I hadn't given her my name yesterday. I'd told her a time and walked away. Real smooth.
"Atlas Morrow," I said.
She blinked. "Sorry — what?"
"My name. Atlas Morrow."
"Oh." Her expression shifted. Surprise, then warmth, then a flicker I couldn't pin down. "Flora Diaz. But you already know that because I word-vomited my entire resume at you yesterday while facedown in your bee yard."
She stuck out her hand. I took it. Small. Warm. Rough with calluses. The contact hit my bloodstream and settled south of my belt buckle. I let go faster than I should have.
"You're early," I said.
"Seven minutes. That's basically late in plant time." She was already scanning the property, those dark eyes moving acrossthe meadow, the hive placement, the south-facing slope. "Your girls are busy this morning."
She meant the bees. I knew what she meant. The rest of my brain went somewhere else entirely with "your girls are busy," and I stared at the wax until it passed.
"Spring build-up," I said. "They've got work to do."
"So do I." She pulled out her sketchpad. "Walk me through your setup."
I walked. She followed. And within twenty minutes she was the one leading.
She crouched beside a patch of early penstemon, rubbed the soil between her fingers, and squinted toward the creek bank. "Shooting star coming in over there?"
It was. I'd spotted the first blooms two days ago.
"Your south exposure is doing the heavy lifting for early forage," she said, standing up and brushing off her pants, which pulled the fabric tight against her thighs. I looked at the hive. "But you've got a gap between the spring bloomers and the summer perennials. Your bees are scrambling in mid-June."
She'd named the exact problem I'd been chewing on for two seasons. In forty minutes. While her top kept shifting every time she pointed at a plant, each shift giving me information I hadn't asked for and couldn't stop receiving.
"Hm," I said.
I broke a chunk of capped comb off the nearest frame, spring wildflower, first real harvest, and held it out. "Taste this."
She took it. Her fingers grazed my knuckles and the buzz went straight to my groin. She bit into the comb. Her eyes closed. Honey ran down her chin. She made a sound — a low, wrecked little moan — and my cock thickened so fast I had to shift my weight.
Gone. I was just gone. All I could see was honey on her skin and my tongue following it down her throat, across hercollarbone, over the swell of her breasts above that neckline, lower. Drizzling it on her stomach and licking it clean. The inside of her thighs and my head between them, tasting her underneath the sweetness, her skin warm and her back arched and —
"Oh my God," she breathed, eyes still closed. "That is obscene."
Yeah. Many things were obscene right now. Several of them were happening below my belt.
"Spring wildflower," I said. Flat. Controlled. The voice of a man whose thoughts were firmly on nectar sources and not on spreading honey along every inch of her and eating it off until she made that sound again.
She opened her eyes. Honey on her chin. Looking up at me. "Do you just hand women chunks of honeycomb at seven in the morning? Is this how you say hello in Montana?"
"Quality check."
"Uh-huh." She ran her tongue across her lower lip. Slow. Catching the honey. Watching me while she did it. "Consider your honey very thoroughly checked."
I turned away. Adjusted my belt because my jeans had become a structural problem and my cock was not getting the message that this was a professional interaction. Thought about varroa mites. Colony collapse. My quarterly tax filing. The specific moisture content required for proper honey curing.
None of it worked. She was behind me with sweetness on her fingers, that sound still echoing through my chest, and I was thirty-three years old and undone by a piece of comb.
"You should try the late-summer buckwheat," I said, because apparently my response to the most gorgeous woman I'd ever met moaning at my honeycomb was to recommend seasonal varietals. The bees had better game than I did. The bees at least danced.
We worked through the rest of the morning. She sketched while I inspected hives, and the silence should've been easy — I was built for silence — except she kept filling it with questions.
