HE COULDN’T GET Savannah or that morning at the lake out of his head.
It was just sex. Amazing sex. With an awkward conversation at the end because, while he knew he shouldn’t stay with her, he’d been tempted to do just that. To stay right with her in their little clearing for the rest of the day. To turn that day into a week or maybe a month or...however long he could make it last.
But he couldn’t blow off work just for sex with Savannah Walters. He had responsibilities. Collin Tyler did the right thing. Responsibilities were the right thing.
Having sex at the side of the lake on a beach towel with Savannah Walters might have felt right, but it was all kinds of wrong.
And thinking about it like this was all kinds of obsessive. It had been three days. Three long days and three interminable nights in which he fell asleep imagining the feel of her body under his hands, and woke up sweaty, tangled in sheets he’d dreamed were made of terry cloth. With a raging hard-on.
He hadn’t taken as many cold showers since he was a sixteen-year-old.
Collin checked the soil in a few of the greenhouse saplings, but the feel of the soft dirt reminded him of those moments on his knees in front of Savannah. He withdrew his hand as if he’d been burned. Maybe he’d check on things outside the greenhouse. Or he could go to his office to figure out a way for Tyler Orchards to become the supplier for Westfall Foods without losing either their farm stand or the market in town. Both were integral pieces of the orchard that had saved Collin and his sisters all those years ago. He couldn’t turn his back on them now.
He started for the barn, but saw a blond head in the garden.
They’d planted Gran’s berry garden a few weeks before and he found Amanda kneeling in the dirt, harvesting a few ripe strawberries.
“Hey, kid, grabbing an afternoon snack?”
The strawberry plants were looking good, and the raspberry and blueberry vines, too, he noticed. In another couple of weeks, Gran would have a good harvest, and they would have berries to add to the offerings at the farmers’ market.
Amanda looked up, bitten strawberry in her hand. “Gran was going to teach me how to make a strawberry pie.” She frowned and then sighed. “But she got tired and went up to take a nap. I thought maybe I’d figure it out on my own.” There was a hopeful glint to her clear blue gaze.
Collin shook his head. “I know how to grow and pick the food around here. Baking it is beyond me.” Her gaze fell.
“Can’t be too hard,” she mumbled, and snapped a few more strawberries off the plant, dropping them into the bowl at her knees.
Maybe he could struggle through an afternoon in the kitchen. It would take all his concentration, which would mean less time for thoughts about Savannah. And he still had three weeks to come to a decision about the Westfall offer.
Collin bent and snapped off a few strawberries.
“Maybe I could figure it out.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need a babysitter. Seventeen-year-olds know how to cook without burning down a house.” She picked up the bowl of berries, holding it to her chest.
“Did I ever tell you about me, Levi and Adam, Home Ec class and a cherry cheesecake that looked like something someone had vomited up?” He put his arm around Amanda’s shoulder and began walking to the house with her.
“We’d mixed all the main ingredients, but Adam thought the cherries should be combined into the mix. It was already beginning to mold so Levi grabs a mixer from another station, Adam dumps the can of cherries into the bowl, and Levi starts mixing them. And the cheesecake is starting to look pink, like Pepto-Bismol, and I’m thinking there is no way this can be right. But there was no turning back.”
Amanda giggled. “The cherries go over the cheesecake. You guys were idiots.”
“Yeah, that goes without saying. So we pour the three or four cherries that were left in the can over the cheesecake and stick it in the fridge.”
“Did you fail?”
“No, our teacher gave us a C for creativity. It didn’t taste half-bad, if you could get past the look of it. Gran banned me from the kitchen after that.”
“And so you never learned how to cook?”
“I can do toast. Eggs. Some pasta, as long as the sauce is from a can. Stuff that doesn’t call for a recipe.” They reached the kitchen, and Amanda began washing the strawberries. “Speaking of, do you have the recipe?”
She pointed to the wooden recipe clip shaped like a small iron that Collin had made their grandmother for Mother’s Day one year. He read the recipe. Didn’t seem too daunting. He arranged pots, a pie plate and the other ingredients.
“You don’t have to waste your day spending time with me. I’m used to entertaining myself,” his sister said.
“I don’t mind,” he said absently as he read the recipe.
When Amanda plopped the bowl of berries on the counter, droplets of water sprayed the paper and Collin’s arms.
“You want to cut the berries, and I’ll start mixing dough for the crust?” She shrugged, which Collin decided was as close to a yes as he was going to get. He handed her the cutting board and began mixing the crust ingredients.
“I haven’t asked what your plans are for the summer.” School released the day he’d met Savannah at the lake. Three days ago. Damn it, he needed to stop using sex with Savannah as a time measurement device. Collin punched the dough in the mixing bowl.
“I assume I’m still on work duty for the farmers’ market and the roadside stand.”
“Of course, but you don’t have to be at either 24/7.”
Amanda scraped the tops of the cut strawberries into the trash, checked the recipe and began making the sauce while Collin rolled the dough into the shape of a piecrust. It was cool and smooth, like Savannah’s skin when they’d first left the water.
Cooking sucked.
“You don’t even listen to me when we’re working on something together.” Amanda dumped the strawberries into saucepan on the stove and stormed out of the kitchen.
What had he done now? Collin sighed. He wiped his hands on a red-checked towel, clicked off the stove burner and removed the pan from the hot element. He turned off the oven and hung the towel over the handle on the oven door.
He found her sitting in the gazebo swing in the side yard. Their grandfather had built it to look like a miniature version of the big barn, with swings on two sides. Collin slipped through one of the open ends and sat across from her.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t listening. I had...” He considered his words. “Something else on my mind. It’s a terrible excuse. I’m sorry.”
She wouldn’t look at him.
“Amanda.”
She curled one leg under her, leaning against the arm of the swing as she pushed her other foot against the floor. “It doesn’t matter.”
Except that it did. He sucked at parenting. He’d been using his sister as a distraction from Savannah when the two of them had already decided not to go any further with whatever was pushing the attraction between them. He’d never been one to get preoccupied with sex, but since that morning with Savannah it was all he could think about.
“You matter, kid, and I’m sorry I screwed up the kitchen thing. I’m not sure how to be your parent, but I’m trying.”
“You could start by not being my parent. I’ve already got two lousy ones.” She chewed on her lower lip.
Collin lightly kicked her foot with his. “You need someone, and while Gran’s still sick, I’m what you’ve got.”
“Great.”
He sighed. With any other teen, he might think the attitude was overly dramatic, but he’d never known Amanda to go for that kind of thing. And he had been a jerk in the kitchen. For longer than that, actually.
“Maybe I’ll go back to being your brother, then?”
She shrugged.
“I know I missed it in the kitchen, but how do you want to spend your last summer as a high school student?”
Finally, she looked at him. “Work with you?”
“I meant other than working at the market and the farm stand.”
“Yeah. I thought, maybe, you could teach me about the trees.”
“You want to know how the orchard works?”
She nodded, her nearly white-blond hair flying around her face as she did. “I want to know when to transplant the saplings and how you know a tree has finishing providing fruit and how you can tell a fruit is ready to be picked. I want to learn about the sustainability things you do, and what our carbon footprint is—”
Collin held up his hands. “That’s a lot to take in in a single summer.” Her interest was surprising. Any time he’d asked her about the orchard before, Amanda had seemed completely bored by how an organic orchard worked.
“I can learn it, and I can keep working with you in the fall. I checked with the guidance counselor, and I could do a work-study thing where I go to school in the mornings and work here in the afternoons—”
“You checked with the guidance counselor?”
Amanda nodded. “I have all the credits I need already to graduate, so if I’m working here half the day, I only have to figure out two morning classes instead of a full class load.”
“So you want to work here by default? So you don’t have to take a bunch of classes you aren’t interested in?” That made more sense than her sudden interest in farming.
But Amanda surprised him again. “Yes to the uninteresting classes part, but no to the default part. There was an assembly earlier this year about environmental protection and green initiatives. It was really inspiring. That’s when I started to get interested in how things run here, but you’ve been pretty busy.”
Collin was stunned. “It means being in the orchard by six every morning.”
“I can do that.”
“And it’s a lot of hard work, running an organic orchard. No pesticides, so we have to do other things to keep the pests away.”
“I know, I’ve been reading about it.”
“You’re not going to have a lot of extra time to hang out with your friends.”
“I don’t care. This is more important.”
God, she sounded like him. Although he’d always made time for the guys and fit “orcharding” around them. He had one more question. “If you’re so interested in the environment, what’s with wasting who knows how many rolls of duct tape downtown?”
“The one-ways are wasteful. There are only about ten thousand people in town. Making them all take extra laps around the courthouse square to find a parking space just because all those streets only go one direction wastes gas and puts more exhaust into the air.”
Collin blinked. “You tried to re-route town traffic to be less wasteful?”
Amanda nodded. “But you and Officer Calhoun wouldn’t listen to me.”
“I’m not sure you actually tried to explain your actions.”
She shrugged. “If I’d tried to explain, would you have listened?”
“Probably not.” Definitely not. Until this conversation, he’d thought Amanda was oblivious to global warming, eco-friendly farming and carbon footprints. “But I’m glad I listened today. You want to go finish that pie?”
“Yeah. We can surprise Gran at supper.”
They walked back to the house, and Collin thought maybe the two of them had turned a corner. Now to turn that corner with his sudden obsession with Savannah.
Maybe after a little more dough-pounding he would find a solution to the Savannah issue, and the Westfall offer, too.
* * *
SAVANNAH PULLED MAMA HAZEL’S car to a stop at the farm stand near the turnoff for the orchard. Hazel had sent her over for irregular apples so she could bake caramel apple pies for the farmers’ market coming up on Saturday. Why she needed irregular apples, Savannah didn’t know.
She wasn’t even sure what irregular apples were, but after secluding herself at the ranch for the past three days she had run out of things to do. She’d cleaned out her old closet, tossing most of the things she’d left behind when she’d left home—like the yearbook her cheerleader “friends” had signed, a pair of tennis shoes that had seen better days and an especially embarrassing rhinestone-embellished, fringed blouse she’d worn to sing the national anthem at the county fair rodeo the summer she graduated from Slippery Rock High. She’d helped Hazel with spring cleaning in the house, pretending she was too focused on the work to talk, and attempted one more time to figure out the milking apparatus in the parlor.
She’d failed. Maybe she should just ask her dad or her brother how it all worked. YouTube videos and online tutorials were certainly not working.
She’d also spent way too much time thinking and dreaming about Collin.
Getting out of the house was a good thing. She could reassure herself that Collin was merely a man and not a Thor-like sex god. Added bonus, she could let him know that she wasn’t hung up on him.
Much.
Well, for all he’ll know, she decided as she checked her reflection in the mirror, I’m not thinking about him at all.
She put a few dollars in the pocket of her shorts, picked up the reusable grocery bags from the passenger seat and left the car.
Amanda sat inside the booth.
Damn. Now Collin would have no idea how not-hung-up on him she was.
“Amanda, right?” The younger girl nodded. “I’m here for about ten pounds of irregular apples. Think you can help me out?”
She shook her head. “We keep all the irregulars in the barn. Customers get the best of the stock. You could go up there to get some, though, we have plenty.”
Savannah leaned against the counter. “Could I ask you a favor?”
“Sure.” She seemed happier today than she had Saturday at the farmers’ market.
“What’s the difference?”
“That’s not a favor.”
“The favor is don’t tell your brother I asked.”
Amanda grinned. “Irregulars look different. They’re not bad apples, mostly they’re just misshapen or their color is off. Most people think bad color means bad taste, so we don’t bring them to the stand or the market.”
That made sense. Savannah didn’t cook, but when she picked up an apple or a tomato or any other fruit or vegetable she always picked the prettiest ones. “How much for ten pounds?”
“Oh, we don’t sell the irregulars, you can just take them.”
“Since Mama Hazel is using them for pies, we’ll buy them.”
Amanda shrugged, but she took the money Savannah handed over the counter.
“So, up at the barn?”
The girl nodded. “Follow the lane around and go in through the big doors, they’ll be open.” She tilted her head to the side. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you come back here?”
Savannah blinked and then realized Amanda was talking in generalities, not about the incident at the lake. She really had to get her mind off Collin.
“I had a break from the tour—” she began, but Amanda cut her off.
“You could have gone anywhere, but you came back here.”
For a teenager, she saw way too much. “Well, I hadn’t been back for a while. I missed my family.” She was surprised to realize the words were true. She had missed Bennett, Hazel and Levi. More than she’d ever imagined she could miss anyone.
Amanda nodded. “Yeah,” she said, and it was as if the weight of the world were in that single syllable.
Savannah started to turn away but then asked, “Did that answer your question?” She knew it was a lame question, but she didn’t really know Amanda. She didn’t want the girl to feel as if Savannah were prying into something that was none of her business.
The girl shot a look over her shoulder and then nodded. Savannah would have pushed, but Amanda had picked up the magazine on the counter and focused her attention there. Savannah had been dismissed.
It only took a minute to drive Hazel’s sedan up the orchard drive. She parked in front of the massive red barn and took a couple of reusable grocery bags from the seat. She didn’t bother to check her appearance. Obviously she’d been obsessing about nothing. Collin was probably out checking his trees or something.
The interior of the barn was dark as she walked in through doors big enough that a tractor could pass through them, and she blinked to adjust her gaze. Tractors and other farm equipment was arranged on one side of the structure, and tables filled with wooden bushel baskets and other paraphernalia filled the other. Savannah crossed to the side with the tables. Several of the baskets were filled with apples that looked odd.
Some had strange color markings, and a few were so misshapen around the core they looked like they were squinting. She filled both bags and returned to the car to put the apples in the trunk.
She was in the clear, she should go.
Savannah looked back at the barn. She didn’t want to leave.
She wanted to talk to Collin. Not have sex. Just talk. And let him know he wouldn’t be getting any more sex from her.
That seemed a bit childish. She shook her head, slammed the trunk.
Things were going to be weird if they didn’t talk. With Collin being buddies with her brother, they were bound to run into one another often while she was back in town. She didn’t want those interactions to be uncomfortable or weird.
He was probably in the orchard, anyway, but she could at least check the door near the back of the barn with the sign reading Office.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Savannah marched back into the barn and knocked on the door. No answer. Just like a man to not be around when a woman wanted him to see how not-hung-up-on-him she was.
Probably for the best, anyway. Chances were she’d say something she would regret later. Or find it impossible to not kiss him again.
“No one uses that office anymore,” Collin said from behind her.
Savannah whirled, putting her hand to her chest. “What are you doing here?”
“I work here, and I own the place. What are you doing here?” He looked scrumptious in another pair of cargo shorts, this time olive-colored, and a black T-shirt. The man had to have stock in some cargo shorts company, as often as he wore them. He had old Nikes on his feet, and a Slippery Rock High ball cap on his head. His sunglasses were perched on the bill. “Finished with your inspection?”
“I was buying apples.”
“Nice try. The apple stand is at the end of the drive.”
“I needed irregulars.” He raised one eyebrow in disbelief. “For Mama Hazel. She’s making pies. For the farmers’ market. Caramel apple.”
“And the apples are?”
“In the trunk.” She pointed to the blue sedan.
“And you’re knocking on the office door because...?”
“Because I don’t want to have sex with you.” Savannah immediately wished the words back. “That came out wrong.” She fisted her hands at her sides. Well, she’d started this. She could finish it. “I, uh, wanted to let you know I’m okay about how things ended the other day. I’m not interested in starting anything up with you, either. So, we don’t have to avoid one another or feel weird around one another or...tell anyone else about what happened.”
There, that almost sounded like something a self-confident adult would say. Collin looked bewildered. Or something. She couldn’t quite read the expression in his clear blue gaze. He tilted his head to the side and the movement reminded her of his sister. The Tyler family definitely had that resemblance thing down. Longing squeezed Savannah’s heart. She’d spent so long pretending to find resemblances between herself and her adoptive family, and then so long pretending it didn’t matter that she was so different from them. Her skin lighter, her hair different.
She wasn’t like them, though. Her parents and her brother always did the right thing. Savannah made all the wrong moves, although it was hard to remember that having sex with Collin was a wrong move when he was standing three feet away from her, the embodiment of a bunch of her teenage fantasies.
“I’m glad you cleared that up.”
“Yeah, well, I’m trying to...be more responsible about things, and since we’ll be seeing one another at the market, I didn’t want things to be awkward.”
“Okay.” He waited a long moment, watching her. Savannah switched her weight from one leg to the other. “What happened to the Honda?” he asked finally.
Savannah glanced outside toward Mama Hazel’s big blue sedan. “Turns out that check-engine light was an actual thing. It’s out of commission for a while.”
Collin nodded. “I’m glad you had it checked.” He moved past her to the office door.
“Where are you going?”
“To the office to go over some paperwork.”
“Oh.” This was awkward. She should go. Walk to the car, Savannah, and drive away. Far, far away. “Why are you going into the office if no one uses it?” she asked, following him inside.
The room was dusty, the window looking out over the orchard streaked with dirt. There was a big wooden desk along one wall, old filing cabinets along another. The chairs were old but didn’t look rickety. No phone, no computer. Collin reached into the filing cabinet and pulled out an old ledger.
“Needed to go over some old numbers,” he said. “I don’t use the office, but it’s a good place to store the old files.”
“You should transfer them to the computer.”
He tilted his head to one side. “When I figure out how to get twenty-seven hours out of a day instead of twenty-four, I’ll consider it.”
“You sound like Levi. I tried milking again. That osmosis thing still isn’t working.”
Just leave, Savannah. Just go, she told herself, but she couldn’t get her feet to obey her brain’s orders.
“Watch a YouTube video. You’d be surprised what you can pick up.”
“Have you learned anything by watching YouTube videos?” All she’d learned from the videos so far was how to make a fool of herself in front of some cows.
He shook his head. “No. But I’ve heard.” Collin leaned a hip against the dusty desk. “For someone who isn’t here to have sex, you’re finding a lot of reasons to stick around.”
“I’m testing the awkwardness level. If we can have a conversation alone, we can have a conversation when people are around us.” And maybe if they kept talking, her feet would get the unspoken message to move. “So what are you working on that you need a ledger from 1950?”
That brought a smile to Collin’s lips, and Savannah relaxed. Maybe they could get past the post-sex awkwardness. He might already be past it, but this was good practice for her. She didn’t want to let another I-don’t-want-sex comment to pass her lips when people were around.
“It’s actually from ’99. The year my grandfather expanded the orchard. He bought forty acres from a neighboring farm and put in another ten acres of apple trees. I need to look at yield totals and do some estimating.” He stood.
“Why?”
“Because it’s what farmers do.”
“I’ve never seen Bennett or Levi go back more than five years.” At least, she didn’t think they had.
“Look, seeing you is going to be awkward, and not just because we had sex. Talking to me about orchard totals isn’t going to ease that awkwardness.” Collin shook his head. “I’m sorry I was abrupt the other day. I’m not...in a place to start anything romantic or personal, and having sex with you was...” He trailed off.
“Personal?” she asked hopefully.
He took off his baseball cap and twisted it in his hands. “Yeah, it was personal. I should have handled it better, and I didn’t.”
“I’m a big girl, Collin, and I’m not sorry it happened. We can just be friends, though. Or just hey-how-are-you merchants at the market.”
“Good,” he said.
Savannah moved to the door and, before she could talk herself out of it, turned back to him. “It was personal for me, too. If you get past whatever it is you’re doing with the old ledger, I’ll be around.” And then she walked as quickly as she could to Hazel’s car, telling herself she was a million kinds of fool for telling him she would be around. He didn’t need to know that. It was bad enough she’d said it was personal for her, too.
She wasn’t going to be around, at least not for him, whether or not her manager called with good news. Slippery Rock was just a place to get her feet back under her, nothing more.
She put the key in the ignition but instead of backing away, sat looking at the big barn for a long minute. Savannah couldn’t afford to let herself get too comfortable here. She wanted to, but she’d let herself get comfortable once before with Vince Honeycutt. He’d been as suave as any high school boy could be, and she’d fallen for every line that came out of his mouth. And that got her pressed against a tree in her formal dress in the rain. All she’d wanted from Vince with a little bit of teenage normalcy—she hadn’t been foolish enough to think a homecoming dance would lead anywhere important.
Getting comfortable with Collin would be so much more dangerous. He didn’t say the right things, and he was grumpy. She still wanted normal, and he was ridiculously, sexily normal.
He could shatter the pieces of her heart she was finally trying to glue back together.