Authors: Amber Lin
Armed with a large rusty trimmer and a corroded hand pruner, she went to work pulling apart what years had wrought, building a pile of broken branches behind her, uncovering the secrets of this house in a way she couldn’t do for its owner.
Lucy’s cousin owned the Feed & Seed one town over, and Lucy was always on Natalie’s case to go on a date with him. He would have donned a suit for her, taken her to the steakhouse and proposed within the month. He was a settle-down kind of guy, and Natalie wanted to settle down, so what was the problem?
She wanted a home and a family, but she also wanted the thrill, the passion. She wanted her husband so hot for her that he came up behind her in the middle of the day to make love. Was that too much to ask?
Closer to the ground, the flora definitely changed, probably grass and weeds encroaching from the sides, but she didn’t stop. Almost afraid to look too closely at what was inside, she cut away all around, yanked at the overgrowth from the ground and pulled down unruly vines forming a canopy over the top. Despite her dedication, the work was sloppy, leaving the bulk of the bush intact. But when the strata above the wood enclosure was clear, she knew. Somehow, the garden had survived. Not just one ultra-hardy plant, which would have been understandable, but a whole slew of them: bell peppers, jalapeños, some other thin stalks of unclear breed and several types of herbs. The basil plant was practically a monster, with the thickest base she had ever seen and a multitude of high stalks with broad, pungent leaves.
She knew she looked a mess, her hair decorated with leaves and small twigs, her arms scratched to high heaven. Holding her large, rusty shears, she was like an old mad scientist, having brought this thing back to life. Insane, but also satisfying. Exhilarating in a way serving eggs and hash browns to bleary-eyed customers couldn’t compete with. And with these to season the pot, she could make even that canned chili taste good.
After digging in the kitchen for a colander, she got on her knees to pick whatever vegetables and leaves were intact. Finished, she carried the tools back to the barn. As she set them in place, footsteps crunched closer to the door.
She leaned against a stall as he came in. “Hey. Saw you on the tractor.”
He looked surprised but pleased to find her there. “Hey back. Figured I’d give it a try. It runs like shit but gets the job done, I guess. Well, it would, if I had six months instead of two weeks.” He peered closer, a faint uncertain smile curving his lips. “What have you been up to?”
“Come see. I have something to show you.”
Looking bemused, he allowed her to lead him across the yard. She explained briefly how she’d seen the growth and decided to cut it back, then found a blossoming garden inside, a little Atlantis in a sea of barrenness. “The fact that any of these plants survived means this’ll be a great spot once you clear more of this out, get some seedlings in here.”
“You did all this?” He sounded stunned.
She looked at the rather modest showing, seeing it through his eyes now, and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “It passed the time better than snooping in your attic.”
Even though it had been snooping of a different kind. Agricultural snooping, like counting the rings in a tree to learn its history.
He laughed, the sound a little sharp. “I bust my ass every day and can’t even get the soil to behave. You spend a couple of hours out here and you’ve already got more green than me.”
She frowned. “It’s just a garden. And it’s not even mine.”
“It was my mother’s.” He shook his head. “We certainly didn’t grow things here. I barely even came back here.”
His mother had died when he was only an infant. A complication related to the birth. That made this garden...really freaking old. “Maybe your dad watered it even if he didn’t harvest it.”
That caustic laugh again. “I was lucky if he remembered to feed me, so I doubt he remembered to tend a garden for no reason. No, I take it back. That was exactly the kind of thing he would do.”
Staring at the garden, she swallowed hard, because what could she say to that? Sawyer’s father had been a cold, selfish man. But he’d also been mired in the past, more interested in the wife who’d passed away than the son she’d left behind.
Sawyer disappeared into the barn and returned a moment later with the shears. She almost started forward, thinking he was going to tear apart the puny little garden in some sort of rebellion, but no. He was finishing her work, all the high-up branches of the overgrown bush that she couldn’t reach. The thick stalks she’d left behind. He had to be exhausted already, but he worked carefully, methodically. She recognized his actions for what they were: not anger at his father but homage to his mother.
She sat down on the cooling, shadowed grass to watch him and silently will her support.
After some time, he said, “Tell me the rest of the story.”
“What?”
“I want to hear your voice.”
His was muffled, but his request touched her. She didn’t want him to feel alone any more than she wanted to be alone.
“Let’s see, where did I leave off? So the prince is working under the gardener, and in his kingdom there are three princesses. Well, every time the prince delivers flowers to the castle, he ties a lock of his golden hair around the bouquet of the youngest princess. Years pass, and they all grow up. The two older sisters eventually get married off to highborn lord types.”
She picked at blades of grass as she spoke, pretending not to watch the way sweat gleamed on his shoulders or his odd, thoughtful expression as he worked. There was already too much mixing, too much emotion on top of their physical chemistry, like snow piling on a tree branch. When it became too much, what would break?
“Come time for the youngest princess to marry, the king brings in all the highborn lords and she refuses them. Then he brings in all the merchants, and she refuses them. Finally he brings in all the commoners, and she chooses the lowly gardener’s apprentice.”
He gave her a look of disbelief. “The king lets his daughter marry a gardener’s apprentice?”
“Hush, it’s romantic.” Though she did appreciate the proof that he was listening. “So everyone is happy for a while, but eventually their kingdom comes under attack. They are really in trouble, and the prince is desperate to protect his wife and her family. Well, that sorcerer he saved still remembers him and offers him a magical sword.”
He snorted.
“This is not a dirty story,” she reprimanded.
“Every story’s a dirty story when it comes out of your mouth.”
She tried to be offended but felt ridiculously pleased instead. This was what she wanted, this simple domesticity tinged with lust, the intersection of her lifelong hopes and secret fantasies.
“All right, then. Why don’t you tell me a story?” Her voice came out sultry, not an affectation but a side effect of the want coursing through her body.
“Anything I want?” he challenged with a lift of his brow.
She shrugged slightly. “It’s your story.”
He sat back on his heels, his chest sweaty and dirty and gleaming, his jeans taut around straining thighs. “Once upon a time there was a woman.”
“A princess?” she teased.
“A naked princess.”
His voice was light enough that she knew he didn’t expect her to do it. This was all a game, but she wanted to raise the stakes. She wanted to experience his fantasy, whatever it might be.
Standing up, she drew her sundress over her head and tossed it aside. Next came her panties. Her hair fell out of the braid she’d tried to tame it with, and then it was just her, bared and waiting for his instructions.
He hadn’t moved at all, but a muscle ticked in his jaw as his gaze roamed her body.
She grew hot from the appreciative look in his eyes but nervous too. “What does the princess do?”
“She’s waiting for her prince.” He jerked his head to the grass. “On her hands and knees.”
A smile curved her lips, but she obeyed, sliding her fingers through slick grass. She heard him approach, but kept her eyes downcast. He was behind her a long time, his admiration almost palpable. Lightly, slowly, he added touch, stroking along her back, down the sides of her legs and up the inside of her thighs. Then there, where she was wet and needy and jolted at his caress.
His fingers slipped inside her, gently exploring until they found a spot that made her grunt. Very unprincess-like. “Do it again,” she gasped.
“Bossy,” he said, though he did as she commanded again, then again.
Even with her hands on the ground, she’d begun to lose her bearings, so focused was she on her pleasure, but the heat of his embrace brought her back.
“It’s the royal blood.” Her breath was coming hard and fast and
almost
—she was almost there.
“I don’t mind,” he murmured against the back of her shoulder. His fingers were working and working, driving her to the brink. “I know what to do with a bossy princess. I’ll give her exactly what she wants.”
He paused, to drive her mad, withholding now. With his other hand, he reached around and pressed two fingers against her lips. Her mouth opened to him, tasting sweet grass and dirt and man. If this was what a gardener’s apprentice could do, no wonder the princess had chosen him from all the land.
She sucked him gently, held on to him with her mouth and her sex, grounded in him. It was messy and kinky. How did he
know
this was what she had always wanted, because it was...oh, God.
She must have made some sound, some sign of distress, because he soothed her. “Just let go. I’ve got you. Give in to it.”
Even then he gave her no respite from his fingers in her mouth, controlling her, owning her, and that was exactly how she wanted it. She never wanted a break from this, from him, never wanted to be without his hold on her, never wanted him to walk away again.
It was too much, the physical sensations like liquid fire, the earthy taste of his skin a catalyst. She was coming on his hand, biting down, she thought distantly, on his fingers, and this was how she wanted to come forever, at his hands, kneeling before him.
Before she had recovered, he flipped her over. She stared blankly up at the sky, her limbs lax with bliss, only vaguely aware when his head lowered between her legs, but, oh, when he touched his tongue to her swollen skin, she knew then. She jumped, writhed, but whatever mercy had lent him patience in their earlier play was gone now, evaporated with the blistering afternoon sun, sweated out of him. There was only this man, coarse and wild, her prince, crowned by the sun.
He lapped up the proof of her climax, then bent to produce another. Then another, until all that was left of her was a sore puddle of sated muscles. She gazed up at him from beneath heavy lids. He looked fierce and frantic with need, the sight filling her with a desire to please him however she could—so long as it didn’t require her to move.
He put his hand beneath her breasts, not putting his weight on her, but firm. Kneeling between her splayed legs, he jerked himself off in rough, cruel tugs, and soon he was spilling onto her belly, her sex, onto the small patch of grass that separated her bottom and his knees. The warm lashes on her skin were like a brand, a sign of his ownership, a mark of pride.
But all of that was in her head, an endorphin-fueled fantasy. She blinked up at the washed-out sky—now
that
was real. The storm coming tomorrow was real. Sawyer leaving was real. And she had to remember that. She kept forgetting.
Chapter Eight
Sawyer spent that night trying out every position and kinky act his fevered mind could think of, but there was a catch. The more sex he had with Natalie, the more he craved it. A web spun tighter and tighter around him, the venom so sweet he wasn’t sure he’d ever want to leave.
The morning dawned overcast and drizzly, so for the first day in weeks, he didn’t work in the fields. Far from discouraging him, the brief repast of homemade pancakes and coffee was rejuvenating. He looked out at the monochromatic expanse and felt pride. He looked at Natalie, disheveled and sex-softened in one of his shirts, and felt pride.
He began to plan. As if approaching a town on the horizon, the lines sharpened and blurred shapes took form. Maybe he really would make a go of this. He’d purchase some new equipment, see if anyone in town was looking for a job.
And if he did lose the farm, he realized with some surprise, it would feel like a real loss. But even then, he wouldn’t have to leave Dearling. Hell, Joe was supposed to be a farmer, same as him, but he was sheriff now. Sawyer could move into the town proper and become the resident bank robber just to fuck with him. Or maybe Natalie would let him move into her apartment above the diner, a live-in sex slave.
Point was, he had options.
After a particularly vigorous round, he collapsed with Natalie onto the sofa. He drowsed, appreciating the slight weight of her and the way she trailed her fingers over his chest.
A beautiful woman initiating mind-blowing sex—this was the life. Well, he wasn’t sure if wiping down the kitchen counter counted as initiating, but she’d bent over and he’d lost it. Two minutes flat, and her skirt was flipped up, a condom slipped on, and he was balls deep. In three minutes, she was coming, clenching around him and crying out “oh, God,” so he figured she didn’t mind the interruption too much.
A crack of thunder broke the silence, heralding the climax of the storm as Joe had predicted. He tensed, involuntarily. Natalie’s fingers paused, then resumed their gentle stroking. He was grateful she was willing to ignore his...whatever this was. Because it was goddamned embarrassing.
He felt shaken, the electricity in the air from the storm amplifying his internal revelations. Worse, his body was interpreting the endorphin rush as the prep time in a mission. The low rumble of thunder became distant fire, closing in on their position. The thickening storm clouds became the cover of night, go time.
“I never finished my story.” Her soft voice startled him, like a prayer answered, because if she was here, none of it was real. He was home, and he was with her. She was softness and sex, kindness and kinship, and he wondered if she’d ever stop bringing him back.
“Yes, you did,” he finally managed. “The prince married the princess. Then they had sex on the grass.”
“That was you and me, not the characters. And that wasn’t the end.”
Yeah, but he’d felt a little like that, like an unworthy imposter preying upon a princess, a commoner at the altar of a goddess. “Tell me the rest of the story. Tell me how it ends.”
“Where were we? So the prince takes his magic sword, puts on a disguise and goes to help the king. The battle is fierce, and the prince’s foot is injured, but he does indeed win the day. No one knows who this masked savior was. The next day, the king visits his youngest daughter to invite her and her husband, who is now the gardener, to the big celebration. Instead, he sees the prince through the bushes, wrapping up his injured foot.”
“Surprise, surprise,” he murmured, but he could feel himself unraveling, just a bit, settling into the comfort of her voice.
“Exactly. The king figures out that it was him, and when they are all at the big celebration dinner, he announces that his heir to the throne will not be one of the lords his eldest daughters married, but the gardener who saved the whole kingdom.”
“And they all lived happily ever after,” he concluded.
“Almost everyone. The first king, the prince’s father, had recently passed away, leaving no other heir. The guards confessed to setting the prince free and there was a big search for him. The sorcerer had told them where to find him, and so his true identity was revealed.”
He slanted his eyes open. “So he got both kingdoms?”
She nodded. “How’s that for a happy ending?”
It was the predictable end, so he shouldn’t have been surprised. Somehow, though, it annoyed him. As if maybe she was thinking of him as the golden-haired prince in more ways than a little royalty role-play. He’d noticed the similarities: the prince had an asshole father, he’d gone off to fight his own battles and had ended up inheriting the kingdom—assuming this farm could be called such. But there was one crucial difference she didn’t know. The prince had saved that kingdom with his ridiculous magic sword, and Sawyer’s farm was soggy, unfertile land. There was no magic sword—or hoe or tractor—for him. “Yeah, real happy.”
“You seem upset.”
“I said it’s happy. It’s just...”
“Just what?”
It wasn’t the way things worked. It was fine to tell stories to children, but he knew better...and so did she. “It’s not exactly realistic.”
“Of course it’s not. That’s what fairy tales are all about. They show us what’s possible.”
“There’s a sorcerer,” he said dryly.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
“What’s the moral here? Have long golden hair? Guess I’m shit out of luck, then.”
When she sat up without meeting his eyes, he thought maybe okay hadn’t really been okay. And when she excused herself and stiffly walked outside, he thought, yeah, he’d fucked up. But he was still strung too tight to follow her.
When he’d had a minute to cool down and think logically, he could see his mistake. Who complained that a fairy tale had a happy ending? It was like complaining that sex kept resulting in an orgasm.
Yeah
, she’d said
.
Okay.
He’d been stupid...and vain enough to think that a story told by her grandmother, written hundreds of years ago probably, was about him. Well, it wasn’t. Fictional, golden-haired princes got kingdoms. He got an old farm with no water rights.
He didn’t care about that. He had never cared about this place. Except when he’d come home and seen those medals hanging on the wall, those horrible “fuck you” medals in a place of honor, he’d...yeah, he’d started to wonder. Wonder if maybe his dad had ignored him for all those years because running a farm on your own was really goddamned hard. Or that perhaps the comments about Sawyer’s lack of strength, intelligence or anything that would make him worthy of the Nolan family name was his twisted way to make him work harder, become better, in preparation for the day when he would run this farm. None of that made the guy a saint, but it did make him a father.
Sawyer followed Natalie through the back door and saw her standing out away from the house, near the barn. Wind whipped her hair around her face and drew the lines of her body beneath her dress. Her stance was tall and proud, but there was something forlorn about her. He remembered watching her as she slept, the puzzling sense that she was alone in a crowd.
In his youthful frustration, he had only been able to see his father through the lens of his wants, his needs. With Natalie, it had been the same way.
This is what you are to me.
His father had demanded too much from him, and she too little. His father was the wrathful sea, driving him farther away from home. She was sweet Penelope, someone to long for. He had left them both, with so much to prove, so damned self-centered he had barely seen past her pretty smile.
He thought of the courage it had taken to drive to his barn and ask him out when their last real intimacy, in high school, had ended with him callously rejecting her. He thought of the strength it took to run the diner on her own. Now he wondered,
Who are you away from me?
What do you long for?
* * *
Natalie shivered at the wet spray across her face and wondered what she was really waiting for. For the storm to clear up? No, she had been mooning over Sawyer ever since he arrived back in town. And before that? Always waiting, and her self-imposed bonds were starting to chafe.
Over the rush of wind in her ears, she heard the crunch of gravel that signaled Sawyer’s approach. She didn’t feel ready to confront him, was barely ready to deal with herself, but there was nowhere to hide. And maybe it was time to stop doing that anyway.
She turned to face him. His expression was inscrutable, his eyes as turbulent as the sky above them.
“How’s the diner?”
She blinked. The diner? He said it as casually as asking about the weather. It was fine. A little chilly. No, it sucked horribly, but she didn’t have control over either of them. “It’s good, I guess,” she finally said. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of cleanup to do once I get back. Most of that stuff needed replacing, so now I’ll finally get around to it.”
“Most of what stuff?”
“Uh...everything really. The booths, the plateware. The register is the same one Gran bought, and the period key sticks. Let me tell you, when we hire a high school kid to help with the summer rush, there are more than a few wrong checks. One time, this guy was passing through and we charged him over $300 dollars for the Riverboat breakfast plate. And he paid it. No one even realized until I was running the numbers at the end of the month. All I could do by then was refund the whole amount, so really he got a free breakfast out of it.”
“You’re rambling,” he said, a smile softening his face. Everything about him looked softer. Not soft, quizzical, as if trying to figure something out.
“I do that.”
“When you’re nervous,” he finished for her. “You said ‘when we hire,’ but there’s no
we
, right? It’s your diner. You could have replaced stuff anytime, if it needed it, if you wanted to.”
A flush heated her cheeks at his scrutiny that felt like criticism. “It can get expensive to do that. We aren’t exactly fine dining.”
“I guess. But you were in my house a day and it already looks completely different. You made an entire garden out of nothing.”
“You know that’s not what happened. It was already—”
“Exactly. You do that, uncover things, make them better. But the diner looks the same as it did twenty years ago. Well, it looks worse, because now it’s been twenty years.”
The wind was really raging now, lashing at her, and her heart beat heavily in her chest, under attack. Who was he to question the way her Gram had done things? “It’s none of your business.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Just like it’s none of your business what I do with this farm. Maybe I should make up a story about a princess who inherits a royal dining facility.”
“I didn’t make that up.” So maybe she’d subconsciously picked that one for a reason, but dammit, he had no right to question her. She cared about him. She loved him. She had always loved him, from the day she saw him in the halls of elementary school, far too shy to ever approach him. Then in high school when he had finally looked at her with heat in his eyes and kissed her. Even when he walked away from her, even when she knew he would do it again, she loved him. And she hated it.
“Fine,” he said. “It was a random story. And you like the color puce and chipped plates and a diner that you never wanted any more than I wanted this farm.”
“Stop it.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the storm. “Stop being an ass because you’re freaked out. Stop pushing me away because you don’t know what you want. It’s not my fault you hate this town. It’s not my fault your dad was a coldhearted bastard—and so are you!”
His eyes flickered ominously. Damn, she hadn’t meant to say that last part at all, but it was true and she couldn’t take it back.
“You’re right. I don’t really know what I want. I never wanted this farm before and maybe I still don’t. But at least I’m doing something here. At least I’m giving it a shot. What have you been doing in that diner except...existing? Is that what you want?”
She tasted the mist and realized her mouth hung open. He looked a little shocked too.
He stepped closer, but it wasn’t threatening. It was almost tender, the look of regret on his face. Almost protective the way his body blocked the wind. His skin was glistening, dripping, and only then did she realize it was raining, that she was crying.
“I didn’t mean to say that.” But she knew he had.
“Go to hell,” she said, but she leaned closer, wanting his heat, wanting him to take it back. Was it true? The diner meant everything to her. No, Gram meant everything, but she wasn’t here anymore. Even in Austin, that was only her body. She wasn’t aware, couldn’t think anymore, and it made Natalie hurt so bad.
“Tell me what
you
want,” he said, and it sounded like begging.
And if a man like Sawyer was willing to beg, then she was willing to submit. Maybe it would be better somehow. Maybe it would mean something to him.
“I want you to stay,” she said haltingly. “I want to wake up every morning in this house with you beside me. I want you to kiss me goodbye on your way out to the farm and again when you come inside to eat the dinner I’ve cooked for you. I want you to pretend to care about the new drapes I’ll make for the kitchen window. I want you to love this town like I do, to be connected to the land like I am. I want you to
want
this.”
She took a deep breath. “Can you do that, Sawyer? Can you give me that?”
His throat muscles worked as he swallowed. She’d known what his answer would be. She had promised herself never to pose the question and face certain rejection. Not just about Sawyer. Never reach for what you want, never deal with the disappointment.
Her whole life was on hold because she couldn’t let Gram go, waiting for something amazing to walk into her diner. Sawyer had changed that, challenged her. So damn desirable and...God, so frustratingly lovable that she had handed him her heart on a platter.
And here he was in front of her, saying, “I can’t.”
No
,
thanks
, he meant.
Not enough.