I went still.
She didn’t know I could see her. Her focus was on the sketch, whatever planting scheme she was mapping. That unconscious press of her hand was a gesture that belonged to no one but her.
My grip on the hive tool went white. I set it down, turned toward the tree line, and waited until my pulse settled.
“I need to pick up supplies in town,” I said when we broke for water. “Feed store, general store. You’re welcome to ride along.”
Her head came up. “I keep forgetting to call Connie about extending my reservation.”
“Come and tell her in person.”
She gathered her things. We walked to my truck, a three-minute trip across the yard that involved her falling into step beside me, her shoulder just below mine, her hip close enough that I could feel the warmth of her through my sleeve. She climbed into the passenger seat. Her knee was a foot from the gearshift. I forgot what I was reaching for and turned the key instead.
She rolled her window down. The mountain air caught her curls and blew them across her face and she laughed and gathered them in one fist, holding the mass at the nape of her neck. Her jaw in profile. Her throat. The small gold stud in her ear catching the light. I missed the curve where the gravel met the county road and had to correct with a jerk of the wheel.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Sun in my eyes.”
The sun was behind us.
Colter Creek sat in a bend of the valley where the creek widened and the cottonwoods crowded the banks. One paved street, a row of storefronts that hadn’t changed their paint since the nineties, a diner with a hand-lettered chalkboard advertising pie. The ice cream window was still boarded for the season. A dog slept on the post office steps. The whole town had decided what it wanted to be forty years ago and saw no reason to revisit the question.
I parked in front of the general store. Connie Aldrich was at her usual post behind the register, a wiry woman in her seventies with silver hair cropped short, reading glasses perched on her nose, and both eyebrows loaded and ready.
“Morning, Atlas.” She tracked past me to Flora, who was climbing out of the passenger side with her loose hair and her easy smile, and Connie’s eyebrows rose with the slow deliberate arc of someone who’d been waiting for exactly this. “And company.”
“Flora Diaz.” Flora crossed the store in three strides with her arm extended and that wide-open warmth that made people want to tell her things. Bright brown gaze, that scattering of freckles across her nose, dirt still under two fingernails from the soil checks. “I’m designing a pollinator garden up at Atlas’s place. I’ve been renting the Juniper — I was hoping to book through the rest of the week?”
“A garden.” Connie said it the way she might say ice fishing in July. Technically possible. Obviously not what brought this particular woman to this particular mountain. Her attention cut to me. I found a display of canned peaches very interesting.
“Juniper’s open through May,” Connie said. “I’ll put you down for the week?”
“That would be wonderful.”
A week. She’d booked three nights and she was extending to a week and she still hadn’t mentioned the client she’d supposedly driven nine hours to scout for.
I left Flora with Connie and crossed to the farm supply. Lyle Bowen was behind his counter sorting invoices, tall, sun-leathered, a man whose face had more weather in it than most almanacs. He’d been running this store since before I’d moved up the mountain and he had the small-town gift of knowing everyone’s business without appearing to try.
“Morrow.” He looked past me through the storefront window, at my truck, at the general store where Flora was visible through the glass, her hands moving while she talked. “Word is you’ve got a woman on the mountain.”
“I need five bags of the clover seed and three flats of bee balm.”
“Mm-hm.” He pulled the flats from the rear shelf. Stacked them. Took his time. “Pretty woman, from what I hear. Connie says she’s doing garden work for you.”
“She’s designing a garden. That’s the job.”
“Uh-huh.” Lyle leaned on the counter. He had the look of a man enjoying himself at someone else’s expense. “That your girl, Morrow?”
“She’s my garden designer.”
From behind the seed rack: “I am his garden designer, thank you very much.”
Flora. Rounding the end of the aisle with a paper sack from Connie’s tucked under her arm, chin lifted, eyes sharp with something halfway between indignation and a laugh she was barely containing. Our gazes caught. Her mouth twitched. Mine wanted to.
Lyle looked between us with the patience of a man who’d heard this exact denial from every couple in the valley and had never once bought it.
“Five bags clover, three flats bee balm,” he said. “I’ll load your truck.”
