“Sure you are.”
“I’m going to do one day of work tomorrow, confirm he’s a normal decent human being, and drive back to Portland and raise my baby and never think about this again.”
“I’m going to screenshot this and send it back to you in two weeks.”
“It’s a phone call. You can’t screenshot a phone call.”
“Watch me.”
We talked for another hour. I did not hang up. I should note that for the record too.
Later, after I’d showered the mud off and eaten a granola bar that was supposed to be dinner and wasn’t, I sat on the Juniper’s narrow bed and pulled up the donor profile.
Donor #3847. Height: 6’2”. Weight: 210 lbs. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Education: B.S., Entomology. The essay was two paragraphs about why he loved working with bees — how a hive was its own perfect system, how the bees didn’t care about anything except the work and the season, and how the best thing he’d ever learned was to pay attention to what was already growing instead of forcing what wasn’t. That essay had made me choose him over 3846 and 3848 and every other number in the catalogue.
The man I’d met today was not a number. He’d lifted a bee off my nose with scarred fingers and said “you done?” in that flat voice, and he’d stood in his meadow with the mountains behind him and the spring light turning his skin gold and offered me a job with fewer words than most people used to order coffee. The profile said nothing about what his voice would do to the base of my spine. It said nothing about the way his jeans had hung on his hips, or the size of his hands, or the fact that I was lying in a cabin bed thinking about those hands and where I wanted them and I was going to stop that thought right now. Right now. Stopping.
I closed the profile. I put the phone facedown on the nightstand.
It didn’t help. In the dark, without the screen to focus on, the day came back in pieces — not the humiliation, not the cover story, but him. His hands first. The scarred fingers lifting the bee off my nose with a care that contradicted everything else about his delivery, and I thought about those fingers and my skin flushed hot under the quilt. The width of his chest. The way he’d stood in that meadow, unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be and never would. My thighs pressed together in the dark— quiet, involuntary, undeniable. My body had already made a decision my brain was still arguing about. I stared at the ceiling until my pulse evened out.
I was supposed to be here for a weekend. I had a job that didn’t exist at a company that wasn’t real. I’d given a fake reason for being on the property of a man who was biologically connected to the baby currently the size of a lentil in my uterus, and tomorrow morning I had to show up at seven a.m. and pretend to be a person who had any idea what she was doing.
I pressed my hand against my stomach. Flat, still. No evidence of anything except bad choices and excellent instincts.
I was in so much trouble.
I was also — and I could hear Britt’s voice telling me this was a red flag — a little bit thrilled.
Don’t be thrilled. This is a reconnaissance mission, not a romcom.
I turned off the light.
It was absolutely a romcom.
Chapter Two
ATLAS
FIVE A.M. COFFEE. HIVES. Same as every morning for the past six years, except this morning I kept replaying someone crashing through my bee yard. A compact natural disaster who hadn't stopped talking the entire time she was face-first in my dirt.
I pulled a frame from the first hive and held it up to the early light. Good brood pattern. Queen laying well. Foragers already heading toward the balsamroot along the south meadow. Spring was cracking the mountain open. Snow pulling back on the peaks, wildflowers pushing through wherever the sun hit, everything waking up on its own schedule. I usually liked this part. The quiet. The hum. Just me and sixty thousand bees who didn't need me to make conversation.
Then yesterday happened.
She'd talked for five straight minutes without pausing for air. I counted. She'd lied about at least three things in those five minutes, and I'd caught every one. I'd also caught the way her jeans stretched across her thighs when she stood up, the curve of her hips when she turned. The kind of body that made a man want to grab hold and not let go. My jaw clenched thinking about it. Still clenching now.
I closed the hive. The bees didn't care about my problems.
She showed up at six fifty-three. Seven minutes early. I was at the second hive cluster near the tree line when I heard tires on gravel and looked up.
Work boots. Canvas pants that sat on her hips in a way that tightened my grip on the hive tool. A fitted top under an open flannel, the fabric losing its fight against her cleavage, and my teeth locked on instinct. Dark curly hair pulled into a braid already coming apart. She had a bag over one shoulder and a sketchpad under her arm, walking toward me with the confidence of a woman who'd been invited. Which, technically, she had. That was on me.
She stopped ten feet away. Grinned. "And here we see the landscape designer in her natural habitat," she said, doing a pitch-perfect nature documentary narrator, "approaching the grumpy beekeeper with caution."
I stared at her.
The grin got bigger.
