He caught her eye, perhaps mistaking her look of trepidation for one of excitement. “Don’t get your hopes up though, these aren’t going to be anything special. It’s still a pretty average car dealership. You can drive a manual?”
Alexis looked at him blankly. “Manual? Is that like a stick shift?” She shook her head. “No, no I can’t. I can only drive an automatic.”
Mason slapped his face with his palm. “Seriously? Geez, you get more city every day. Ah well, hopefully there’s something there you can drive.”
They set off down the road, Alexis feeling miffed once again at his digs at her. She could drive. She had driven in the city all her life, and she’d like to see him try that when he lived in a town with only one set of traffic lights.
The car dealership was barely a few minutes’ walk away but the cold, crisp air bit into Alexis’s cheeks and she was thankful for the coffee cup to wrap her hands around. It kept them warm enough to not lose feeling in her fingers.
Mason must have noticed her shivering because he offered his sweater to her.
Alexis refused, straightened her back and marched on into the car dealership, holding back her shivers as best she could. He already thought she was a soft city girl. She’d show him that she was made of stronger stuff than he thought.
As she entered, the car salesman looked up from his phone with the expression of someone who can see walking dollar signs approaching him.
“How can I help you Ms.—” Then he saw Mason standing behind her and his smile dropped marginally. Maybe a sale wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought. “Oh, Mason. It’s you.”
His lack of enthusiasm seemed to amuse Mason, who walked up to him and clapped him on the back with a cheery, “Sal, you old dog, good to see you. Been a while. I brought a friend with me. Needs a car for the farm.”
Sal led them over to a small line-up of pickups. “These are the best ones we got. All run on petrol except this one, she’s a diesel. About five grand is what I can do for you for these three,” he gestured at three equally beaten-up white pickups, “and these two are a bit more pricey, ten grand for the gray or eleven for the black.”
“Why is the black one more expensive?” Alexis inquired, looking at the two vehicles. To her eyes, they looked exactly the same.
Sal laughed. “Cos its black see, less cleaning!”
Mason chuckled. “Want to take one for a test ride?”
She nodded eagerly. She’d never driven a car this big before. It was going to make the bumpy roads a lot easier to traverse, that was for sure.
Sal opened the driver’s door for her on the black pickup, but she shook her head. “I want to drive one of the white ones.” Despite her inheritance, she didn’t have money to burn. She wanted to be careful with her money. A cheap pickup would do her just as well as a more expensive one.
“Your choice,” he responded grumpily as he walked over to one of the beaten-up white pickups and opened the door for her. “I’ll go grab the keys.”
She climbed into the truck and settled herself on the worn seat. It was tidy inside, worn in places but clean, and it looked well-maintained. When she looked down at the steering wheel, the sight of the stick out of the corner of her eye made her stomach drop. She climbed out, crestfallen. She couldn’t drive this.
“I could have told you it was manual,” Mason said. “That model always is manual.”
“Well, thanks for the help, then.” She looked down the row of pickups. What was the chance one of them would be an automatic? She sighed. She really did need a sturdy vehicle to get around in. Maybe she should go get another rental.
Mason stood with his arms crossed, watching her closely. “Tell you what, I’ll give you a lesson. It's easy to pick up. A couple of lessons and you’ll be sweet.”
She looked back at him with surprise. “You’d do that?”
“Yeah,” he responded gruffly. “Can’t have you having an accident. Then I’d have to wait another few months, or deal with your ass of a lawyer, to buy Bert’s farm.”
They left the dealership in the white pickup, after Mason had haggled down the price to just over half the asking price. Sal looked slightly put out with himself as they left and kicked the tire of the expensive black truck to vent his feelings.
Mason took the driver's seat and Alexis buckled herself in next to him. “I’ll drive us over to pick up the oven. There’s no point in having you drive through the town and risking my life and your own dignity.”
“I need to learn some time,” she said doubtfully.
“We can go for your first lesson out by your farm. Fewer cars for you to crash into.” And he grinned to take the sting out of his words.
She was secretly glad. She didn’t fancy embarrassing herself in front of the entire town. A town this small, one person would see her and the next thing the whole population would know she was a city girl who couldn’t drive a stick shift car.
She’d driven through town when she had first arrived, jetlagged and unhappy. It was smaller than she remembered. You could literally sneeze and miss it if you were driving along the main road. A tiny supermarket, a clothes shop whose clientele were clearly very fond of pastels, elastic waists and thick-soled shoes, a post office, a liquor store, an antiques store and a farming equipment store, which was by far the biggest and most modern-looking store in the area. Nothing else. “What do people here do for fun? There’s not a lot here in town.”
Mason looked at her in surprise. “Lots of things. We don’t come into town to have fun. We have the whole countryside.”
Alexis stared blankly back. “But, but what about bars? And trying different restaurants? And concerts? Shopping? And, I dunno, art galleries, exhibitions, that sort of stuff?”
Mason snorted. “You’re not going to find those here. Christchurch would be the nearest. There’s a few people here who rely a bit too heavily on that liquor store for their entertainment, like Nate, but generally we go hiking, mountain biking, hunting, that sort of thing.”
Alexis had never done any of those and her blank look said as much.
Mason stared back at her thoughtfully for a minute. “I can take you deer hunting one day if you want to try.”
“Hunting? Like, shooting hunting?” A picture appeared in her head of Bambi’s mother and Mason standing over her with a gun. She swallowed uncomfortably.
“We usually stay in a cabin for a couple of days. It would be a good chance for you to see the native bushland around here, and it’s better exercise than a gym.”
It was testament to how little else there was to do in Twizel that Alexis agreed, against her better judgment. Sure, she could handle a handgun, but she’d only ever shot at a shooting range before. And that was only something she had done with Phoebe a couple of times when they were doing a women’s self-defense course and their overly enthusiastic instructor insisted they learn to use a gun. What on earth was she doing agreeing to go hunting when she’d never so much as squashed a spider before?
The local electronics and homewares store was a one-room shop about the size of a small living room, stuffed full of an eclectic mix of used and new goods. Mason informed her that you could often come in and swap old electronics or homewares for a discounted new item, but “your old oven isn’t going to be much help there unless a museum wants to come by to purchase it,” and instead Alexis found herself forking out yet more money towards this new life into which she had thrown herself.
It’s okay to spend this much. When I sell the farm, I will make it all back and more. It was all money coming from one of her most successful saving accounts, the one she had mentally earmarked a few months ago to pay for her wedding. The wedding she had been dreaming of since James had first taken her out to a New York restaurant, told her she was beautiful and kissed her.
Pffft, so much for that plan. She might as well use it for a car and a decent oven as anything else.
After poking around the store for a half hour, she bought a second-hand
stand-alone stove and cooktop that looked hardly used. The retail assistant assured her that if anything went wrong, they would refund the sale.
She hoped nothing would go wrong—she was already relying far too much on Mason to take her out here and now to give her driving lessons. She couldn’t ask him for help to drive out here again in a hurry.
During the drive home, he talked her through what he was doing with the gears and the clutch. By the time they arrived home she was feeling confident that she at least understood the theory of driving a stick shift.
Mason lifted her new stove out of the car and carried it into the kitchen for her. “Want me to wire it in for you?” he offered. “It won’t take me a minute.”
She thought of a proper, home-cooked meal and swallowed. “If you don’t mind. I’d really appreciate it. I’ll cook you lunch on it as payment.”
“Deal.”
As he hunkered down in the corner where the stove was going to live, she busied herself getting the ingredients out for a make-your-own taco lunch, grating carrots and cheese, chopping tomatoes, lettuce, avocado, and bell peppers, and digging out salsa and sour cream. As she worked, she stole the odd glance at his jeans-clad butt. Working out on the farm had given him a body to die for: impressive shoulders and a hard, lean torso without an ounce of spare fat on it. Altogether an impressive package. He didn’t have model good looks like James, with his blindingly white, even smile and his carefully groomed hair, but Mason had the sort of body that would look equally good in jeans or a tux. Or in nothing at all...
No harm in looking, she told herself, as she shredded lettuce with unaccustomed vigor, feeling her ears turn a little pink around the edges at the direction of her thoughts. It wasn’t as if she was actually going to do anything about it. He may have those rugged good looks, and be surprisingly thoughtful and kind, but he was a farmer. He belonged on the land. She was merely a visitor. There was no possible future for any relationship between them.
Besides, she was still in love with James. She couldn’t forget that.
Just as she finished setting out the plates on the table, Mason rose to his feet and dusted off his hands. “That should do it.”
She grabbed a pan and tossed in her special homemade mixture of oil and spices and put it on the cooktop. “Mmmmm, I’ve missed cooking,” she said, inhaling the aroma of the cooking spices.
He sniffed appreciatively. “It smells amazing.”
Once the spicy chicken mixture was cooked, she placed it, still in the pan, on the kitchen table. “Help yourself.”
Three impressively overstuffed tacos later, he pushed his chair back. “I’m impressed. You really can cook.”
A glow of satisfaction went through her. She may not be able to drive a stick shift, but she had her own talents. “Thanks.”
Once he had helped her with the dishes and headed off again, she pulled off her going-to-town clothes, donned her much-abused yoga pants, and set off on foot to find the farm workers. Now that she had a truck to get around the country in, she just needed to learn how to drive it and then she could knuckle down to the business of actually running her farm.
Terry and Trev were hard at work in the barn, loading bales of hay onto a trailer. Terry called out a cheery hello, while Trev ducked his head and mumbled something unintelligible. She looked around the yards. “Where’s Nate?” As he was the farm manager, she wanted to go over the books with him to understand the financial position she was in.
Terry shrugged. “He went off a while ago.”
Trev mimed drinking a beer. “Try the pub.”
Meh. She wasn’t going to spend her afternoon tracking Nate down in whatever drinking establishment he’d holed up in. Besides, if he’d started drinking already, she wouldn’t be able to get much sense out of him now. “When you see him next, can you tell him to come see me?”
Terry chucked another hay bale on top of the trailer. “Sure. But I don’t expect to see him ‘til tomorrow.”
“Lazy sod,” Trev muttered under his breath, as he clambered up to sit on top of the mound of hay in the trailer.
“Jump up,” Terry said, motioning at her to join Trev. “Come help us put the feed out.”
She eyed the trailer nervously for a moment. The bales of hay didn’t look very stable, but she wanted to learn about how to run the farm. Carefully she climbed up beside Trev and sat on a mound of hay.
Terry started the engine and drove off, the trailer bouncing and juddering behind him.
Alexis worked alongside them all afternoon. She soon got comfortable hopping down to open and shut gates and turfing the hay over the side of the trailer through the fields to supplement the early spring grass.
She surprised herself by enjoying it immensely and was sad when Terry called it a day and dropped her back off at the house again.
When he pulled away, she sat in her kitchen looking with satisfaction at the newly installed oven, feeling exhausted but happy. She had a car, she had an oven, she was going to learn how to drive her new car, and she was learning how to run a farm.
Definitely time to tell Phoebe her good news.
She opened her laptop, and the three missed calls and a half dozen messages from her friend gave her a guilty conscience. The last message read simply, “Are you still alive?!”
Phoebe answered her call after three rings, her face covered with a thick gray paste that Alexis recognized as her mud mask. Usually they would have a facial together a couple of nights a month, while drinking wine and gossiping about people at work. Her heart ached with missing her best friend.
“Alexis, I’ve been trying to get hold of you for so long.” She sounded bubbly and enthusiastic as usual, but there was an underlying wistfulness in her voice. “It’s so good to hear from you. I miss you soooo much. It’s not the same without you here.”
“You wouldn't believe it, Phoebe, it’s so beautiful. I actually like it here.”
“How is it going? What’s your sheep farm like? How are you doing?”
Alexis replied with a laugh. “Honestly, the house is an absolute dump, I spent about a week cleaning it. But the farm is huge, much bigger than I expected. Bert left it to get a bit run down, I don’t think he was keeping up with the workload here before he died. So there’s lots to do to get it up and running again.”
“Wait, up and running again? Aren’t you putting it on the market and coming home?” Phoebe’s eyes narrowed, as much as they could with the thick paste holding her skin so tightly.
She found she couldn't meet Phoebe’s eyes. “Yes, I will put it on the market once it’s ready.”
“This just isn’t like you, running away from everything instead of dealing with it head-on. I know James acted like a complete douchebag, but you didn’t have to leave the country. You ran away from him, and I understand that. But you also ran away from me.”
There was hurt in her voice. Alexis wanted to reach through the screen and hug her friend and reassure her that she missed her desperately too. “It’s been good for me. Going away on vacation was the best thing I could ever have done. I haven’t even cried over James in at least three days now.”
“Tell me that you’ve at least found some cute local farmers to keep you occupied,” Phoebe replied grumpily.
Alexis’s mind flashed to Mason’s muscles rippling under his shirt as he’d carried her oven inside the kitchen, and the wide, cheeky smile that made it look as though he was always laughing at her.
Phoebe would fall all over herself for a man with such rugged good looks.
But Phoebe had been a friend to James before she had even known Alexis, and Alexis didn’t want a hint of a rumor that she was seeing someone else to make its way back to her ex.
If there was ever even a tiny chance he would come back to her, she wasn’t about to ruin it by hooking up with some random farmhand in New Zealand, no matter how wide his shoulders or how bright his smile.
“There’s only about twenty people who live here,” she answered, s
tudiously avoiding the question.
“Slim pickings!” Phoebe laughed in reply.
They spoke the next few minutes about Phoebe’s latest Bumble date disaster before Phoebe started to flag. “I better go to bed now,” she said finally after a particularly wide yawn that sent cracks running down her now fully-dried face mask. “Please keep in touch. It’s lonely without you. And I worry if I don’t hear from you.”
Alexis thought about putting a mud mask on her own face but decided against it. Without its usual daily layer of makeup, her skin was clearer than it had been in years.
She wondered what Mason would think if he saw her doing her own usual skin routine. Probably just reinforce his preconceptions about her being a useless city girl.
Instead, she cooked a chicken risotto, relishing the simple joy of having a working cooktop again, and fell asleep with Bert’s ratty old farming manual tucked next to her, various pages covered in highlighter and her own careful, neat notes on the margins, most of which read “to Google”, “Google this” and “Ask Mason about?”
Alexis woke to a loud banging on her back door. Grabbing a dressing gown, she threw it hastily around her shoulders. Nate was slouching against the back doorjamb, his features drawn into a scowl. “Where’s the fire?” she demanded.
He blinked at her. “What fire?”
She gave a theatrical yawn that quickly turned into a real one. “The fire that was so important that you had to wake me up at the crack of dawn to put out.”
He gave an I-don’t-give-a-damn shrug. “Terry said you wanted to see me.”
“Not at six o’clock in the morning, I don’t.”
“It’s nearly seven.”
She ostentatiously consulted her watch. “It is exactly 6:13 a.m. Yes, I want to see you. I went looking for you yesterday at lunchtime, but Terry told me you’d already knocked off for the day.”
Head First (Quinn Brothers Book 1) Page 5
