Secret Hearts

by Radclyffe

  “Think she’s coming back?”

  “Yes,” Jordan said with more certainty than she felt. “Kip doesn’t strike me as a quitter, and nothing that we talked about was really all that terrible. Embarrassing, I guess—”

  Ty snorted. “I imagine anything you get arrested for is embarrassing, unless you’re some kind of real career criminal or sociopath or just an idiot.” Tya pulled a water bottle from the pocket of her coveralls and sipped. “She doesn’t strike me as any of those things. She doesn’t look like she belongs here or anywhere else serving any kind of sentence. Something’s really weird, don’t you think?”

  “I can’t say I’m an expert on people who break the law, but you’re right, something feels terribly off.”

  “Just be careful, will you?”

  “Course. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Tya gave her a look, shook her head, and went back to snipping the young lettuce shoots, placing them into plastic containers to weigh and price before the afternoon delivery to their restaurant clients. Jordan reached for another flat and moved it down a few feet, squatted on aching thighs, and dug another hole in the soil. There wasn’t anything to worry about, other than her peace of mind, and she could handle that.

  The creak of the gate brought her upright and spinning around a minute later. Kip came through, her face pale and her hair disheveled, as if she’d been running. Jordan forced herself to stay still, even though every other part of her wanted to hurry over to greet her.

  “Sorry, I lost track of time,” Kip said.

  “There’s no problem. Like I said, you’re not on the clock.”

  “Not exactly true, but I appreciate the latitude. I got…caught up.”

  Jordan wanted to know in what, but kept from asking. Not her business. That was going to have to become her mantra. Not her business where Kip went or who she went with or what she did when she got there. Not her business if Kip looked upset, or if she was the cause of Kip’s unhappiness. If she was, she hadn’t a clue how to make things right. She couldn’t very well undo Kip’s sentence or pretend she didn’t know. She didn’t even know how to comfort her, as if Kip had asked, which she hadn’t. And now she was getting close to making herself crazy. “We’ve got a few hours of daylight left. How do you feel about planting?”

  “About the same as I feel about bungee jumping. Looks interesting from a distance.” Kip grinned weakly. “Just give me the step-by-step, and I’ll give it a go.”

  Jordan laughed. “I think you’ll find this substantially easier, and safer, than extreme sports. The most important thing is to be gentle with the roots. They’re very fragile, and until they get established in their new location, the seedling is essentially starving. All the nutrients come up from the soil, of course.”

  “Okay. Don’t squeeze the root ball. Got it.”

  “Don’t squeeze, don’t shake the dirt off, don’t crush them when you put it in the hole.”

  Kip regarded the ten-inch-high plants skeptically. “Maybe there’s something else I could do. I don’t want to be the cause of many little seedling deaths.”

  “Trust me, I’ll keep an eye on you. The first few times.”

  “All right, if you say so.”

  Smiling, relieved to have Kip back, Jordan pointed to the garden shed. “Why don’t you go around to the other side of the bed, and we’ll work down the line together. There’re gloves in the shed and a trowel in there too.”

  “Be right back.”

  Heart tripping, Jordan watched her go. The heavy sense of unease lifted, and she would absolutely swear the day was brighter. That couldn’t possibly be true. She ought to be nervous, on guard, suspicious of the way she felt, but she couldn’t pretend she didn’t like the excitement of having Kip near. She very much did. When Kip emerged, gloves in one hand and trowel in the other, and saw her watching, she grinned. Getting caught looking was becoming a habit, but Jordan didn’t mind. Kip didn’t seem to either, and her self-satisfied smile said so. Just seeing the return of Kip’s smile chased away the last of Jordan’s tension and worry.

  Kip settled across from her, resting back on her heels, her muscled forearms surprisingly pale. Whatever she did as a mechanic, she did inside. Jordan’s hands, in contrast, were several shades darker, already tanned after just a few weeks of early spring sunlight. “Ready?”

  “Always.”

  Jordan didn’t look up, pretending she didn’t hear the slight husky note in Kip’s voice. “Okay, first, before you take the seedling out, make a hole in the topsoil about this wide and this deep.” She demonstrated. “Drop in a handful of the fertilizer pellets, a little layer of peat moss, and then lift the seedling from the pot by tilting it at about thirty degrees and squeezing until the root ball pops free.”

  “I’m not sure about the squeezing part. I can hear the little root thingies screaming,” Kip said as she tried it the first time.

  Jordan chuckled. “All right, I might’ve exaggerated their fragility just a little. These are hardy specimens from a very good nursery. They’ll be fine.”

  Kip’s jaw was set as she carefully deposited the seedling into the hole she made. “Now what?”

  “Use both hands to kind of flatten and press the soil down around the root ball. You want to get rid of air pockets where water can collect and either drown the roots or prevent them from reaching the soil where the nutrients are.”

  “Okay. I’ve got it.”

  “Good. That’s all there is to it. Now you’ll be able to handle anything. In a few weeks we’ll teach you how to weed.”

  Kip shot her a look. “I think I’m gonna be very busy constructing a greenhouse by then.”

  “I can’t believe you’re running from the garden chores,” Jordan teased. “Where exactly is your green thumb?”

  “I don’t have one. My mother was the gardener.”

  Jordan caught the past tense as well as the flat tone of Kip’s voice. She wondered, but she’d already pressed Kip for enough personal information in one day. “Well, you’re catching on just fine.”

  She kept an eye on Kip as they worked their way down the long, four-foot-wide raised garden bed. Kip was careful, but not tentative, and confident the way she appeared to be about most everything. They finished the row and started another.

  “How many tomatoes do you expect?” Kip asked.

  “If these produce the way I expect, and we don’t have problems with the weather or pests, several dozen from each plant.”

  “Wow.” Kip turned, looking down the row. “That’s a hell of a lot of tomatoes.”

  “Tomatoes are one of the biggest sellers. The season is so short, especially in the Northeast. Plus, the fruit is central to all kinds of seasonal dishes. Restaurants and wholesalers are clamoring for more than we can provide most of the time.”

  “So tell me about the tomato you wanted to make.”

  Jordan frowned. “Sorry?”

  “The heirloom thing—the hybrid. What were you going for?”

  “Oh.” Jordan laughed, self-conscious. “Well, I wanted an oversized fruit, like a beefsteak, but one that was a little more on the juicy side as opposed to the meaty side like most beefsteaks. Some of the heirloom varieties have incredible flavor and delicate meat, but they tend to be smaller and not as robust. I had several crosses I was planning to work on.”

  “So what happened?”

  Jordan hesitated. Where to start. Places she didn’t want to go. Maybe another day she would’ve changed the subject like she so often did when her past came up, but she’d asked Kip to bare a difficult secret and she had. She hadn’t wanted to, and even though the circumstances weren’t the same, Kip had been more than honest. She’d shown her self-recriminations and her vulnerability. Now it only seemed fair for Jordan to answer. More than that, she wanted to answer. She wanted Kip to know something about her. “I had big plans, like I already told you. My family were farmers, just ordinary farmers, for several generations back. We had a small dairy he
rd, the usual crops, and our produce was popular in area restaurants and farmers’ markets even fifteen years ago, before local sourcing really caught on.”

  “Where did you grow up?” Kip asked, reaching for another seedling.

  “A couple hundred miles upstate. I went to school at Cornell—it’s a big Ag place.”

  “I don’t think I knew that. They have a really good aeronautic engineering department too.”

  “See,” Jordan said lightly, “I didn’t know that, either.”

  “We’re obviously a good team.” Kip walked to the cooler at the end of the row and pulled out two bottles of water and brought one back to Jordan. “So you were saying about the farm?”

  “Yes, right. Well, I planned to take it over, one day, in the far future.” Jordan shook her head, remembering her naïve aspirations. “But the economy went into a tailspin and most farmers were overextended—easy credit let them purchase more land than they could afford and equipment they couldn’t pay for and a lot of small farms went under.”

  Kip set her water bottle down and crouched across from Jordan, watching her intently with the tomato seedlings nodding between them. A frown line marked the space between her dark brows. “I guess I knew that, but I never knew anyone that actually had to deal with it.”

  “I didn’t know I needed to either. My father didn’t say anything to my mother or to me about exactly how bad things were. Not until…” Jordan swallowed and wiped away the sweat that had accumulated on her forehead and was slowly trickling down toward her eyes with the back of her hand. “Not until the morning he drove out into the field on his tractor and shot himself.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Kip winced. “If I’d known, I never would have brought that up—I’m sorry.”

  “None of it was your doing,” Jordan said, ignoring the lead ball dragging at her insides. “I don’t know if I’d suspected what he was planning that I could have made any difference at all, but I didn’t have any idea. My father was a proud man, and I doubt he would have asked for help, anyone’s help, even if we’d been able to give it. Maybe I should’ve known, probably should’ve been paying more attention, but—” She blew out a breath. “I can’t really blame it on youth. After a certain point, we know what we’re doing or not doing, don’t we? I just wasn’t thinking about them.”

  Kip caught her lower lip between her teeth, nodded sharply. “I don’t know what the circumstances were for you then, but I’m guessing if you’d had any clue, you would’ve tried to help. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  Jordan raised her eyes, searched Kip’s, found understanding and compassion and certainty. Grateful, but not convinced, she said softly, “Why? I mean, what makes you think I wasn’t like most twenty-three-year-olds—self-absorbed, still expecting someone else to solve the problems, blissfully unaware of other people’s suffering.”

  “Because if you had been, I don’t think you’d be suffering now, and I know that you are.”

  Jordan went back to planting, her refuge from the memories. “Well, I appreciate your kind opinion of me. After that, my mother sold the farm, had to, to cover the bills.” She busied herself making a new hole and settling a seedling gently into place. “She went to live with her sister and died suddenly less than a year later. I finished my master’s and have been more or less working around the fringes of agriculture ever since.”

  “So you’ve given up on the idea of farming?”

  “Since I don’t have a farm, it’s rather moot.” Jordan patted the earth down around the seedling, carefully compacting the soil to hug the hairlike rootlets. “Let’s just say I’ve traded in dreams for reality.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Hey, Ty, what time are the kids coming home?” Jordan called.

  Kip glanced at her watch. Somehow four hours had slipped by. While they’d planted, she and Jordan had fallen into an easy rhythm, moving down the rows in tandem, talking as they had at dinner about news and books and sports. Like her, Jordan had high hopes for the home baseball team that season. And they’d talked about Jordan’s plan for community outreach, expanding the project’s merchant base, and creating a self-sustaining enterprise. Tya floated in and out of the conversation, sharp and funny and still a little wary of Kip but too cool to really let it show. Kip might have missed it if she hadn’t developed a sixth sense for what people weren’t saying from dealing with bureaucrats and spooks. She didn’t blame Tya for her caution.

  She and Jordan carefully avoided talk of family and past, but she kept thinking about Jordan’s story. Unlike Jordan, who had lost her family and her home in one tragic moment, she still had her father and Randy. She still had the security of the family enterprise. She’d always had a place. Jordan had rebuilt her life, and thinking about that made Kip wonder if she would have been as strong.

  Tya coiled the hose under the spigot Kip had repaired with a new gasket. “They have band tonight, but I ought to get going soon.”

  “Go ahead home, then. We’re good over here.” Jordan straightened with a slight groan and turned to Kip. “That’s the last of them for today. You get another star.”

  “That’s two already.”

  Jordan smiled and shook her head.

  Kip grabbed the empty flat and tossed it onto a pile next to the shed. “You need a dumpster.”

  “I need a vacation house in the Bahamas too,” Jordan said, massaging her back.

  “Sore?”

  “Mmm. Occupational hazard. How do you feel?”

  “Like my knees are frozen in a permanently flexed position.” Kip grinned and rubbed her thighs. “I’ll feel it tomorrow.”

  “We got twice as much done—no, even more than that—with your help.” Jordan squinted toward the sky. “And we won’t get much more done today. It looks like the rain that was forecast is coming.”

  “Should we cover these guys up or something?” Kip was already worried she might have shocked the little guys. A drenching rain couldn’t be good for them. “They’ve already had a hard day.”

  Jordan laughed. “They’ll be fine. Temperatures are supposed to stay in the midforties tonight. We ought to put the fabric over the beds, though. That will protect them from getting beat up.”

  “Is that the rolls of white stuff I saw in the shed?”

  “Yeah, do you mind getting it?”

  “No problem. How many?”

  “Three.”

  Kip collected them and returned just as Tya was heading toward the gate. “’Night.”

  “See you,” Tya called briskly and disappeared out the gate.

  Kip sighed. “I don’t think she’s too happy about me being here. Is that causing problems for you?”

  “No. Ty just needs a chance to get to know you.”

  “Maybe she thinks she already knows enough.”

  “You’re not being very fair to either one of you if you don’t give her a chance.”

  “You’re right. It’s just, I can see you two are close, and I don’t want to cause friction.” Kip stacked the rolls by the bed.

  “I think I’m a pretty good judge of character, and I’m not worried. Ty will be fine.”

  “Then I’ll stop worrying. Now what?”

  “I can get the rest of this,” Jordan said. “You don’t need to stay.”

  “That’s okay. Let me give you a hand. It’ll go faster.” Kip was in no hurry to leave. All she had to look forward to was her silent apartment, her empty refrigerator, and another call to her father. She needed to find out how Randy was doing and to get a number for him, if she could. Beyond that, she had nothing to do except wait for the next round of testing results to come in on the new engine. That would be at least a week.

  “Okay, sure. I won’t turn down good help.” Jordan handed her a couple dozen wire hoops. “Stick these in the ground about every four feet. Then we’ll run the fabric over them and stake it all down.”

  “Got it.” Kip set the hoops in silence for a minute. “So what did she say?”

&nbs
p; “Who?”

  “Ty.”

  “About what?”

  “About why I’m here.”

  “Nothing. I didn’t tell her the details.”

  Kip stopped and stared. “Why not?”

  Jordan met her gaze, a little challenge in her eyes. “Because she didn’t need to know. All she needed to know was you aren’t an ax murderer.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Why didn’t you just tell her? She must have been curious.”

  “I didn’t want to,” Jordan said softly. “I practically forced you to tell me. It’s your private business.”

  “Thank you.” Kip took a minute to savor the heat that pooled in her belly. She wasn’t used to being defended. She’d always been the one doing the shielding, ever since Randy was old enough to get into trouble. “I don’t think I have the right to privacy where this is concerned, but I appreciate it. This is…pretty humiliating.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t be. I was driving the damn car, after all. No contest there.”

  “Who actually stole it?”

  Kip shook her head. The responsibility had become hers the minute she got behind the wheel. And she’d already accepted the consequences in court. Randy had been guilty, but so had she. “Put it down to a string of bad decisions, and I ended up making the last one.”

  “All right,” Jordan said slowly. She unraveled the first roll. “Grab one side of this fabric.”

  Together they walked the long sheet of six-foot-wide thin white mesh from one end of the raised bed to the other and staked it down. The seedlings looked like little tent poles underneath it.

  “How long do you keep this stuff on there?” Kip asked.

  “Probably the better part of a month. It not only protects them from wind and rain, it helps concentrate the heat, and tomato plants like heat.”

  “So, what’s next?”

  Jordan collected the leftover stakes, dropped them into a canvas bag she’d slung over her shoulder, and shooed a chicken out of the shed before storing her tools. “Peppers and eggplants. Everything else we’ll start from seed. If I had a greenhouse, I’d have started my own seedlings by now.”