didn’t mention anything specific.

  There was barely enough time to do everything I needed to do. I had to get back to Brenton, where I’d been living out of a hotel while going door to door in this part of the world and filling up my truck from a local distribution hub, and all the way back for a start. Plus, I had to rent a car since the only vehicle of my own out here was my truck.

  Every door I’d knocked on in the last month or two was heart-attack-material. Always wondering if the next face I saw would be Amy’s, wondering what her reaction would be if it was Amy.

  When I finally did see her, it felt like my heart had been replaced by a bass drum that shook my body for a single beat. She was standing over by a greenhouse, hands covering her mouth in shock, such a sight for sore eyes that I forgot I was even carrying anything and dropped my samples and paperwork on the ground.

  Then she ran to me. Once more, I had her in my arms, I felt her lips on mine and that perfect little body pressing against me. I could have held on to her forever.

  It was strange to see her in this setting, this place she called home. I was so used to seeing her in expensive dresses, jewelry, her image perfectly manicured in the city lights, but it was still undeniably her under the dirty shirt and the ripped jeans, hair tied up to keep it out of the way.

  Instead of flour on the tip of her nose she had potting mix, and I could have kissed it. If anything, she was even more beautiful now than I’d ever seen her.

  If there was any question about how much of herself she’d shown me during our week together in New Eastport, it was answered when I knocked on her door that evening. She opened up and I saw that she had her heir tied in pigtails. Not high on her head like that unforgettable day in my penthouse, but long and flowing Pocahontas-style.

  She knew what she was doing. If that wasn’t a mischievous sparkle in her eye, then there was no such thing. Amy grabbed my hands with a smile that could melt an ice berg and sighed happily.

  “You’re here. Come in and say hi to my mom?”

  “Sure, of course.”

  Amy pulled me in and led me to the
living room. I saw the marks on the door frames Amy had told me about, I saw the way paths had been worn into the bare wood floors by years of her family’s feet walking over it.

  I’d never been in a house quite like it, certainly nothing I’d ever lived in felt like this. Even after only a few seconds I could see why she’d do anything to save it. This place was something special.

  Her mom was sitting in the living room in her wheelchair, just as I’d seen over at her friend Agnes’ house earlier. Her face lit up in recognition, another worry seemingly quelled. I had wondered if she would take issue with the large age gap between Amy and me, but apparently not.

  “Kris, this is my mom. Mom… Kris,” she said.

  “Hello Miss…?”

  “Mrs. Evans… call me Ellie.”

  “Well, nice to see you again, Ellie,” I said.

  Mrs. Evans’ eyes dipped down to see Amy and I holding hands, and she almost visibly burst with a clucky kind of happiness. She clasped her own hands together in front of her.

  “Ooohhhh! Agnes is going to be so jealous when I tell her my Amy is dating the creampie man!”

  I may have looked like I was smiling politely, but if anybody paid me a closer inspection, they would have seen the way my jaw muscles were clenching my teeth together against the roar of laughter that was threatening to burst out. Amy covered her face with her free hand and shook her head.

  “Mooooommm… don’t call him that!”

  Mrs. Evans held one hand to her chest and gasped a little. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I meant the Creampie King!”

  It hurt. I wondered if I might crack a tooth from clenching so hard. Amy was holding her fist against her mouth, with little puffs of laughter snorting out.

  “Amy, stop making such strange sounds in front of your friend, it’s not ladylike.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. Um. We’re just gonna get going now.”

  “OK! Have fun! I’ll see you out.”

  She rolled herself out to the porch behind us as I opened the passenger door for Amy. Maybe she’d been expecting me to show up in my truck instead of a high-end Mercedes.