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It was nice to have someplace that was his, that Dad couldn’t look down his nose at.
And it was always nice to have a place to bring a woman home to.
Mia’s image popped into his head. Such a strange intrusion he laughed into the quiet spring morning. A pig squealed in the distance and Dell jumped off the fence.
He had about fifteen minutes until Charlie would show up complaining about the early hour, and every damn thing, loading up the vegetables. It was nice to have company while he worked, but Charlie’s nonstop bitching was starting to get old and they were only into week three. Charlie was helping out to soothe Mom’s worries that his corporate lifestyle was ruining his karma. An idea she’d picked up from some corny TV show.
Dell didn’t give much of a crap about his brother’s karma, but the help was nice. If Charlie would stop complaining all the time. He wished he knew a way to make his big brother understand, to see the value of this place, to feel what it meant. So much more than just them.
On a sigh, Dell hopped into the shower. No more brooding over his family. He had work to do today.
What would Mia have up her sleeve? He doubted his turning around her Naked Farmer moniker to help himself had left her too happy. He probably hadn’t helped the situation with his “keep the change” comment.
Nope. Not happy. If Mia could shoot lasers from her pretty green eyes, he’d be deader than a doornail.
Why the thought cheered him after his depressing inner monologue earlier, he had no idea. Something about going toe-to-toe with Mia was...fun.
Whistling, Dell pulled on a pair of faded jeans, the kind loose enough at the waist to hang a little low.
He was no dummy.
He shrugged on a button-up flannel shirt, finger combed his wet hair, then grabbed his keys and wallet. Maybe if he texted Charlie to meet him at the vegetable shed, he could cut down on the amount of whining he had to listen to.
But when he stepped outside, Charlie’s sleek luxury car was already parked in front of the gate. Along with Dad’s truck. The two men leaned against poles of his fence, Charlie with a to-go coffee cup in his hand, Dad with his beat-up thermos.
They looked nothing alike. Charlie had Mom’s height, her darker shade of blond. He was lean and polished. Dell had inherited Dad’s bigger frame, light hair, dark eyes. But it seemed in terms of personality, Charlie had combined Mom and Dad to be the favorite and Dell was just...the odd man out.
He was the one following the old man’s footsteps. Charlie acted as if the old man’s footsteps were caked with manure. But of course Dad seemed to look at his own footsteps that way.
Not really the best comparison, since technically manure was a way of life around here.
Dell let out a breath and steeled himself for a round of disdain. They could keep trying this make-Dell-feel-like-an-idiot thing, but it wasn’t going to change his determination. “Morning.”
Dad and Charlie grunted in unison.
“Still doing the market thing, then?”
Dell didn’t flinch, didn’t scowl. “Yup. Told you I’d be doing it all year again. CSA stuff, too.”
“Can’t believe people pay money to come here and pick up a bunch of vegetables. What’s wrong with the grocery store?”
“People care about where their food comes from.”
Dad shook his head, muttered something about hippies. Which was hilarious. Mom had been the one to suggest he start a CSA. In her own practical way, she was the biggest hippie in New Benton. “Has he let you look at the CSA profits?” Dad said to Charlie, jerking his head toward Dell. “They’re pretty dismal if you ask me, but I’d like to know your take.”
This time Dell did scowl. He jammed his baseball cap on his head in the hopes it’d hide most of his expression. His brother might be a VP of sales, but he didn’t know a damn thing about Dell’s business. “Charlie hasn’t once set eyes on my spreadsheets. He sells crap, not food.”
“You should let him look. I don’t like what I’m seeing. Maybe we need a second opinion.”
“He’s not a farmer.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “More power to him.”
Dell didn’t know how many times they could have the same conversation. Run in the same loop. Probably over and over and over, since neither of them could understand the other’s point.
“Do I have to remind you you’re a farmer?”
“I wanted something better for my sons. Look at Charlie. He went out and made a name for himself. Didn’t get tied down to this burden. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Charlie had the decency to look uncomfortable, but he didn’t speak up. Which was how things always seemed to go. Charlie was the great doer of what Dad and Mom wanted. Dell would forever be a disappointment.
If it meant the farm, he supposed he’d just have to suck it up and accept it. “I fell in love with this burden, Dad. This place. This work. I don’t want better.”
“Farming isn’t love.” Dad shook his head. “It’s hard work and dirt and hell on a body.” He drained his Thermos. “Head in the clouds.” He walked back to his truck, shaking his head.
How could he feel that way? How could he still work this land and feel that way? Dell didn’t understand it, wasn’t sure he ever would.
In silence, he and Charlie slid into Dell’s truck, drove up to the vegetable shack and loaded the truck for market. When they got back in and drove off Wainwright property, Charlie made a big production of tapping his leg, fidgeting in his seat.
“Spit it out.” He’d rather hear all of Charlie’s complaints than watch him try to keep them in.
“Look, Dell, you’re not dumb.”
Dell scowled at the stoplight in front of him. “I know I’m not dumb.” Of course, Charlie had read at a kindergarten level at the age of three. And solved for x in elementary school. While Dell had enjoyed remedial reading and math all through middle school.
But that didn’t make him dumb. Not in the areas that mattered.
“So, the thing is, you could have more than this.” Charlie waved at the farmland on each side of the highway Dell merged onto. “I know you like it, maybe you’re even good at it, but how much longer is small-scale farming going to be a lucrative career?”
“I don’t want more than this. This isn’t some compromise or slacker job. It’s what I want. It’s important. I don’t need lucrative.”
“You need to survive. And are you so certain it’s not that you want it just because Dad doesn’t want you to do it? Remember how you didn’t have any interest in playing basketball until I tried out, then suddenly it was all you wanted to do? And once I quit, so did you.”
Dell shifted. “It’s not the same.” It wasn’t, but he knew he couldn’t convince Charlie of that. First, because Charlie thought Charlie was always right. Second, well, he wasn’t about to admit he’d just been trying to get his older brother’s attention.
He’d given up on that. Charlie was always going to look down his nose at him. They were too different, and for some reason Charlie didn’t see the farm the way he did. Didn’t feel the history in it, the belonging to it.
Charlie didn’t say anything else, just shook his head and looked out the passenger-side window.
Dell watched as farmland morphed into suburbia. Tried to imagine living here, in a house all piled on top of another house, with nothing but streets and strip malls and perfectly manicured lawns.
He didn’t belong anywhere here, even less so in the packed-together city Charlie lived in. He belonged on that farm, where he could look out a window and see the swell of the hill, hear his own footsteps, dig in the land and grow something. It was his heart, and the work he did was important. Someday Dell would just have to accept he was the only one in his family who believed it.
* * *
MIASATIN the driver’s seat, working on not hyperventilating. Some positive self-talk, some reminders that, in this space, people looked at her as a professional, knowledgeable businesswoman, not Mia, Queen of the Geeks, whose verbal diarrhea always meant saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
“Mia, get out of the car.”
“I will.” She nodded. Her feet ignored her.
Cara slammed her door shut. A few seconds later she jerked open the driver’s-side door. “Get out, young lady.”
“I’m older than you.”
“Mia.”
“Just give me a second.”
“Mia, look at me.”
Reluctantly, Mia met her sister’s fierce stare.
“Do you think you’re ugly?”
Mia frowned. “Well, no.” She wasn’t a bombshell, but she certainly wasn’t ugly. Decent haircut, no more acne, body in good shape. She wasn’t ugly. Didn’t mean she was comfortable being seen as anything other than background noise. She’d worked so hard at being background noise since coming home from Truman four years ago. Worked on quietly doing what she needed to do, not babbling, not embarrassing herself.
This step seemed to scream, “Look at me,” and as much as she wouldn’t mind some male attention, she wasn’t ready for the screaming insecurity that went with it. If she was ready for that, she’d probably have had a date by now.
“Then, suck it up, sister. You’re cute. No one’s going to look twice at you except people who know you and wonder how you hid that body for so long. You look like a normal twenty-six-year-old woman. Of course, if a guy comes over to buy something, I’d make sure to bend over.”
“Cara—”
“Just be you. Forget what you look like or what people think. That’s how you’ve gotten this far, isn’t it? You learned to stop worrying what people thought?”
That was true. Not an easy lesson to learn, or even one she’d mastered, but Cara was right. Who cared what people thought? She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt, for heaven’s sake. Not a G-string and some tassels.
She certainly wasn’t stripping, unlike some people.
Mia sneaked a glance over her shoulder at Dell. He hadn’t taken off his shirt yet, but it was unbuttoned all the way. Moron.
With a deep breath, Mia hopped out of the truck, earning her a back pat from Cara. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
Squaring her shoulders, Mia focused on setting up the booth, including their newest tactic: free coloring pages and crayon packets for kids. Next week Anna was going to do face painting. If Dell was going to go the man-ogling route, she would go the family route.
Pants that fit and a low-cut T-shirt just meant looking less like the crazy, isolated farmer she was. It had nothing to do with sex appeal.
Of course, if a single guy was interested...
Mia shook her head. Idiot fantasies had never gotten her anywhere. Certainly not laid. She might look a little more alluring than she once had, but all her work at invisibility had certainly kept any interested parties away.
Well, maybe with her new look she’d work on that next.
This morning, though, she was concentrating on selling the pants off Dell Wainwright. Not literally or anything. But, well, now that she thought of it...
Nope. Not going there.
Mia smiled brightly at a couple and their twin toddlers. “Good morning. Welcome to Pruitt Farms’ stand. Do you see anything you like?”
She chatted with the mother about what kind of fertilizers they used and if they were certified organic. In the end, the twins each took a coloring sheet and crayons, and Mia sold one of everything.
She also made sure to tell them about the face painting next weekend, and they promised to return.
Take that, Magic Mike.
“Dell keeps looking at you,” Cara stage whispered in her ear as Mia filled a bag with greens.
Mia refused to look over her shoulder. “So?”
“So? I don’t mean he’s looking at you like, oh, he happened to look over here. I mean, he’s jaw-dropped looking at you. Like, ‘damn, that girl is fine’ looking at you.”
She waved Cara off, placed the new bag onto the table. As another family passed their booth, she greeted, chatted and focused on her job. Once they were gone, she couldn’t take the curiosity any longer.
She lifted her eyes over the aisle to Dell’s table. There he was in all his shirtless glory, flirting with an older lady. Totally not looking at her.
Except when he handed the woman a bag of broccoli, his gaze met hers across the aisle. Something in her stomach flipped uncomfortably, and a warm sensation zinged down to her toes. Mia quickly looked down at her table, all too aware she was probably beet red from her shoulders to the roots of her hair.
From that point on, she promised herself not to look at Dell, and not to replay that weird moment his eyes had locked on hers and she’d felt something. Just from a look.
Nope. Not thinking about it.
She made it through the rest of the morning, pleased to see they’d sold more than last week. Some of that might have had to do with more people coming as the season went on, and that it wasn’t raining today as it had been last week, but still, progress was progress.
“Uh-oh, here comes trouble,” Cara said under her breath.
Mia looked up as Dell sauntered to their table.
She focused on packing up the leftovers. When he leaned his arms on her table and ducked under the awning, she was only momentarily mesmerized by the fine blond hair on his tanned, muscular forearms.
So not fair.
“That’s quite a getup,” he said, none too pleasantly.
She would not blush. She would not blush. She would not blush. She stood to her full height, chin up to add a few centimeters. Fisting her hands on her hips, she managed her best intimidating glare, even if her cheeks were probably pink as she looked down at his hunched-over frame. “What getup?”
He stood, motioned a hand up and down her front. “That.”
“What?”
He did the motion again. “That.”
Mia cocked her head, folded her arms under her breasts. When Dell looked at the sky, she nearly giggled. “I never pegged you for the modest type. What with the stripping and all.”
He scowled down at her, and it took a little extra effort to suck in a breath.
“I do not strip,” he said through gritted teeth. He leaned closer and, by God, her heart nearly leaped out of her chest. But she stood her ground. Standing her ground felt really good.
