CHAPTER ONE
BECKETT
MARCH
“Do you plan on coming back to bed?”
Her voice is raspy with sleep and she has a hickey at the base of her throat, a deep purple bruise that I can’t stop staring at. She stretches her arms above her head and the sheet slips half an inch, the swell of her breasts rising from beneath. I want to catch that sheet in my teeth and drag it down until she’s bare beneath me. I want a hundred other things, too.
I shake my head from where I’m perched on the desk in the corner of the room, taking another sip of coffee instead.
Restraint, I tell myself. Have some god damned restraint.
She smirks at me.
“Oh, I get it.” She drops her hands back down, one twisting through her hair, the other slipping beneath the sheets. One eyebrow arches high in invitation. “You like to watch.”
I’m pretty sure I’d like just about anything with Evie. I want all that black, silky hair wrapped around my fist, that smiling mouth at my neck. Last night she spent twenty-two minutes tracing the tattoo across my bicep with her mouth and I want that, too. I want to return the favor with the freckles on the inside of her wrist and the marks at her hips.
I push off the desk and set my cup to the side. I step towards the bed and watch the movement of her hand. She swipes it low across her stomach, a wicked smile on her pretty face. I plant my knee on the bed and find her ankle, her bare foot dangling off the edge.
“I love to watch,” I tell her as I grip her thigh and make room for my body between her long legs. I drop a kiss to the inside of her knee and her whole body shivers. I drop another kiss just above it. “But I like to touch more.”
A finger digs into my ribcage as I’m violently yanked from my favorite daydream.
“Are you paying attention?”
My knee jolts and my boot catches on the chair in front of me, sending Becky Gardener rocking precariously to the side. She curls her hands around the edges with a white-knuckled grip and shoots me a look over her shoulder. I fix my attention on my boots and mumble an apology.
“I’m paying attention,” I tell Stella, and swat her hand away.
Kind of. Not really. There are too many people in this room. All of the business owners in town are sandwiched together in the conference space at the rec hall, an old room that I’m pretty sure is used to store Easter decorations if the slightly terrifying six-foot bunny in the back corner is any indication. It smells like stale coffee and hairspray and the ladies from the salon haven’t stopped cackling since they stepped through the door. It’s like sitting cross-legged in the middle of a parade while the drumline marches around me. All of the sound pulls my shoulders tight, an itch of discomfort pricking at my neck.
And I keep making eye contact with that bunny.
I don’t usually come to these types of things, but Stella had insisted. You wanted to be a partner, she said. This is what partners do.
I thought being a partner meant I could buy the fancy fertilizer without checking in with anyone, not attend meetings that serve absolutely no purpose. There’s a reason I chose a job where I spend seventy-five percent of my day outside.
Alone. In the quiet.
I struggle with talking to people. Struggle with coming up with the right words in the right sequence at the right time. Every single time I come into town, I feel like everyone is looking right at me. Some of that is in my head, I know, but some of it is—
Some of it is Cindy Croswell pretending to fall in the aisle at the pharmacy just so I have to help her up again. Or Becky Gardener from the school asking me if I can host a field trip while eyeing me up like I’m a rare steak with a side of potatoes. I’ve got no idea what goes on half the time I come into town, but I feel like people lose their damn minds.
“You’re not paying attention,” Layla chimes in from my right, legs crossed and hand rummaging around in the giant bowl of popcorn she brought with her. Layla runs the bakery at the farm while Stella holds down the tourism and marketing side of things. Since Inglewild is the size of a postage stamp and Stella has a bone-deep urge to make Lovelight Farms a cornerstone of the community, we seem to be expected to be involved in a lot of town business.
I don’t even know what this meeting is about.
“Where did the popcorn come from?”
I glance at the gargantuan bag stuffed under her chair. I know for a fact there’s some brownies and half a box of crackers in there. She says the Inglewild bi-monthly small business owner’s meeting is a drag without a snack and I’m inclined to agree. Not that she’s offered to share.
Layla circles one finger right in front of my face and ignores my question. “You have that moony look on your face. You’re thinking about Evelyn.”
“Was not.” I sigh and roll my shoulders, desperate to relieve the tension that sits between them. “I was thinking about the pepper crop,” I lie.
I’m distracted. I’ve been that way since two hazy nights in August. Sweat-slicked skin. Hair like midnight. Evie St. James had smelled like sea salt and tasted like citrus.
I haven’t had my head on straight since.
Layla rolls her eyes and crams another handful of popcorn into her mouth. “Okay, sure. Whatever you say.”
Stella reaches across me and snatches the bowl out of Layla’s hands. “They’re getting ready to start. If we could pretend to be professional, that would be great.”
I raise both eyebrows. “For the town meeting?”
“Yes, for the town meeting. The one in which we are currently in attendance.”
“Ah, yes. Always very professional.”
At the last town meeting, Pete Crawford tried to filibuster Georgie Simmons during a vote on new parking restrictions in front of the co-op. He had re-enacted Speed, complete with props and voices.
Stella levels me with a look and turns back to the front of the room with the bowl in the crook of her arm. Layla shimmies closer and rests her chin at my elbow. I sigh and look up at the heavy wooden beams that cut across the ceiling and pray for patience. There’s a deflated balloon stuck up there, probably leftover from the Valentine’s Day event they had last month. A speed dating thing, I think. My sisters had tried to make me go and I locked myself in my house and turned off my phone. I stare at the balloon and frown. A faded red heart, deflated and stuck, string wrapped around and around.
“Have you talked to her since she left?”
A couple of times. A bland text sent in the middle of the night after one too many beers. A generic response. A picture from her of an open field, somewhere out there in the world, a line of text that said not as nice as your farm but still pretty nice. I had fumbled my phone into the dirt when that message came through, my thumb tracing back and forth over her words like I had my hands on her skin instead.
A social media influencer. An important one, apparently. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that. Millions and millions of followers. I looked her up one night when the silence of my house felt suffocating, my thumb tapping at the screen of my phone. I checked her account and couldn’t stop staring at that little number at the top.
I never checked her account again.
I’ve had one-night stands before. Plenty of them. But I can’t get Evie out of my head. Thinking about her is like a hunger in the hollow of my stomach, a buzzing just under my skin. We spent two nights together in Bar Harbor. I shouldn’t—I don’t know why I still see her when I close my eyes.
Twisted up in bedsheets. Hair in my face. That half-smile that drove me crazy.
“I was thinking about peppers,” I say again, determined to hold onto this lie. It’s best not to give Layla an inch. She’ll take a mile and the shirt off your back for the trouble of it. I grew up with three sisters. I can sense the inquisition like a wind change.
“Your face does not say you’re thinking about bell peppers. It says you’re thinking about Evelyn.”
“Stop looking at my face.”
“Stop making the face you’re making and I’ll stop looking at it.”
I sigh.
“I just think it’s a shame, is all,” Layla reaches across me and grabs another handful of popcorn and a kernel lands in my lap. I flick it off and hit Becky Gardener right in the back of the head. Christ. I wince and sink further in my chair. “You two seemed to hit it off.”
What we seemed to do is circle each other like two skittish kittens. After I went to visit her at the bed and breakfast, I promised I’d give her a wide berth to do her job. It had been harder than I expected, keeping that promise. Seeing her standing among the rows and rows of trees on the farm, a smile on her face, her hands passing over the branches—well. It was like taking a baseball bat to the face. Repeatedly. But the contest meant everything to Stella, and I wasn’t about to ruin our chances with a … with a …
A crush? A flirtation?
I don’t even know what.
All I know is that it was a challenge for me to be around her. I couldn’t stop thinking about my body curled around hers. The way the skin just below her ear tasted. How it felt to have all that hair brush against my jaw, my shoulders, the tops of my thighs. I found myself wanting to make her laugh, wanting to talk to her.
I can count on one hand the number of people I want to talk to.
But we figured it out, settled into a routine while she was here. Cordial conversation and polite nods. A single slice of shared zucchini bread on a quiet afternoon—plenty of space between us. That same electric current that tugged us together at a dive bar in Maine knit slowly back together in a thin thread of connection.
And then she left. Again.
And unfortunately for me, I still haven’t figured out how to stop thinking about her.
“What kind of peppers?”
I shake my head once, trying to pry loose an image of Evelyn standing in between two towering oak trees on the edge of the property, her face in profile and tilted towards the sky. The sun had painted her in shimmering golds, leaves fluttering lightly around her. I clear my throat and adjust my position in the folding chair, my knee knocking sideways into Layla’s. I’m way too big for these chairs and there are too many damn people in this room. “What?”
“What type of peppers are you planting? I haven’t seen any markers for peppers out in the field.”
The back of my neck goes hot. “You never go out in the fields.”
“I’m in the fields every day.”
She walks through the fields, sure, on the way to the bakehouse situated smack dab in the middle of them. But she never finds herself in the produce crop. Not unless she needs something. I scratch at my jaw, frustrated. I’d bet my savings she finds something she needs out there tomorrow morning.
“Bell,” I manage between clenched teeth.
Shit, now I need to go out and plant bell peppers.
Layla hums, eyes alight with mischief. “What color?”
“What?”
“What color bell pepper—” she puts an annoying emphasis on the words. “—have you planted?”
“He planted red bell peppers in the southeast fields in two rows next to the zucchini. Which you will get absolutely none of if you do not pay attention,” Stella snaps. Layla and I both glance at her in shock. It’s not like Stella to get aggravated. Not to mention that is … not a true statement. And we both know it.
Some of the steel melts out of her shoulders and she slumps, handing Layla back her popcorn bowl.
“Sorry. I’m stressed.”
“Clearly,” Layla says in a laugh, hand back to rummaging around in her snacks. Her eyes find mine and hold, narrowing until all I can see is a glimpse of hazel. She still has some jelly in her hair from baking earlier today. Strawberry, by the looks of it. She points her finger right between my eyebrows and taps me there once. “Don’t think I’m going to forget about this.”
I swat her hand away. She could persist on this topic for the next six months for all I care. It’ll just sound like background noise.
I turn my attention to Stella and wedge my boot against hers. She stops the nervous tapping of her foot and grimaces. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize over,” I shrug and scan the edges of the room. “Luka not coming?”
If Luka were here, he’d smooth his hand between her shoulder blades and she’d melt like butter. They were like that before they got together, and it took them a stupidly long time to see what was right in front of them. I didn’t win the town-wide betting pool, but it was close. Gus over at the fire station hasn’t shut up about it, going as far as making a plaque to hang above the ambulance bay at the firehouse. It says Inglewild’s Top Matchmaker, like he had anything to do with Luka and Stella orbiting each other for close to a decade. I slip down further in my seat and try to rearrange my legs so I actually fit in this damn chair.
“He’s on his way,” she says, eyes darting to the door and holding like she can make him appear by sheer force of will. A hand pushes tangled black curls off her face. “But he’s running late.”
“He’ll be here,” I assure her. Pretty sure Luka wouldn’t miss this for anything. Even if his tiny Italian mother and all her ferocious sisters were blocking the door. If he said he’d come, he’ll be here.
“Hey,” I lower my voice and lean closer, conscious of Layla still snacking away on my right. She’s started tossing pieces up in the air and catching them in her mouth. Accurate every time. “I didn’t plant any bell peppers.”
That seems to relax Stella a bit, a coy smile turning the corners of her lips. “I know that.”
“Why’d you lie then?”
“Because you looked like you needed an out. And I know a thing or two about having to sort through feelings before you can share them with everyone else.” The door to the rec hall creaks open and Luka steps inside, eyes searching. His hair is sticking in every direction, the edge of his shirt half-tucked into his jeans. He looks like he ran straight here from the Delaware border. Stella breathes out a sigh and a grin pulls her mouth wide. An answering smile blooms on Luka’s face the second he finds her in the crowd. Watching them together is like shoving a cupcake directly into my face.
“Plus,” Stella’s eyes don’t blink away from Luka as he tries to climb his way through rows of people to get to the empty seat next to her. He knocks over a folding chair and almost sends Cindy Croswell to the ground with it. “I’ve been wanting bell peppers on the farm for ages.”
“Ah, okay. There it is.”
“Luka makes really good stuffed peppers,” she chuckles as Luka slips into the space next to her. His hand immediately sneaks under her hair and her shoulders do a little shimmy as she leans further into him. I avert my eyes to the front of the room where Sheriff Jones is getting ready at the wooden podium, but I don’t miss the low murmuring between them, the way Stella folds her body into his. How Luka’s foot hooks in the bottom of her chair to pull her a little bit closer.
Not for the first time, I’m jealous. I’ve never had that with another person. Never been able to slide into someone’s space and press my fingertips to their skin, watch them lean further into me.
I think of my thumb against a full bottom lip, red as a cherry, and shift in my seat. The metal squeaks ominously beneath me.
I’d really love to stop thinking about Evelyn.
Layla leans around me, her bowl digging into my ribcage. “The maintenance closet is available if you two want to get a room.”
I snort a laugh. Stella groans. Luka bends forward and scoops his hand in the popcorn bowl.
“Does it have a lock?”
Layla cackles loud enough to attract attention from the front of the room. Some of the salon ladies stop their conversation to give us a look and Alex from the bookstore raises his coffee in greeting. I notice Deputy Caleb Alvarez standing just behind the Sheriff, a smile twitching on his lips, his gaze fixed on Layla.
I catch Stella’s eye and she grins.
“Alright, let's get this show on the road.” Sheriff Dane Jones clears his throat and then clears it again, the chatter in the room quieting as everyone settles in for the meeting. “First order of business. Ms. Beatrice, the police department would appreciate it if you stopped trying to tow the cars in front of the cafe on your own. You don’t have the equipment for it, and using your vehicle as a battering ram has resulted in a few complaints.”
“She tried to kill me,” Sam Montez shouts from the back of the room, his hat falling off sideways as he jumps from his chair. “I was out of my car for a minute—two tops—and she tried to kill me!”
I hide my smile behind my fist. Sam has a bad habit of double parking. Not usually a problem on our small town roads, but annoying all the same. I can just barely make out the top of Ms. Beatrice’s head sitting at the end of the front row, her gray hair pulled into a messy bun. She mutters something that I don’t quite catch. Dane frowns, and Caleb practically swallows his tongue.
“Well, there’s no need for that kind of language. If someone is blocking the loading dock, you can give me or Caleb a ring.”
She mumbles something else and Shirley from the salon gasps. Dane pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Bea, what have I told you about making threats of physical violence in front of a police officer. Sam, sit down.”
Sam drops down in his seat and scoops up his hat. Luka reaches across me for another handful of popcorn from Layla’s bowl.
“You undersold this meeting, La La.”
“They’re not usually this colorful,” Stella tells him, accepting a piece of offered popcorn.
“Yes, they are,” Layla and I reply in unison.
“Next up,” Dane glances down at the stack of papers on the podium and lets out a muffled groan. He glances at Caleb with a pleading expression. Caleb shrugs and Dane turns back to the room. “Ms. Beatrice, if you could kindly remove the WANTED posters from the window of the shop, that would be great.”
This time I’m not the only one who has to stifle a laugh. The room breaks out into a low murmur and Caleb has to completely turn around to hide his grin, his back facing the audience and his shoulders shaking. Ms. Beatrice has been putting up WANTED signs in her windows for months now, ever since she caught two tourists in the back bathroom using the sink in new and creative ways.
Dane tilts his head to listen to whatever Ms. Beatrice has to say on the matter. “I agree public indecency is a crime, but again, just give me or Caleb a call.” He holds up his hand to cut off her response and glances down at the podium, eager to move the conversation along. But whatever he sees has him folding up the whole stack of paperwork with a grunt. “Alright, Beatrice, clearly you and I need to have a side conversation. We’ll table the—“ he flips over the paper and glances at it again. “—other seven things for another time.”
“Do you think someone complained about how she refuses to buy almond milk?” Layla whispers out of the corner of her mouth. She did buy it, actually. She just put it in a canister that says hipster juice on the side.
“Probably something about Karen and the latte incident,” I reply. I rarely come into town during the afternoons, but I happened to be walking by the day Ms. Beatrice refused to serve Karen Wilkes on account of her being rude to the wait staff. A latte somehow found its way all over Karen’s faux fur bomber jacket. Can’t say I blame her for that one.
“Alright,” Dane’s voice booms over the room and everyone settles again. “Next up. The pizza shop is, uh—” he hesitates, rubbing his fingertips over his mustache and down his chin. He taps there once and glances around the room. “Matty would like you all to know there’s a special this month. Half the profits on Wednesdays go to the elementary school to fund their science trips.”
Stella’s hand shoots into the air. Dane looks like he wants to walk out the door and keep walking. “Yes, Stella?”
“Is this an appropriate time to share that I think you two are the cutest couple I’ve ever seen in my life and express my congratulations that you’ve finally moved in together?”
“I like the wreath you put on your door,” Mabel Brewster adds from somewhere in the middle of the room. “And the birdbath in the front yard. Didn’t know you had such an eye for gardening, Sheriff.”
The rest of the room bursts into a series of comments and questions on the Sheriff’s love life.
“Did you see them at the farmer’s market? I swear I’ve never seen Dane Jones smile so much.”
“Do you mean he smiled once? Because I think that’s the standing record.”
“They were holding hands. He bought Matty flowers.”
“Where is Matty? You can’t keep him locked up just because you two are an item now.”
I sink further in my chair, the hum of sound rising up and over me. It’s like a buzz in the back of my head, a ringing in my ears. I press my thumb deep into my palm and try to focus there instead.
Dane looks about ready to burst at the front of the room, his cheeks a flaming red above his beard, hands fussing with the hat tucked under his arm.
I nudge Stella with my elbow. “You’re not worried this is going to turn on you?”
“What do you mean?”
I gesture between her and Luka. “When are you two moving in together?”
“Oh,” she waves her hand, unconcerned. “As soon as we can figure out how to add more space. I don’t think Luka is ready for me in my full messy glory quite yet.”
Stella lives in a cottage on the opposite side of the farm from my cabin, a tiny house filled to the brim with old magazines and half-empty coffee mugs. It looks like an eighty-year-old woman with a hoarding problem lives there, Luka’s interference be damned. I once heard them arguing about kitchen towels with gnomes on them. Stella didn’t want to throw them away because, apparently, they’re a conversation piece.
“We’ll move in together when we can add a bedroom or two so he has someplace to cry when I don’t fold his t-shirts exactly right.” She shrugs, jostling Luka’s arm around her shoulders. He pinches her lightly without even looking and her smile spreads into a grin. “I’m happy to share that with anyone who asks. All of this—Dane needs to know we love him. We love them. He told me once he didn’t think he was enough for Matty. He was afraid to take the chance.” She leans into Luka, her temple against his chin. “He deserves to know he’s got the town rooting for him. That we’re glad he’s happy.”
That’s all well and good, but Dane looks like he’s about to melt into the floor.
“Even if it derails the rest of this meeting?”
She grins. Luka shouts something about matching china patterns. There’s an answering cheer throughout the small room and Dane presses his fist to his forehead. “Especially then.”
I lean back in my seat with a chuckle and cross my arms over my chest, pull my baseball cap low over my eyes, and stretch my legs out as much as I’m able. Best just to wait these things out, in my experience.
I close my eyes, breathe in deep, and think about peppers.