Bittersweet (True North #1)

  Every day I got up before dawn and worked like a cart horse without complaint.

  But somewhere along the way I’d begun to dream, and dreaming was dangerous. In my mind’s eye I’d built a modern brewery in the cider house. And I’d ripped out some of our least interesting apple trees to re-graft them with cider varietals. In my dreams I spent my days blending fascinating, complicated ciders and shipping them to eager buyers.

  At some point I’d begun to draft a short but crucial list of things that I just plain wanted. But wanting wasn’t allowed. Not for me. Not right now, anyway. My family was already freaking out over my plan to sell off part of our herd and reinvest in the brewery. It could work, though. We could prosper.

  Or it could fail and I’d let everyone down.

  The worst-case scenario was that we’d have to sell the farm. And go…where, exactly? If the farm failed, I’d have to get a job that paid well. I had a college degree in chemistry, so I was theoretically employable, but in a city, where I never wanted to live. At best I could live in a goddamn suburb surrounded by neighbors who poisoned their lawns every other week to keep the weeds away.

  Fuck. I’d be that asshole who lectured the neighbors about the evils of commercial herbicides, and told their kids to stay off my organic lawn. I’d keep my blinds shut so I wouldn’t see how close together the houses were. Meanwhile, our hilltop farm would be sold to some asshole who’d tear down the farmhouse to build a six-bedroom manse with a four stall garage.

  Yep, the million-dollar views were great here. It was just too damn bad we didn’t have the million dollars.

  Tonight I’d added yet another item to the list of things I wanted. And this one was as dangerous to my sanity as any other dream. Saying goodnight to Audrey had caused me physical pain—even harder to explain than my yearning to make a go of the cider business.

  Around and around we go. My thoughts were like a never-ending merry-go-round.

  I rolled onto my stomach and stuffed my face into the pillow. There was no reason why that girl should make me so crazy. I barely even knew her. That’s what I was going to keep telling myself, anyway. It was just lust, right?

  Right.

  I didn’t have time for a girlfriend, especially one who lived in Boston and didn’t like me all that much.

  I’d help her meet some farmers, and hopefully she’d get what she needed and go back to Beantown. As long as she and I were in the same area code, I wasn’t going to be able to finish a thought, unless that thought involved her naked body.

  Jesus. My cock thickened against the mattress just from the memory of the way she’d looked over her shoulder at me from the barstool. There’d been a challenge in her eye. Don’t tangle with me, it said. I may be cute, but I am fierce.

  I just wanted to fuck all that sass right out of her. I wanted to shut her up with my mouth and my hands until she came apart on my cock.

  Instead, tomorrow we would sell a thousand dollars’ worth of apples and cider and introduce her to a bunch of farming nerds. What a party.

  I locked my arms together under the pillow and forbade myself to think about her anymore until morning.

  Thank god for coffee.

  Six hours later I drove up to the motor lodge in my pickup, the back loaded with fruit and cider. The place where Audrey was staying was trapped in the 1950s. It wasn’t one big motel but rather a bunch of tiny one-room cabins. The sign out front boasted Color TV, and someone had added at the bottom: 3 Bars of Cell Phone Service. But it was cheerful enough. Mrs. Beasley kept each cabin’s window box stuffed full of petunias, though we all knew the flowers were just an excuse to peer into her guests’ windows as she watered them.

  There was no sign of Audrey yet. Jude and I sat in silence for a moment, scanning the blue doors, waiting for one to open. And then the one on the far right popped open and Audrey came out in another one of her tiny denim skirts that killed me, her long legs gleaming in the morning sunlight as she hurried toward the truck. She tossed her hair out of the way, exposing smooth, bare shoulders.

  It was gonna be a long day. No doubt about it.

  Jude opened his door and jumped out. Then he climbed into the back seat. For a convicted felon, Jude had surprisingly good manners.

  Audrey heaved herself up and onto the truck’s seat and slammed the door.

  “Morning,” I said, reversing out of my parking spot. “Sleep well?” I didn’t.

  “God, it’s early!” She grabbed my coffee thermos out of the cupholder and took a sip.

  “Help yourself,” I grumbled. “Not like Jude and I need that. We’ve been up for two-and-a-half hours milking cows and loading the truck. But no big.” The loss of a night’s sleep obviously made me even crustier than usual.

  “Oh, Grouchy Griff.” Audrey took another sip of my coffee. “I brought you some lemon scones that I baked myself this morning. They are fabulous. It’s a fair trade, I swear.”

  “Baked? Where?” I demanded. Nobody baked at Mrs. Beasley’s motor lodge.

  “There’s a toaster oven in my room.”

  There was chuckling from the back seat. “So you just…whipped up some scones on the TV?”

  “Yep.” She leaned over and dug something out of her shoulder bag. “Here, Jude. Taste the greatness.”

  She handed something over the seat. A moment later Jude began moaning.

  “Everything okay back there?” I grumbled.

  “Oh, hell that’s good. Can I eat Griff’s?”

  “Nope!” she sang. “A girl needs some leverage sometimes. Coffee?” She passed my thermos back to him, too.

  When it came back in my direction, I grabbed the thermos and set it down. As if I needed any more of it. I was jumpy already. Audrey smelled like fruity shampoo and lemon scones. That, and her teasing smile made me hungry for about a hundred different things, only a few of which were food.

  I pointed the truck south toward Norwich. As the crow flies, it wasn’t very far. But the drive took most of an hour because the roads in Vermont didn’t often go where you needed ’em to.

  “Shame about all this traffic,” Audrey said, stretching her golden legs out in front of her.

  “Yeah,” I said automatically.

  She burst out laughing. “What are you thinking about? Because you didn’t even hear what I said, did you?”

  “I could hazard a guess,” Jude muttered behind me.

  “Just hungry,” I grumbled, giving Jude a glare in the rear-view.

  All the teasing fell out of her voice, which became soft. “Would you like a scone, Grouchy Griff?”

  “Yes please, princess.”

  She placed one in my palm, and I took a bite. Sweet, crumbly, lemony goodness broke across my tongue.

  It wasn’t easy to hold back my moan, but I managed. Just barely.

  We pulled up to the usual mayhem—men and women hauling bushel baskets and coolers off truck beds while their children ran around like little maniacs.

  The weather was nice today, which meant we’d see the maximum number of customers. The Norwich market was the regional mother ship. It was the only market where the booths stayed put all week long and where musicians entertained the crowd. It was something of a spectacle.

  Jude and I carried the goods from the truck to the stall. Setting up was easy enough except for the extra complication of swatting away Audrey’s help every time she tried to lift an apple crate.

  “Jesus, Griff!” she argued when I snatched another crate out of her hands. “It’s not that heavy.”

  The truth was that I couldn’t stand the sight of a pretty girl doing work that was really mine. But the perky princess wouldn’t want to hear that. “You’re not covered by my workers’ comp,” I said by way of explanation. “Your job is to stand there and look pretty.”

  She rolled her eyes, then pouted for a moment, perking up again when she spotted the baker’s goods on the neighboring table. “Ooh, donuts. Hey—how come you guys don’t make cider donuts for the tourists at your f
arm? There’s nothing like a hot cider donut with cinnamon sugar.”

  “No time,” I said, setting our scale on the table and balancing it. It was nine o’clock—opening hour. A child ran down the aisles clanging the bell, and the buyers pounced. The early customers were always families with young children and retirees. As the morning wore on, we’d see fewer locals and more tourists.

  During August, this market was the very picture of abundance. Farm-fresh eggs, loaves of country-style bread and fresh-picked everything. Abraham’s—my neighbors’—stall was catty-corner to mine. The Apostate Farm sign hung over a table loaded down with organic vegetables in every color. Red and golden beets. Orange and purple carrots. Yellow crook-neck squash and blindingly beautiful tomatoes that had survived last month’s blight scare.

  I weighed the first bag of apples of the day at one minute after nine. “That’ll be six dollars,” I pronounced, rounding down. We always rounded down to the nearest fifty cents, because it made the transactions faster and it signaled good will. Of course, we carried higher prices per pound here in Norwich than anywhere else. But that was our little secret.

  The buying was brisk. “Eight dollars,” I said to the next person. “Six-fifty,” for the next. And then, “Two bottles of cider, twenty four dollars, please.” The action continued for a while and when there was finally a little break, I handed Jude the money belt. “Can you hold down the fort for a few? I want to introduce Audrey to some farmers.”

  “Sure.”

  As it turned out, Audrey didn’t need a lot of help. After I’d introduced her to the decision-makers at the three biggest organic farms, she got right in there. “Oh! These are glorious!” she said of a picturesque display of winter squashes. “Omigod, is this an ambercup?” She hugged an orange squash like a long-lost child. “I never see these in Boston! They have the best flavor and texture. It’s so moist and buttery.”

  I stood there like a dolt, watching her wrap the old farmer around her finger. She whipped out a wallet and bought a squash. Then she fawned over some heirloom tomatoes before finally getting around to mentioning her produce-hungry employer.

  It took me a few minutes to realize that I wasn’t needed anymore. I went back to my own stand, where Jude handed over the money belt without a word and began restocking the tables with apples from our truck and lining up the cider bottles with the labels facing the same direction.

  Jude had been with us a month now, and the kid always caught on quickly. Last week I’d watched him handling a fast bunch of transactions without relying on the calculator to check his math. Yet right after he’d arrived, Jude had let slip that he got Cs and Ds in high school.

  He was a puzzle I was still trying to figure out.

  The morning slipped into afternoon as I sold an ocean of apples and cider. I kept my prices higher at this market than at some others, because Norwich had plenty of cash, and the attitude that went along with it. “When will the Crispins be ready? I want pie,” an old woman complained. “These won’t do.”

  “We don’t get Crispins ’til October,” I said gently. Nature doesn’t care about your pie. “The Zestars will bake up for you just fine, though.”

  She sniffed unhappily and then bought ten pounds of Zestars. People are weird.

  Audrey eventually staggered toward my booth, weighed down under bags of vegetables, with a squash under one arm and a perfect tub of late raspberries balanced on one palm.

  I ducked out of the stall to grab some of her booty before it all went crashing down and managed not to get yelled at for helping.

  “Thank you,” she breathed.

  “Why’d you buy all this stuff?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re making squash in the toaster oven at Mrs. Beasley’s.”

  Audrey shook her head. “Nope. That’s a gift for your mom. Here, have a six-dollar raspberry.” She popped one in her mouth.

  I found a place for all her things in an empty apple crate. “Why’d you go shopping? I thought your asshole employers were supposed to foot the bill.”

  “Credibility,” she said, crossing those silky arms. “Buying some things makes me sound serious.”

  “You already sound serious,” I heard myself say. Seriously delicious. But really—her enthusiasm for ingredients was obvious. Who wouldn’t want to sell produce to a girl who practically orgasmed over the balance of sugars and acids in a purple heirloom tomato?

  “Hope so.” She sighed. “But it might not even matter. It’s pretty late in the season. Lots of these farmers’ produce is promised to restaurants who offered fair rates right off the bat.”

  “Crap. I was worried about that for you.”

  She nudged me with her elbow. “Careful, Griff, you almost sound helpful right now.”

  Damn it, I did.

  “Can I play store? Maybe Jude needs a break?”

  “Sure. Bet he’d love a break.”

  Audrey took over the apple selling while I stacked some fruit and listened to her charm the pants off my customers. “These have such lovely perfume,” she said of my Zestars. “I’d sauté them and serve them with a pork roast.”

  Great. Now I was starving.

  “Um, Griff?” I heard her ask a few minutes later. “Do you take these?”

  Audrey held up a paper Market Money voucher—the ones I’d designed for our customers who were cashing in food stamps. I’d forgotten to tell her about those. Meanwhile, the woman standing in front of her jiggled a toddler on her hip and wore an embarrassed frown on her face.

  “Of course,” I said quickly, darting over to help. “Are these yours?” I asked, checking the scale.

  “Yeah,” the customer murmured.

  The apples on the scale didn’t quite weigh out to the five bucks on the voucher. “You’ve got more coming. Hang on.” One more apple would have done it, but I grabbed four and bagged them all up together. “Here you go. See you next week. We’ll have even more variety as the season goes on.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly, taking the bag.

  “That was nice of you,” Audrey said when the woman had disappeared into the crowd.

  “Clean food isn’t just for rich people.”

  Audrey shook her head. “I promise not to tell any of your old football friends that you’re a softie. Your secret is safe with me.”

  “You have a customer,” was my only response.

  An hour and a half later we were back on the road. The fair was over, and I’d sold nearly every apple I’d brought and fifty bottles of cider. Before we got back in the truck I bartered a bottle with Fran of Fran’s Flatbreads in exchange for three of his generous slices with chicken, olives and feta.

  So my belly was full but I was feeling undercaffeinated after my long, sleepless night. “Tell me about your family,” I said to Audrey, hoping she’d keep me awake. “You met mine already.”

  “That won’t take long,” she said. “I don’t have a father.”

  “Everyone has a father,” I argued. “Basic science, princess.”

  “I passed seventh-grade biology, Griff. But when my mother decided she wanted a child, she picked the fanciest fertility specialist in Boston and chose a vial of Harvard sperm to be my father.”

  “Ah. Okay.”

  “See, my mother hates men. Hates. So getting married was out of the question.”

  “She’s…an angry lesbian?” I guessed. Jude snorted in the back seat.

  “No, that would be more interesting. She’s just angry. She wants to singlehandedly bust the glass ceiling for every woman in America. She runs a big venture capital firm. She’s on the board of directors at a dozen different companies. As far as I can tell, she wants women everywhere to become money-hungry assholes, just like men.”

  “Sounds like a fun person,” Jude said.

  “She’s a peach,” Audrey said. “The second time I failed out of college, she cut me off. She sold my car and cut up my credit cards. She told me to figure it out for myself.”

  “Ouch,” I said. ??
?I’m sorry.”

  “Nah.” Audrey grinned at me. “Best thing that ever happened to me. Mom didn’t realize that you can’t hound your kid after you cut her off. She thought I’d stick around for daily lectures and doses of humiliation. But I moved out. It was rough at first—working shitty kitchen jobs and couch surfing for three weeks until I started getting paychecks. For the first time in my life, there was nobody telling me I was a worthless piece of junk.”

  Fuuuuck. That had to be an exaggeration. “She said that to her own child?”

  “Oh sure.” Audrey waved one pretty hand in the air. “Mom just assumed I’d get straight A’s like she did. But that just wasn’t in the cards. She even called up the sperm bank when I was in high school to ask if they’d discovered any issues with that donor. I think she wanted to sue them. Fun times.”

  I found myself white-knuckling the steering wheel and had to force my hands to relax. “Jesus. Sorry, babe.”

  “It’s okay,” she insisted. “Know what’s funny? She thinks that I went to culinary school just to spite her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because women have been cooking for millennia, right? And she views herself as a crusader for equality in the boardroom. She thinks it’s embarrassing that I want to be a chef and assumes I chose cooking just to make her look stupid. It’s the only thing I ever excelled at, though. Somewhere out there is a sperm donor who’s really savvy in the kitchen.”

  I drove the next few miles in silence, wondering what it would be like to have your only parent reject you. My family and I had some difficult decisions to make about our farm’s future. But my parents had always told us that we could do whatever made us happy. Whether we chose farming or something completely different, it was always up to us.

  Meanwhile, Audrey spun around on the passenger’s seat to talk to Jude. She slung an elbow over the back of the seat, and now I had an oblique view of her tight, sexy ass. Hell. It was a long enough drive already.

  “So what did you cook in the prison kitchen?” she asked our favorite felon.