I even had to stop my car to let a flock of chickens cross the road. (Insert your own joke here, please.)
The main house was at the top of the hill, the highest point for miles, looking down on everything like a genteel old lady (beautiful but stone-faced). Signs pointed me to parking by the main house, and as I pulled into a spot I looked toward the enormous stone barn, where Leo told me he’d be waiting for me. And there he was, towering above a gaggle of Cub Scouts.
He caught my eye and waved, and a teeny tiny butterfly batted her wings in my tummy. I waved back, grabbed the slice of cake I’d brought for him, and set out across the yard. The barn was set up in almost a U shape, wrapped around a central yard shaded by an enormous oak tree. The fieldstone walls were half-timbered and two stories high. Wide beams were visible through open windows, their sashes painted bright red. The original hay bins now contained offices and classrooms. Maxwell Farms was not only a working farm but a teaching farm. I was hoping to learn more about what they were teaching on my tour today.
Boyish laughter made me turn from admiring the window boxes on the second floor, spilling over with brightly colored flowers, to the group clustered around Leo. The boys were jumping and shouting as he held what looked like patches over them, doling them out and calling the kids by name. As I got closer, I could hear him laughing along with the kids.
“I hear you, Owen; you’ll get your activity patch too—don’t worry. Who else? Here you go, Jeffrey, you earned it when you picked the biggest eggplant we’ve had yet this year! Who else? Let’s see . . . oh boy, we can’t forget Matthew—here you go, buddy. You guys are the best Webelos around.”
His smile really was contagious, and I found myself grinning as I crossed the gravel, admiring his high cheekbones, the curve of his lower lip as he laughed, and the green eyes that, when fixed on mine, turned my belly all butterflies.
And that beard. What constituted a hipster beard? Is it the length? The shape? The proximity to flannel and Mumford? We were within twenty yards of an heirloom tomato; does that count as hipster cred?
I hadn’t been a fan of facial hair beyond two-day sexy scruff, yet Leo was sporting an actual beard and I liked it. I more than liked it, I wanted to touch it. Was it scratchy? Soft? Coarse? Touch it, hell—I’d like to look down and see it, and his face, between my thighs. With significantly less clothing than in our previous encounters.
As my breathing speeded up, another image popped into my brain: sweaty, naked parts and grasping, clutching hands. Whew, it seemed hot out! Christ, the farmer was now affecting me physically. Which was good— I wanted physical. I needed physical. So when I saw him pick up a bottleneck squash that mimicked something very specific in my mind, I covered my moan with a cough.
“You okay?” he asked as I reached him.
“Yeah. Why?” I said, tugging at my T-shirt. Air, please—just a little air.
“Sounded like you were—”
“Just clearing my throat,” I said, and quickly changed the topic. “I made the black walnut cake, with cream cheese buttercream frosting.” I thrust the white box into his hands.
“Wow, you really made me cake?” he asked, looking quite pleased.
“Well, I made it for the diner; the rest got sold today.”
“Is it good?” he asked.
I grinned. “It’s fucking great.”
Leo closed his eyes and shook his head, and I realized I’d just F-bombed a Boy Scout troop.
“Ah shit,” I muttered, then clapped my hand over my mouth.
Leo just snorted, and rallied. “Hey there, Jason, you still need your badge, right? Roxie, maybe you could run this cake over to the cooler inside the store there, huh?”
I grabbed the cake and quick-stepped away, heading for the farm stand. I had no idea how to talk to kids, but I was pretty sure swearing in front of them was high on the list of things not to do. I found someone to stick the cake into the fridge, took a breath, and decided to act like it never happened. I headed back to the troop.
“I didn’t know you were playing with friends today,” I said, nodding at the scouts.
“Actually, we’ve got people visiting almost every day, whether it’s a class field trip, new interns rotating through, or a bunch of—”
He was suddenly knocked toward me by a riot of Webelos fighting over the final patch. The wind was nearly knocked out of me as roughly two hundred pounds of Leo collided with me, making me gasp. I was once again in his arms, but this time upright and tucked in, almost hugged. And he. Smelled. Fan. Tastic.
All around us birds chirped, dogs barked, farmhands handed, and Webelos rumpused. But in the moment, all I was aware of were his arms, snug around my waist. His hands, initially on my hips just to steady me, were now kneading like a cat, nudging underneath my defenseless T-shirt, and spreading wide to touch my very lucky lower back.
And hey look, are those my hands, pressed firmly against his flannel-covered chest? Sliding higher, higher, curling over impossibly strong muscles and moving north, around the back of his neck, feeling the tickly ends of his hair . . . And those green eyes are smoldering . . . and interested . . . and hey, I’m up on my tiptoes now, and I bet my boobs look fantastic crushed up against his—
“I’m gonna kick you in the balls!” a Webelo shouted, and I instantly backed away from the muscular chest. And the mouth, which was now tipped up at one end. And his head was nodding, saying oh yeah—this’ll get finished later.
I love getting finished.
Chapter 8
But first I had a farm to tour. And once the Webelos vacated, the tour began. Just me and Leo and seventeen other people who’d signed up to be shown around what I was now learning was the premier organic teaching farm in the Hudson Valley. Some say the state. Some say the Northeast.
Some say it should have been hard for me to concentrate on things like cover crops and rotational crop planting, now that I’d had my hands in that luscious honey-blond hair. But to his credit, Leo gave a helluva tour.
What he’d done with the land since taking it over several years ago was all new to me. The estate had evolved from a house for one family into an entire business community, employing not only a year-round team but a host of summer interns, eager to learn what Leo had to teach them. In the two hours that we walked around the property, I learned more about organic and sustainable farming than I had in my entire lifetime.
“So, when you started to convert the fields back to—what did you call it?” one of the guys on the tour asked.
“It’s called fallow syndrome, when fields haven’t been tended to in a while. You’d think letting a field rest a bit would naturally replenish it, and that’s somewhat true. But if you let farmland just sit for years and years, there’s not a lot of action going on under the surface. So when we first started getting things going here, we turned the earth over, aerated and tilled it, and then planted a green manure crop in all the fields we wanted to be able to grow on.”
A couple of young boys, tagging along with their parents and bored out of their minds judging by the fact that their iPhones hadn’t left their hands since we left the barn, snickered. “Green manure? Is that like vegetable poo?” one of them asked, to the delight of the other.
“Nah, the poo came later,” Leo fired back, clapping the kid on the back and nodding toward the iPhone. “You planning on playing on that thing the whole time?”
“Um, no?”
“Great answer. So, back to the poo—”
“Wait, the poo is real?” the kid asked, looking at his friend in disbelief.
“Dude. This is a farm. There’s poo everywhere,” Leo said seriously. Every single one of us did a discreet quick lift and check of the bottom of our shoes. “Green manure is a cover crop we sow to put some nitrogen back into the soil. Clover’s also great for cows, which works out perfectly, since the next farm over is a dairy farm. The owner’s a friend of mine, and we help each other out. I provide the grazing land, Oscar provides the four-legged
poo machines, and pow.”
“Poo?” the kids asked.
Leo nodded. “Nature’s way of ensuring a good harvest.”
Everyone nodded like this made sense.
“We usually don’t have so much poo talk this early on in the tour, but every now and again we get someone in the group who can’t let the word manure go by without a chuckle. I get it,” Leo said, patting the kid on the shoulder. “Who wants to see the compost pile?”
Both kids forgot all about their iPhones for the rest of the tour, and I heard them telling their father that Leo was “awesome.”
We hiked up and down hills, tucking in and out of hedgerows and along the naturally worn paths between the fields. We saw rows and rows of vegetables, almost every kind imaginable. Pole beans grew vertically up green wood stakes, teepee’d over frothy catnip plants, designed to deter pests in a natural way. Carrots were planted alternately with leeks, which encouraged growth and discouraged something called carrot fly. We stopped periodically to taste, nibbling chive flowers and the first tiny yellow pear tomatoes, planted alongside bushes of purple basil.
We visited the greenhouse, where trays and trays of seedlings were in various stages of growth. Tiny potato seedlings grew next to enormous heads of butter lettuce. We spent some time out in the fields that were deliberately resting from crop production, but hardly dormant. We were up higher on the hills now, the barns and the main house far below in a sea of green.
Just as we were leaving one of the fields, three tractors appeared, towing what looked like . . . outhouses?
“Perfect timing, here come the chickens,” Leo said, herding us into a corner of the field as the tractors made their way out into the middle. “If you look at this field, compared to the one next to it, what do you see?” He looked at everyone, encouraging the kids to answer.
To my left, a field with sheep grazing. To my far left, a field with the aforementioned borrowed cows grazing. And the current field? As each tractor stopped and disengaged its little towed house there were chickens everywhere. Beautiful big birds with glossy feathers, fat and sassy and tumbling out onto the waving grass. Grass. Hmmm . . .
I looked from field to field. “You’re moving the animals to mow the grass,” I piped up. Leo looked straight at me, his expression lighting up at my correct answer, and a feeling of warmth started in my tummy and spread outward.
“Exactly right: the animals are mowing the grass for us.” He pointed toward the cows patiently chewing their cuds. “On that field we’ve got a tasty cover crop of alfalfa grass, with a bit of clover mixed in. The cows chew it, crop it down to about knee high, then we move them on to the next field.”
“And the sheep move into the first field, right?” I pointed to the fluffy snowballs.
“Right again, Roxie,” he said, walking through the group to stand right in front of me.
For a moment, I thrilled at the sound of my name on his lips. And for another moment, I imagined him saying my name over and over again. And then for a particularly naughty moment, I forgot all about my name on his lips, and just imagined me on his lips.
And just like that, he licked them. His lips, I mean. And that sweet feeling of warmth headed straight between my legs. No longer sweet, no longer content. Just lust.
“So what do the chickens do?” someone asked.
Leo was silent, lost in studying . . . me?
“Why do you move the chickens behind the sheep?” the asker repeated.
Leo’s jaw clenched. I stopped breathing.
“The chickens?” the guy repeated.
I started to tell whoever was so worried about the chickens exactly where to go, when Leo luckily intervened.
“The chickens finish the job the sheep and the cows started,” he said, appearing to ground himself in the familiar material. “And in turns, they all fertilize the field. The chickens help to finish aerating the soil and feast on all the bugs left behind, making them fat and happy in a completely natural and stress-free environment. The chickens produce eggs with yolks so orange you’ve never seen anything like it. And the chickens”—he started off down the hill toward the main house—“are at the end of the tour. Let’s head back.”
The group followed dutifully behind him, and I could hear him telling them about how they could help out in their own community, or join the farmshare if they were local. Were we moving faster than normal? We sure seemed to be, as he hurried us down the hill and back to where the tour began, wrapping things up.
He caught me by the elbow as he said, “Thanks for coming out today, folks. Hope you enjoyed your tour. Anyone interested in purchasing anything we’ve made here on the farm, including those orange-yolked eggs I was telling you about, just see Lisa over in the store on your way out.”
He waved good-bye, keeping me close to him with the other hand. My heart sped up a bit at the feel of his hand clutching my elbow. Lucky, lucky elbow. He was touching my wenis. It’s a word—look it up.
“What’s up, Farmer Boy,” I murmured, leaning a little closer to him, grazing my breast against his arm. Now my right boob was as lucky as my right wenis.
“Didn’t want you to run away with the herd. I wanted to show you something,” he murmured back, smiling and nodding and still with the waving. Once the group had left, he steered me across the courtyard and around the back of the stone barn.
“Oh, the employee parking lot,” I remarked as we emerged into the shade of the building, where cars with Maxwell Farms mirror tags were parked. “This is the man-behind-the-curtain stuff, where all the magic happens, right? Gee, thanks for showing me this.”
“You’re a bit of a smart-ass, you know that?” he asked, letting go of my wenis and climbing into an old black Wrangler. “I’d open the door for you, but I took them off last spring and haven’t bothered to put them on again.”
“Maybe this fall you’ll get around to it?” I said, climbing in. “And yes, I’ve been told I’m a smart-ass. Where are we—whoa!” I’d barely buckled my seat belt before he’d backed out of the spot.
We drove down a dirt road behind the stone barns that was equal parts gravel, loose soil, and bone crunch. As we bounced along at kidney-shattering speed, he somehow managed to keep us on the road and plug his iPod into a dashboard that, when originally installed, had likely contained a tape deck. I know this because my mother still had one in our living room. This also happened to be one of her favorite albums.
“U2?” I asked, holding on to the roll bar.
“Oh yeah,” he replied. “Best band in the world.”
Somewhere in the world, my mother was punching the sky like the end of The Breakfast Club. “My mother used to play this album for hours when I was a kid.”
“Did she have a favorite track?” he asked, turning us onto another dirt road, which ran along some of the fields.
“Nine,” I said, knowing the Achtung Baby track list by heart. I smiled as soon as I heard that opening drum beat. And I waited for the annoyance that usually accompanied a thought about my mother, but it didn’t come.
“Good song,” he said, thumping his hand on the steering wheel in time with the music. I thumped too, while holding myself in the Jeep as we went around a tight turn. I caught him looking at me, and he unleashed a huge grin. The sun was low in the sky, a big ball of red highlighting the tall crops out this way, deeper onto the property than I’d known existed. Out here, cornstalks were climbing, wheat was waving, and . . . what was that?
“It’s rye.”
“As in bread?”
“As in grass—ryegrass. Great as a winter crop, cover crop, or as livestock feed, which this field will end up being. I’ll put it up as hay at the end of the season, and sell it to some of the dairy farmers around here.”
“Like Oscar, from the farm next door?” I asked.
“Someone was paying attention,” he teased, and before I could tease him back, he made another crazy turn and we were suddenly headed into the woods.
“Where th
e hell are we going?”
He pointed toward the road. “This way.”
I snorted. “This feels very fairy tale—into the woods and all that. You’re not going to take me to a cabin made of candy and try and eat me, are you?”
“Not today,” he said, giving me the side eye.
I gave it right back. “Well, isn’t that too bad,” I said, keeping my voice low. And just like that, he slowed down. “I was kidding! Don’t go all Children of the Corn on me,” I joked, scooching as far over as I could.
“Relax. We’re here.”
“Where?” We were in an entirely indistinguishable part of the woods we’d been driving through.
He walked around to my side of the Jeep and reached across me to unbuckle my seat belt. As he did, his hand brushed against the outside of my thigh, and I inhaled sharply. He turned toward me at the sound, his gaze knowing. I wrinkled my brows at him, trying to cover. But his hand on my thigh. Oh to the my.
“So where are we?” I repeated.
“Come on out of there, Sugar Snap,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me out of the doorless door. He dropped my hand as soon as I was clear but I could still feel it, like a phantom hand hold. Not to mention the delight that surely showed up in my cheeks at him calling me Sugar Snap. Oh, this shit was on now.
He set off on a barely there path through the woods. We’d gone maybe a hundred yards when he stopped and I almost ran into his back. Recovering, I peered around him.
“What are we looking at?” I whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” he answered back.
“I don’t know,” I said, still whispering. “And you didn’t answer my question.”