“Thank you for the tea. It just seems like a lot of extra work.” I shrugged and sipped again.
“So you drove four hours in the middle of the night for a properly prepared cup of tea?” He raised an eyebrow before dropping a sugar cube into his tea.
I let out a mirthless chuckle and sighed.
“I’m not really sure why I’m here,” I whispered. I avoided his penetrating gaze, instead staring into my mug, fixated on the steam rising from the surface of the dark liquid. If I thought Dan would be less distracting fully clothed, I was sadly mistaken. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the farm since the will reading. And a few days ago, I met with a real estate developer named Preston Smith.Have you heard of him?” I glanced at him, and his expression told me the answer before he spoke.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “I’ve met him.”
“Well, he made me a very lucrative offer on the farm, but I don’t know. The idea of selling right now felt wrong.” I looked at him for a response. He nodded, but his face was unreadable.
“Why do you think that is?”
“I didn’t know my grandparents very well because of… family issues…” I glanced away nervously, not sure if I was ready to delve into my family’s dramatic past with a man I barely knew. Although it’s not like there was much for me to tell. For all I knew, Dan might have known more about it than I did. “I just want to learn more about them before I decide whether I want to sell the farm.”
“Fair enough.” He nodded. “What about your job?”
“I took a leave of absence from my job in order to spend some time here,” I said with what I hoped was a convincing smile. He didn’t seem fooled.
“How does your boyfriend feel about you spending time here?” My heart thudded and stopped at his question. Was Dan flirting with me?
“How did you know I had a boyfriend?”
“I didn’t.” He cleared his throat and smiled. “You just told me.”
I narrowed my eyes and shook my head at him, still unable to suppress the smile on my face. I barely knew Dan, but he’d managed to make me smile more in the past week than Teddy had in the past month.
A comfortable silence fell between us in the kitchen. My heart rate was returning to normal as I silently sipped my tea. I wasn’tsure what made it race more, Dan scaring the shit out of me, or Dan in his underwear—probably a combination of both. He was still as handsome as ever, but I noticed his hair was more untamed with curls as opposed to the way it was neatly styled at the will reading. I couldn’t tell which way I preferred before I realized that I shouldn’t be thinking about Dan’s hair or how I best liked it.
My eyes trailed over the way his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he gulped his tea and the way the veins in his forearms danced as he gripped his mug. To say my curious thoughts about Dan over the past week remained firmly in the realm of my grandparents and the fate of the farm would be a lie. Long after I’d hear Teddy’s soft snores, my thoughts would drift to the way Dan’s fingers grazed my spine when he zipped up my dress, or the weight of his hand on my back when I almost swallowed the tea leaf. Maybe I was building up some insane fantasy because Dan and this farm were so far away—literally and figuratively—from my life in Atlanta, which was imploding.
Isn’t that why I was here in the first place? I could tell myself that I was here to deal with my inheritance and get answers to questions that have plagued me for almost my entire life, but in truth, wasn’t I running away?
“Emma.” His voice broke me out of the daze I was in.
“Yeah?”
“Is everything okay? You were… uh…” The corners of his mouth curled into a small smirk. “… staring at me.”
“What? No, I wasn’t.” I absolutely was. “I’ve just had a long day and I’m exhausted.” I pushed myself up to stand and reached for my empty mug, but Dan grabbed it first.
“I got this,” he said with a slight groan as he stood from the table. I lowered back into my seat to keep myself from watching him walk toward the sink.
“Thank you for the tea… and for not hitting me with that stick.” I heard him chuckle over my shoulder. “What is that thing anyway? Farming equipment?”
“Far from it.” He wiped his hands on a dish towel and left the kitchen. When he returned, he was holding the aforementioned wooden stick. “This is a cricket bat, signed by one of the most famous players in the world.” He placed the bat in front of me and pointed to a black scrawl across the lower left corner of the bat’s sloped surface. “Sachin Tendulkar. I got it for my thirteenth birthday. I mentioned to my dad once that I wished I could get a signed bat from my favorite player. Three months later, I woke up on my birthday, and there it was.” A boyish smile that made my heart squeeze spread over Dan’s face. “It’s one of my most prized possessions and one of the few things I had my mum post from London when I decided to make my stay more permanent.”
“So you weren’t planning to stay in the US?” I asked, still curious about why he left the UK after his strange reaction to my question last week.
“I didn’t have a plan really.” His response was strained, and I got the feeling that I was making him uncomfortable, so I decided to change the subject.
“So what is cricket exactly?” I leaned forward and placed my hand on the bat. My tactic seemed to work because his shoulders relaxed, and his beard and mustache twitched into a smile. “I mean, I’ve heard of it. I know it’s a sport, but that’s about it.” I shrugged.
“Well, maybe I’ll teach you sometime. The games are on pretty early here.”
“That would be nice.” Without fully meaning to, I placed my hand on top of his. “Thank you.” The connection only lasted for an instant before Dan abruptly stood from the table and took a step back.
“Well”—he reached up to scratch the back of his head—“you’re welcome, Emma,” he stammered and took two steps to leave the kitchen before awkwardly walking back to retrieve his cricket bat. “Good night,” he said in a low voice, and I could swear I saw the ghost of a smile on his lips as he turned to climb the stairs.
