Cream of the Crop

  “I thought you had cows to tend to.”

  “That’s the thing about cows,” he said, giving my bottom a swat that made me jump, and in the process, lose one of the boots. “Leave the door open, and they know their way home.”

  I stuck my foot out. “See that? That’s what happens when you smack my ass. I lose your stupid boot and get my foot all muddy.”

  “Something else happens when I smack that ass.”

  I made a show of looking directly at his dick.

  He reached out and pulled me against him once more, holding my bottom in both hands and squeezing tightly. “I knew the first time I saw you walking away from me at the farmers’ market with that great big ass, how much it would jiggle when I smacked it.”

  From any other guy, that statement would have earned its own reciprocal smack. But the way his eyes lit up, and the way he ran his enormous hands over my behind like he was just happy to finally have his hands on it—my tough city girl shield melted a little. Also, let’s not discount what he said about thinking about it and wanting it from the beginning.

  However, he wasn’t walking away completely unscathed.

  “We need to talk about your phraseology,” I said, bumping him back with my hips.

  His hands, restless on my body, twisted into my hair as he tipped me backward once again. “Is that a fancy word for my dick?”

  My burst of laughter caught him off guard, and he grinned, waggling his eyebrows.

  “Seriously, Oscar, you can’t just say things like that. You’re gonna get punched one day for saying shit like that to a girl.”

  “Are we back to that comma nonsense again?” he asked, then blew a raspberry between my breasts. “You have a great ass. You have a big ass. You have a great”—he paused for effect . . . pausing . . . pausing . . . still pausing—“big ass, and I can’t wait to see it bouncing on my dick.”

  “You really are a fucking caveman,” I said, eyes wide.

  “One caveman, coming up,” he replied, spinning me like a top and placing my hands on the porch railing. One of his hands slipped between my legs, and my back arched without thought. I giggled, feeling the warmth of his body against my back, wondering how long it would take before I was screaming out his name again—when I heard footsteps coming up the other side of the porch, and then an unmistakable gasp. And it wasn’t me gasping this time, which was a testament to how surprised I was, considering where Oscar’s hand was.

  “Oscar?” a female voice said, and we both turned.

  Standing on the end of the porch in a buttoned-up trench coat was the cutest little brunette I’d ever seen. She’d unwound her scarf and now stood there like a statue, one hand full of striped wool, and the other full of . . . aluminum foil–covered dishes?

  “Ah shit,” Oscar muttered, tucking me behind him, giving me the barest hint of privacy. “Whoops.” I heard his zipper go up.

  “What on earth is going on here?” she asked, and as I tried to quickly button up my shirt—his shirt—I peeked over his shoulder on tiptoes. She was really cute in a Girl Scout jamboree kind of way. And she was clearly furious.

  “You’re early.”

  “Not that early.”

  “I didn’t realize it had gotten so late—sorry about that. Um, Missy, this is . . . umm . . . this is . . .”

  “Natalie,” I supplied, squeezing his bicep and digging in with my nails. “I’m Natalie.”

  “Yes, sorry. Natalie, this is Missy.”

  The brunette seethed. “His wife.”

  I dug in deeper with my fingernails.

  “Ouch! Stop that!” Oscar looked back over his shoulder at me, then turned to Missy. “You always forget the ex in ex-wife.”

  I retracted my nails. A millimeter.

  “I’ll just put these on the table,” she said, so angry her lips were pinched white. He nodded to her almost nonchalantly, still keeping me tucked behind him. She walked inside through the back door, and I could see her bustling about in a kitchen she was clearly at home in, setting down her dishes, starting to take things like lettuce and carrots out of a grocery bag.

  Oscar and I watched her for a moment, then he turned to me. He didn’t go back to what he was doing before, of course, but he didn’t make any effort to hurry me off the porch, either. I wrinkled my brow. “Ex-wife?”

  “Ex,” he confirmed.

  “Does she know that?”

  He shrugged, easily. “She likes to bring me casseroles on Sundays.”

  I could hear casserole dishes being set down on counters—and they sounded like they were being set down from ten feet above. Oh boy. Time to go.

  “I’m going to go ahead and split.” I looked at his watch. “Wow, I didn’t realize how late it had gotten, either; I was planning to catch that last train back to the city tonight. Gotta be at work tomorrow morning, you know . . .”

  My ramble was cut off by a searing, toe-curling, tongue-­tangling kiss. When his mouth released mine, I continued. “So . . . yeah. Bye.”

  I left with as much grace as I could muster, pulling his work boots back on for my trip across the yard to retrieve my own. He’d folded my muddy clothes and piled them neatly on a chair just outside the barn earlier, so it was a quick snatch-and-grab. I was all elbows and knees and flashes of bum as I slid my jeans on, wincing at the cold and the wet. I gave up trying to wrestle with my muddy Chanel boots, and finally ran, still half dressed, across the yard to the Wagoneer. Avoiding the mud puddle, I went around to the other side and climbed across. I started the car, tossed a wave to a grinning Oscar on the porch, a second wave to a white pinched face glaring at me through the kitchen window, and took off, the rear tires spitting mud and gravel back toward the house.

  On the way home, every single pothole and rut in the road made me bounce, and I felt each bounce all over my body, reminding me of the good kind of sore I felt, and Oscar’s words about bouncing on his dick.

  When I pulled into Roxie’s driveway, she and Leo came out to watch me hop out, half dressed, clothes in my arms and hay in my hair, smiling like a lunatic.

  “Gotta catch that train,” I singsonged as I skipped up the porch steps and into the house, past their curious eyes. I popped my head back around the doorframe. “Is that your famous Sunday chicken I smell? I’m starving!”

  Chapter 12

  I caught the last train back into the city with only three minutes to spare. There’d been an earlier train, but that would have meant missing out on Roxie’s Sunday chicken.

  As I sat in the last car with a take-out container full of leftover chicken, buttermilk mashed potatoes, and garlic and shallot green beans, I thought back over the weekend, balancing the pluses and minuses.

  Plus: The town was adorable.

  Minus: The air was almost too clean.

  Plus: The scenery was lovely.

  Minus: It was too quiet, especially at night. No horns.

  Minus: It was too loud, especially at night. Fucking crickets. Fucking wind. Fucking scary scraping trees everywhere . . .

  Plus: The dicks were large . . .

  Plus: And in charge.

  Plus. Plus. Plus.

  I shivered from the excitement my body still felt whenever I thought about that mouth, those lips, that tongue . . .

  That ex.

  Hmm. What was the story there? I’d spent half a year fantasizing about this guy, and half a day letting him get me off twelve ways from Sunday. And I didn’t even have his phone number.

  I waited for some part of me to feel guilty about that, to tsk-tsk me and shake an admonishing finger and make me feel the teeniest bit shameful for spending naked time with a man I barely knew. But it never came.

  I wanted to know more about him, not because I should, but because he fascinated me. I wanted to know the story that was there, because while he occasionally had these wonder
ful verbal treasure nuggets, for the most part he still responded to every question with yep, nope, or great big ass.

  He also responded with beautiful, pinup, and you taste incredible, but that’s beside the point.

  I still should’ve gotten his phone number. At least then we could send dirty texts . . .

  And as the train ran down the tracks, heading back to my city life, I started pulling up train schedules . . .

  It’s funny how visiting a place just once can imprint it on your psyche. The first time I traveled to Prague, I fell in love with the smoky red-brick-topped roofs, the black-and-white-tiled sidewalks, the sound of a foreign language hopelessly unrecognizable to my American ears, all hard Z’s and clucking K’s. The first time I visited Dubai, I was captured by the skyline and the hard-driving sand that coated even the enormous shopping malls, and the oppressive heat that weighted every move.

  Now, all week long I found myself thinking about the color of the fall trees on Main Street in Bailey Falls, the scent of burning leaves in the air, and the slip and slide of hay underneath my bare feet. My bare everything, to be exact.

  But with all this daydreaming, work was still center stage. The T&T project was coming along very nicely. We’d begun casting for the commercials we were shooting, as well as for the print advertisement.

  For the Bailey Falls campaign, I was still kicking around the idea of using the local-farmer angle, how to position it to show these wonderful local farms in exactly the right light. Not to mention lighting those farmers to look irresistible to any woman on the East Coast with a pulse and an overnight bag . . .

  I wondered how Oscar would feel about being photographed for the campaign. I wondered if Casserole Missy would object. I further wondered why I’d taken to referring to her as Casserole Missy, since I was just having some fun, getting a taste of some local flavor, as it were . . .

  I’d resisted the impulse all week to call up Roxie and ask if she had Oscar’s phone number. I wondered if Oscar had called her and asked for mine. Or maybe he’d ask Leo to ask Roxie to ask me if it was okay for him to call me—like a game of high school telephone, the kind with the windy knotted cord that I’d twine around one hand while holding the phone to my ear, giggling late at night on the phone with my girlfriend, talking about how he’d held my hand during lunch and asked me to the dance after the big game Friday night.

  And how he’d told me how satiny soft the inside of my thigh was on his tongue.

  I pulled myself out of Bailey Falls and thoughts of phone numbers. Something told me I needed to play this one easy, casual, and not crowd him. And since my instincts were unfailing in this area, I literally sat on my hands more than once to stop from texting Roxie. But I wondered what he was up to this week, and if he was thinking of me.

  I was giddy. And giddy plus Natalie can equal dangerous territory.

  When I was walking home after work and saw Bailey Falls Creamery cheese in the window of La Belle Fromage, my heart raced. When I saw a red flannel shirt in the window at Barneys, in a display of fashionable lumberjacks, my skin tingled. And when I saw a salami in the window of Zabar’s, it was almost more than I could bear.

  I was stopping by to pick up a few things to have sent over to my parents’ house, since I’d missed brunch the previous Sunday. Work-related issues were an acceptable excuse for missing brunch, but only when cleared in advance and only when it was career enhancing. I usually adhered to this rule, but in the haste to get out of town last week I’d forgotten to call my mother, thus beginning the biggest case of recorded guilt the city had seen since my neighbor Francis Applebaum had forgotten to call his mother on Rosh Hashanah. That he’d been having an emergency appendectomy was usually overlooked in the relaying of this story, but the entire block had taken sides.

  It was Wednesday night, and though I’d originally planned to have the treats delivered, it was a nice night out and I wasn’t quite ready to go home yet. I felt a little out of sorts, twitchy, perhaps a little restless? And wondering how in the world I was going to tell my mother I’d be missing brunch again this Sunday . . .

  I was planning on taking the train up to Bailey Falls again on Thursday afternoon. I had a breakfast planned for Friday morning at Callahan’s with the chamber of commerce and some of the local business owners. I wanted to chat with them about what they wanted, how they saw their town, and how they’d like others to see it. Chad was helping me organize the meeting, making sure the key players were there. Roxie had already been tasked with making the cakes that would follow the meeting. If it went well, cake to celebrate. If it went not so well, then everyone would hopefully just remember the cake . . .

  “You’re heading up there again? This weekend?” Dan had asked when I gave him my expense report for the week before.

  “Yeah, this weekend I get to hobnob with the elite of Bailey Falls, including the mayor’s wife. You know how it is, mingling with the upper crust.” Perched on the edge of his desk, I mentally ran through my wardrobe and wondered if there’d be time to get another pair of thigh-high Chanel boots before the weekend. Sadly, the extended vacation they’d taken in the mud and the water had ruined them. Twenty-two hundred dollars, down the drain.

  Oscar did say he’d like me in the boots, though, and only the boots . . .

  “You’ll be back Monday?” Dan asked, interrupting my daydream.

  “That’s the plan. I’ll take the train back home on Sunday.”

  “Staying up there the entire weekend again? Two Saturday nights in a row, this town has been deprived of Natalie Grayson. I’m surprised the lights didn’t dim on Broadway,” he teased.

  “I’m dedicated, what can I say?” I laughed, snatching back the expense reports after he signed them and running them down to accounting before he could ask me any more questions.

  And speaking of questions . . .

  “I just don’t understand. What in the world could possibly be so interesting upstate that would keep you away from brunch? I mean, it’s brunch, for God’s sake, Natalie,” my mother was saying, walking from the kitchen to the dining room with a tray to arrange the cookies I’d brought. “Explain this to me like I’m an idiot.”

  “You’re not an idiot, Mom,” I said, biting into one of the cookies.

  “I must be, since I’m not understanding this. Two Sundays in a row, Natalie. Two!”

  “Ma! It’s for work, okay? New campaign. I’m working with out-of-town clients, and I’m still collecting information. Its research that I need to do, and it helps when I’m in the place I’m actually supposed to be selling to everyone, you know?”

  “I understand that, but—”

  “And Roxie’s there. It’s great to see her, and meet her new boyfriend and her friends, and it’s a great little town. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . it’s nice,” I muffled my voice with a cookie, “spending some time out of the city.”

  She blinked several times. “Who is he?”

  “Who is who?”

  “Who’s the he that’s making you miss brunch all the time.”

  “All the time?” I laughed. “Two brunches is hardly ‘all the time.’”

  “Quit deflecting,” she said, sitting down across from me at the table. She’d been in her studio today; she had paint under her nails. She had a new show coming up soon, her first in a few years. “You’ve met someone.”

  “You’re psychotic.”

  “That’s twice now you’ve changed the subject or not answered me directly.”

  “Maybe because you’re being psychotic,” I said through the cookie.

  “You always tell me about the guys you’re dating. Why aren’t you telling me about this one?”

  “Because there’s nothing to tell! Jeez, what’s with the third degree?”

  She settled back into her chair and appraised me the way only a mother can. “You look me in the eye and tell me ther
e’s not a guy involved in this, and I’ll drop it.”

  I leaned across the table, keeping my face as composed as I could. “There is not a guy involved in this.”

  She paused a moment, her eyes searching. “Okay. Enough. I won’t say another word.”

  I let out my breath. “Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to pack some things for my trip tomorrow. Did you know that there’s a town literally five minutes up the Hudson where you can’t even see the city?”

  “It’s called Yonkers, sweetie. It’s been there a long time. I think we might have kept you in Manhattan too long.”

  “Perish the thought.” I grinned and dropped a kiss on her head. “I’ll call you on Sunday, how’s that?”

  “I’ll be reading the Times, don’t interrupt me.”

  “Duly noted. Love you.” As I walked past her, she reached out and patted my arm.

  “You’ll tell me about this guy when you’re ready.”

  That woman has X-ray vision.

  Thursday morning went by in a blur, and before I knew it, I was on the train and heading north once again along the Hudson. It was a gorgeous sunny day, the sun shining down and reflecting off the water so brightly it was almost blinding. But not so blinding that I wasn’t able to enjoy the view. Normally a train for me meant sardine-packed between a thousand other commuters, or don’t fall asleep or you’ll miss your stop.

  But I found myself once again watching the little towns go flashing by, wondering at the lives led behind those front doors. I got a quick snapshot into a life that I’d never know anything about, but it was fun imagining what might being going on behind those closed doors. My train was merely a background sound to them, a train that had rattled by twelve times a day (twenty-four if you count the other direction), a sound they’d no doubt tuned out long ago. Or a train they’d taken themselves on a sunny Saturday, to head into the city to watch the Yankees play. All these little snapshots of a life led on the Hudson River Line, and today I was once more part of that background noise—albeit a very excited part, as I was nearly bouncing out of my seat to get back to Bailey Falls.