Page 71

He shook his head. “Ah, darling. If only you saw the way he looks at you.”

Freya looked at Otto with shock. Sophie squealed again.

Alana ignored all of them as she set down her coffee and pushed back her chair. “Time to get back to work.”

23

Alana found Leo later that day kneeling in the dirt. In his hand was a fistful of soil. He was poking and prodding at it, smelling it, examining it as if somehow it would share its secrets with him.

She sat down beside him.

“It looks like…dirt,” he explains. “Regular dirt. And yet, it’s so much more than that.”

She nodded. “I’ve spent years playing with it, hoping that one day I could discover what exactly it is that brings luck.”

“And did you ever find anything?”

She shrugged. “Only the knowledge that Mother Nature has a mind of her own, and sometimes, you have to let her be.”

Leo scanned her face. Then he leaned in to gently kiss her, his lips lingering on hers. “I missed you this morning.”

She grinned. “I was in your bed this morning.”

“I would have liked to also make you breakfast. I wanted to make you a crêpe. They are a specialty in Normandy.”

She kissed his cheek. “I had to talk with my family.”

“I know.” He dropped the dirt and wiped his hands. “Everything okay?”

“Yes, or at least I think so.” She sighed. “I told them about us. I hope that’s okay.”

“Of course.” He stood up, then held out his hands. They were dirty, but she didn’t care in the slightest. She took them and let him pull her up, their bodies flush against one another.

He nuzzled her nose. “That means I get to do this now, right?”

Her grin widened. He kept doing that, making her smile against her will. “Yeah, I guess you can.”

He smiled back as he leaned in and kissed her, long and deep. When his hands moved to the back pockets of her jeans, she chuckled and playfully pushed him out of the way. “We have a harvest to get ready for.”

He shook his head. “September sixth is in two days.”

She cocked her head. “Not going to check your charts to double-check that date?”

He shrugged. “No need to. I believe you.”

She felt like her heart was going to burst, like the satisfying pop of a sweet summer grape.

The fundraiser hit sixty thousand by the morning of harvest. Alana stared at the GoFundMe page for a good long before getting out of bed, Leo snoring softly next to her. She’d been spending her nights in the guest shed with him, ending long days of prep with needy touches and gasping breath. It was a welcome distraction from the constant tick, tick, tick of the clock in her head as their countdown to harvest drew near. Being in his presence, with tangled limbs and fast-beating hearts, was far more addicting than a cigarette. She’d thought about lighting up less and less as the days passed.

But now it was harvest, and she really would have loved to start the day with a smoke. Or something to take the anxious edge off. Freya was determined to convince Klaus to give them two more weeks to turn in the money, enough time to finish harvest and host the big festival Sophie had cooking up.

Leo snatched her phone and locked her screen. “Staring at it won’t change the number.”

She groaned and leaned her head back against the pillow. “We’re so close, and yet, we’re fifteen thousand dollars short.”

He slung an arm around her waist and pulled her close, then kissed her shoulder. “We still have two weeks.”

“What if it’s not enough time,” she replied, spiraling. “What if we lose the farm? What if…?”