Cream of the Crop (7 page)

I laughed. “I think a shorter list is what she
doesn't
have planned for me. She's got the whole weekend packed in an effort to make me fall in love with Bailey Falls.”

He slid from the stool and smiled. “I selfishly have to say that I hope it works and that you never leave. We need some more badass women up here to shake things up.”

“Oh, I don't know,” I said, feeling the heat rise to my cheeks. I had a farmer fantasy, for sure, but long term? I belonged in the city. “You may have converted me into a weekend transplant.” I swiped the last bit of frosting on the plate with my thumb and sucked it off while I thought about someone who might be able to make me visit Bailey Falls more often.

Sucked it off indeed . . .

What I “know” about living on a farm comes from picture books and movies. I also have a tendency to embellish and gild images that I revisit in my mind, coloring and shading things until I can get it just right, until I believe
that's exactly how it is.

Two things happened at Maxwell Farms.

One, I realized I had no idea how an actual farm works. It's not some idealized place where an overalled farmer pats pretty cows while his wife, an extra from
The Donna Reed
Show,
skips through the pasture at lunchtime with a chicken pot pie
tucked in a basket under a red handkerchief, after which they
shtup
each other silly under the blue sky. A farm is dirty, kind of smelly, and a lot of really hard work.

Two, Maxwell Farms
is
an idealized place, where people work hard and make something beautiful out of a few acres and serious sweat. I saw chickens laying eggs, picked a pumpkin from a vine, and scratched a pig on his actual pork belly. It was a riot of smells, sights, sounds, and tastes as well, since Roxie made us sample everything in the kitchen garden, some still with dirt clinging to it. I laughed as she dusted everything off on her farm jeans, telling me to just go with it and let my country out a bit. It really was a magical place.

When I'd shown up at the big stone barn, she took one look at my high-heeled boots and made me put on a pair of Leo's galoshes, which were like canoes on my feet. But after stepping in crap for the fifth time, I was grateful for them.

I took pictures everywhere, sneaking in a few of Leo with his land in the background, dirt on his hands, a smile on his face, and the love for what he did shining through with everything. I wasn't sure exactly what I had yet with the pictures I'd taken, but I knew they'd lead me where I needed to go with this campaign.

Leo moved the animals around the farm to keep things trimmed down, and to provide a kick-ass place for the chickens to relax all day. I'd already seen the chickens and their charming coop-on-wheels get moved onto a freshly sheep-mown pasture. Then we went to see the sheep on the next field, fluffy and white and bleating away as the wind ruffled their coats. Now we were finally moving on to the moo cows, which I'd fight to my death to call them despite Polly's disdain.

I wondered if Leo had any idea how much trouble he was going to be in when that very smart girl turned into a teenager. I grinned to myself.

And speaking of grinning, Roxie looked like the Cheshire cat, even bouncing a little in the front seat as Leo drove his Jeep to the cow pasture.

“What's with the grin?” I asked her, leaning forward.

“Who, me?” she asked with a wide smile. “I'm just having a great day. I've got my best friend here, I'm sleeping with the hottest farmer since Almanzo Wilder—”

“Don't let her fool you, Natalie. She'd throw me over in a second if the actual Almanzo was available,” Leo interjected.

“—and the sun is shining. What more could anyone ask for?” Roxie finished, brushing a few pieces of my hair back away from my face and fussing with my headband.

“A dirty martini and couple of nudie magazines?” I asked brightly, earning a high five from Leo.

“Dirty, I can manage,” Roxie said suggestively.

And just as I turned to ask her what she meant, I saw Oscar. In the field, surrounded by moo cows.

“Fuck me,” I breathed as we pulled up to the gate. Behind him was a parade of fall colors, rich browns and bright reds and oranges. Around him, pretty-looking cattle, deep red and silky brown, with big, gentle eyes. And in the middle of it all, this golden man.

Vaguely in the background, where my internal soundtrack plays, I could hear the opening riff of “Here Comes Your Man” by the Pixies . . .

He looked up from the herd to our Jeep, and waved to Leo. Chestnut hair as always tucked back with a tie, black ­T-shirt with flannel shirt tied around his waist, faded blue jeans wrapped around long legs. Seeing him here, in his natural element, was even more striking than seeing him at the market in the city.

And speaking of striking . . .

I leaned forward and whispered to Roxie, “I can't
believe
you!”

“What?”

“Don't
what
me, lady! What are you up to?”

Oscar was cutting across the field, his big, long strides taking up probably twenty yards at a clip. Fucking Paul Bunyan, this guy. I was pre–panic attack and getting over the pre- pretty quick.

Leo, beautiful and oblivious, just grinned and pointed. “That's my neighbor Oscar; I let his cows graze on my land sometimes.”

“You don't say.” My smile felt like it had a lot of teeth. “We'll be right over.”

Oscar was almost to the fence now. Just another few steps and he'd be here!

I slid low into the backseat. “Roxie, you're on my list. Scratch that, you
are
the list.” Was it possible to call a cab to a field? I started looking for an Uber signal.

“Oh, list schmist, I'll go back to favorite-person status the minute he gets here with that hair, which is glorious by the way,” she said, undoing her seat belt. “I wonder what kind of conditioner he uses for— What the hell are you doing?” She stared down at me.

“Hiding. Which you should try, since once the shock wears off, I'm going to choke you.” I slid down onto the floor. “Is there a trapdoor in here?”

“Oh, stop being so silly about this guy! It's time to actually meet, without cheese!”

I tugged on her shoulder frantically. “Keep your voice down! He'll hear you!”

“You're being ridiculous.”

My pulse was racing. What
was
it with this guy? And not for nothing, if I was going to meet him this weekend, which I knew
was a possibility, I had an outfit and a scenario picked out to boot. Something low-cut, a low-lit bar, some witty repartee, and then hours and hours of sweet sweet fucking. Nowhere in this possible meeting was I wearing a trendy turtleneck, velvet riding jodhpurs, and another man's poopy galoshes!

I could hear his deep voice coming closer, answering Leo's questions with words like “Yeah,” and “Uh-huh,” and “About ten inches.”

I could die.

Roxie argued with me right up until Leo and Oscar were maybe ten feet away from the Jeep. I wasn't ready to face him yet, not yet. He existed in another space and time, a space called The Market and a time called The Best Ten Minutes of My Saturday Morning, and seeing him here and now was threatening to unravel the continuum that held our fragile universe together!

I couldn't stand him being real yet. So I handled things like any grown-up, professional, adult woman.

I pulled my turtleneck up and over my face and hid inside my sweater. I could see through the weave two very distinct shadows appear over the back of the Jeep, one impossibly tall.

I could perceive Leo looking back and forth between me and Roxie, her own shadowy figure shaking her head.

“Um, Sugar Snap?” I heard Leo say.

No use. I couldn't stay inside my sweater forever. I took a deep breath, inhaling a hit of confidence from the perfumed cashmere, and peeked over the top.

Staring down at me with a curious look was Oscar. His gray-blue eyes had a touch of amusement mixed in with the what-the-hell. And as I pulled the sweater further down my face, his eyes changed from confusion to recognition. And as realization dawned, a flare of heat flashed through them.

“Brie,” he breathed, placing the face and my order at the same time.

“Oh. Yes.”

Roxie was shaking her head back and forth so quickly she was going to give herself whiplash. “I gave you the perfect opportunity, and I mean the
perfect
opportunity, to talk to him, to turn on the old Natalie charm and make him want you. You were trapped in a field, in a Jeep, surrounded by cows,
his
cows, mind you. You literally had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. And what did you do?”

“I ran,” I answered, laying my head down on the dashboard. “I. Ran.”

“Across a field.”

“Covered in cows.”

“
Totally
covered in cows!” Roxie exploded.

I turned my face toward her, keeping my head on the dashboard. I'd retreated back into my turtleneck, but my eyes were still peeping out, watching Roxie for any sign that I might still be bordering on charming and not psychotic. “To be fair, I didn't run very far,” I pointed out. “I turned around.”

“Because a cow was chasing you.”

I went ahead and pulled the turtleneck up and over my entire head. It was true, it was all true. When he'd realized it was me, and we'd completed our Three-Word Waltz, I hadn't waited around to see what he would say. Because like a flash, I jumped my size-eighteen ass up and over the side of the Jeep, and took off in a shuffle-hop-step across the field, one of Leo's galoshes hanging halfway off my foot.

Turns out gentle sweet dairy cows get startled when some
one comes running, and they don't always take too kindly to a shuffle-hop-step. One of them came after me, and although it was likely at a pace of about a mile per hour, it looked very fast in my head. I panicked, turned back around, and headed for the Jeep again, while Leo, Roxie, and a beautiful but semifuming Oscar tried to call out alternate directions to me.

“Stop!”

“Keep going!”

“Turn around!”

“Over here!”

“Over there!”

“What the hell are you doing to my cows?”

Luckily, by the time I'd made it back to the Jeep, the men were in the herd, calming down the Bessies, while Roxie was left to calm down this Bessie. And this Bessie directed her to get us the fuck out of there right the fuck fucking now.

And so here we sat, a half mile away from the cow pasture, and I was wondering if there was a one o'clock train back to the city.

“What in the world, Natalie? Really, what's going on?” Roxie asked, and I groaned inside my turtleneck.

“If I knew, I'd tell you. I just go to pieces around this guy.” I pulled down my turtleneck to just above my nose. “When I see him, I literally lose my mind. I can't talk to him when I see that face, and those eyes, and those lips, and all that gorgeous ink, and those hands—did you see those hands? And—”

“Okay, I got it. So, what if you
couldn't
see him?”

“How can you
not
see him? How can you not see that face, and those eyes, and those—”

She held up her hand. “I'm not going to sit here while you go through another round of Sexual Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.”

“Knees and Toes,” I sang back. Which made her smile, which made me smile. A little.

She sighed. “I need to get back to the barn to make lunch.”

“Great! I'm starved!” I announced, tugging down my turtleneck, anxious to sweep this whole thing under the Jeep.

“A lunch that Oscar is attending.”

“I'm actually still full from breakfast.” Up went the turtleneck.

Roxie's hands tugged it from my face. “You're going. This ends today, one way or another.” She started the Jeep and pointed it toward the farm.