Laugh Read online

  He just wanted to do a good job, here, and go home. Charge his phone. Check in with Lacey, his brother and sisters. Do his laundry.

  He could feel the sweat slide down his own spine, under the waistband of his shorts. Looking right into her shiny eyes, the lashes winged and dark, he had a flash of slick bodies bent over convenient sawhorses, muscles moving along his.

  He gripped her hand tighter.

  She pressed her thumb, just a little into his hand, to tell him she noticed.

  What did she notice?

  He lowered his eyes from hers, shy, suddenly, of her seeing either his crass or tender thoughts.

  “I’m surprised she gave me such a glowing recommendation, actually.”

  “She also said you were bossy, rude, a control freak, would probably bring the wrong thing and to not let you come back to the office today or borrow my phone. Then she promised to take me out to that new barrel bar downtown and buy me a twenty-dollar Scotch.”

  “I would’ve held out for bottle service.”

  “The day’s young, Dr. Burnside.”

  “I look forward to it, Farmer Paz.” He was surprised to realize that he was: looking forward it. Her eyes had softened at the corners. Her skin was golden and flushed. Her hair was dark and curled up in the sweat all along her forehead and cheeks.

  “You have freckles, too,” he heard himself say, helpless again. They were the smallest nevi across the bridge of her nose, just a shade deeper than her skin.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He smiled, feeling something give way in his shoulders, his neck. Warmth filled in where all the tight places unsnapped.

  He loosened his grip to turn her hand into a different kind of hold. To search out her wrist, her arm, with his fingers. Her eyelids drifted, just a little bit, and he watched his fingertips start a first stroke along her inner wrist with his thumb.

  Then he suddenly lost her gaze to the ground, and she stepped back, pulling her hand with her.

  He watched her look over into her plants, and he fisted his hands to keep from fidgeting, from finding something to worry on his clothes, from patting his pocket for his phone.

  She looked back at him.

  “You ready to work? How’s your back? Or are those shoulders just for show?”

  He studied her face, and it was serene. But there was color, up high, under those big brown eyes, and he didn’t think it was from the sun.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No you’re not.” She grinned, but with no laugher behind the grin.

  “No.” He wasn’t sorry. Being sorry didn’t work.

  “Don’t ever say you are, if you aren’t.”

  “It seems like the thing to do, when I’m a jackass. What people need to hear.”

  “You should have it printed on a card.”

  “Maybe I should. One of my sisters works at a letterpress. I could get a deal.”

  “If I was your sister, I’d charge you double for I’m Sorry cards.”

  He laughed, and Nina Paz smirked at him—dirt on her forehead, sweat in a V between her beautiful breasts, the sun glossed in her braids. “You’re right, she should. Her, most of all.”

  She looked down at the ground again. But he could see her smile. “You ever picked tomatoes before, Opie?”

  “Nope. City boy, through and through.”

  “Grab a crate and one of those bales of straw. Watch and learn.”

  He kicked his flowers to the side and followed her to the stack of crates, enjoying the view of her Thoroughbred legs bending and lifting and crouching.

  A fine way to spend the morning—sun at your back and by the side of a beautiful woman who really knew how to laugh.

  He closed his eyes.

  Thought, Nina.

  Chapter Two

  The cab of Big Green had never felt small before.

  The bench seat was as big as the sofa in her apartment, the dash stretched across the cab like a conference table, and the foot wells could easily accommodate the comfortable sprawl of tall and long-limbed men.

  Like the one sprawled out on the passenger side right now, for example.

  But even with the windows cranked down, and the hot midday wind blowing the sweat dry on their bodies, the cab of the truck felt close.

  She could feel the pulses in the backs of her knees, thudding against her slippery skin, and she downshifted a little angrily, as if she could shift the direction of her blood along with the gear.

  And then she watched as he slid his gaze to her thigh, where her quads had jumped working the heavy clutch, and her heart sent a fresh injection of pounding life everywhere.

  He had to stop ogling her legs. They were burning from all the horny flexing and lunging she started doing as soon as she realized it drove him nuts. Between her own vanity and his leg fetish, she’d never have to suffer the gym’s leg press again if only he’d follow her around while she was wearing shorts.

  Lacey had warned her Sam was good-looking, but laughed that his self-righteousness and impulse-control issues went a long way to keep a woman from noticing.

  She had only met Lacey recently, and the smart nursing administrator seemed like a great potential friend in the neighborhood, but she had to wonder if the woman needed glasses.

  Even when Sam was frowning, arguing, and sputtering he still looked like he should be leaning against a surfboard stuck in the sand—the sun making his strawberry hair more gold than red, his gray eyes crinkle, his skin go sleek and gilded.

  And no matter how many crates of produce she lifted, how many rows she hoed, how many big commercial-sized soup pots she lifted from the burners, her shoulders would never look like his or be half as bitable.

  Such a problem.

  Even worse was how easy it was to work alongside him over their long morning together.

  How he let her work, and let her lead, and let her show him things, even while he ogled and bragged and postured.

  The contrast between what he performed for her and what he meant told her something that made her think about more than Sam’s shoulders. Something that made her wonder about why a man would try to distract her from noticing the best parts of himself.

  Maybe he hadn’t noticed the best parts of himself.

  She should have sent him home as soon as they’d loaded Big Green’s flatbed with the tomato and squash crates. She probably would have if she hadn’t turned around to answer his question about how to look for ripeness and caught him using the hem of his T-shirt to mop the sweat off his face and been hit with an eyeful of capable-looking man chest decorated in auburn hair.

  Worse, he pulled the T-shirt away from his face just as she was following a trail of hair as it made its way under the waistband of his cargo shorts, low on his hips.

  “See something you like, Farmer?”

  He hadn’t dropped his shirt; in fact, he lifted it higher, like those posturing pendejos at her gym. She had the thought that he probably took pictures of those abs in the bathroom mirror to send to his girlfriends, the peacock.

  She’d snapped her gaze back to the polite end and mentally told her libido to stand down. “Your patients bring you a lot of cookies and brownies in exchange for services, Doctor?”

  He had narrowed his gaze at her, but she wanted to laugh when she watched him suck his belly in, almost imperceptibly. “You think a slice of pie now and then is going to do this”—he swept a hand over his torso like he was revealing a sports car on a game show—“any harm?”

  She had looked at him for a long moment, thinking about how his arms and shoulders got tight in quiet moments, how he snapped vegetables off their stems with an excess of energy that spoke to something inefficient and fearful.

  Without a trace of tease in her voice she had said, “Sam, I don’t think you eat pie.”

  So if she hadn’t seen how he picked vegetables and how his face went pensive and young when she accused him of not eating pie, she knew, surfer god looks or not, she would have sen
t him home once she got the most useful work from her volunteer.

  Yet she had seen that hidden Sam.

  Now he was in the cab of her truck, his pretty hair blowing around in the breeze, his legs tipped wide apart, his left arm along the back of the bench seat so that she had to sit forward to avoid his fingers brushing the back of her neck.

  “Where we going again?”

  “You have someplace else to be on a Saturday?”

  He snorted. “I always have someplace I’m supposed to be.”

  “Says who?”

  He stared out the window as they bounced along the cracked asphalt streets of south downtown Lakefield, bright glints of factory windows pushing a white glare into the truck that made him seem indistinct. “What happens if you don’t go out to your lots?”

  Nina felt the gravity settle between them, something that kept happening when they weren’t bantering and flexing.

  They were a similar age—old enough to have lived some life between them. Of course there was gravity.

  It was rare to find friends anymore. Not because she wasn’t surrounded by people, but because if she wanted to be close to someone new, she would need to share her life, tell her stories, reveal her healing grief.

  When she met someone like Sam, who made her comfortable, who made her laugh, it also made her wary. She could withhold herself and never get closer than superficial comforts, or she could share and risk so much for the slim chance at intimacy.

  Except, his question, how he asked it—what happens if you don’t go out to your lots?—opened something between them.

  Their hearts had let the laughter soften them into reckless intimacies.

  She wanted to be careful, here, even if her heart whispered, Fuck careful.

  His jaw had sharpened, and he pulled his hand from the window to go fishing in his pocket.

  “In weather like this,” Nina started, “when the days are so long and we’ve had so little rain, and the plants are so large, I could lose a lot of crop if I don’t get out early to water. That’s the main thing. Everything here in the city is in raised beds, so the roots have nothing to reach for if I don’t find a way to keep up with the watering. My plot south of the city, which is in a regular field, is more minimally managed.”

  “So you understand.” His voice was almost lost under the rough frequency of Big Green’s engine.

  “What do I understand?”

  “That there’s always someplace to be, something to tend to. You rest, and because you weren’t there, something fails or dies.”

  “Because you’re a doctor.” Nina tried to get a handle on what Sam was talking around.

  He blew a short breath out. “One reason.”

  “What are the others?” She squeezed the steering wheel in empathy with the tight fist his hand made in his lap.

  “Where are we going?”

  It was the middle of summer, when so many depended on her.

  “My café.”

  “You’re not just a farmer.”

  “No. But I’m interested in the whole cycle, where our food comes from, how we make it and serve it and enjoy it. How close we live to where our food is produced. The café is farm to table and serves food from no more than fifty miles away. I grow the produce for the café and catering side of the business, but I also have commission contracts with urban chicken farmers, goat cheese makers, charcuteries, and preservers and canners. My friend Rachel is the chef. She does a send-up of soul food.”

  “People keep chickens in the city?”

  She laughed at the incredulity in his voice. “A lot of people do. And other small livestock, too. I buy goat cheese from a couple who live in a brownstone north of downtown they’ve outfitted with a milking shed in the alley.”

  She turned suddenly when he tugged on her braid. A little smile was threatening around his mouth and when she turned her eyes back to the road, he used the end of her braid to paint slow circles around the bare cap of her shoulder.

  The summer heat was chased off her skin by instant goose bumps.

  Her thoughts were chased away by absolutely everything else.

  Sam cleared his throat.

  “Doesn’t seem legal.”

  “Stop it.”

  Sam stilled the braid over her skin, and she glanced at him, met his eyes, felt warm again, watched him flush.

  He started up again.

  He slid at little closer and brushed the soft end of her braid over her collarbone this time. She could feel his breath against the side of her neck. She could smell the clean oceanic sun sweat of him, and now his other arm was stretched out all along her shoulders, his fingers trailing on the upper aspect of her other arm while her braid brushed slow over her breastbone.

  She downshifted, the gearstick meeting a little resistance from his leg against it, and turned into a side street, and his hip pressed into hers.

  She heard a little hum in his throat.

  “Your legs are fucking insane.”

  She fought against the thick, wet, heavy pleasure welling from the slick squeeze of her clit all the way to her belly.

  But she didn’t fight hard enough.

  She lifted her hand from the knob of the gearshift and trailed it over his thigh, and it was a relief to touch him after talking to him all morning, after watching him, after watching him watch her.

  She pushed under the hem of his shorts to dig her fingers in the hard muscle above his knee.

  He inhaled, fast and deep, against her ear. “Harder.”

  She squeezed harder and bore her eyes into the quiet street to keep them from hitting a Dumpster. He dropped her braid, and he curved the broad palm of his hand over the thickest part of her quad and reached his long fingers right under the hem of her shorts, her very short shorts, and circled into the hot, sensitive hollow bracketing her sex.

  Not there, just nearly.

  Nearly there.

  “Shit,” he whispered. “Shit.”

  Her hips involuntarily gave a little roll. To get those big, searching fingers in the right, swollen spot, where everything was throbbing and live.

  One broad fingertip eased under the elastic of her panties, rubbing, rubbing, and that, along with the tight pull of the short rise of her shorts pressed against her clit, felt like enough to make her come.

  She hit the brake and Big Green lurched to a stop and shuddered in the wrong gear. Muscle memory got the clutch depressed before she killed the engine.

  She pulled her hand off his thigh and yanked the gearshift into neutral.

  He backed away, just a shade. They kept still. Their fast breaths syncopated.

  “Nina—” he whispered.

  “We’re here.” She closed her eyes and shuddered as he pulled his hands slowly from her body.

  He huffed out a laugh. “What’s here?”

  She looked at him, leaning back, his head pushed against the rear window of the cab. His eyes were closed, and his red-gold lashes made perfect semicircles along a high, hectic flush.

  She brushed her gaze over his throat, his pulse jumping in his neck, his damp and clinging T-shirt.

  His massive erection pushing against his shorts.

  She got so wet at the look of that, she felt hot and oiled under her clothes.

  What am I doing?

  “Don’t look at it, you’re making it worse.” He hadn’t opened his eyes, his voice was wry, but a little more than husky.

  “I can’t help it. I think the gearshift is jealous.”

  He groaned, low and shaky. “Don’t talk about the gearshift. Watching you master your giant green horse is what got me in this condition in the first place.”

  “Funny, I thought it was our hands up each other’s pants.”

  “No. All that shifting and bouncing and thrusting. You nearly finished me.”

  She laughed, so glad that laughter came easily with Sam that she felt tears nearly get tight in the corners of her eyes. “Thrusting?”

  “Trust me. There was t
hrusting.” He hadn’t opened his eyes.

  She watched his pulse settle. Thought about what made sense about him. What didn’t. “Do you ever use sex to avoid talking about feelings?”

  His eyes flew open. “What the fuck, Nina.” His voice was low. His eyes searched hers.

  “This is a serious question.” She wasn’t sure what she was doing, but she didn’t think he knew what he was doing either.

  Maybe they didn’t need to know what they were doing, or maybe she had a sudden weakness for redheads, or maybe she wanted his hands on her to mean something.

  “My husband died.” She met his eyes and held them until their contact was fixed, and his mouth gone soft. His brow stayed knitted. “In Afghanistan. He was in the Air Force and was involved in a helicopter transport of machine supplies to an area of infrastructure revision where there wasn’t even any fighting. But their information about where to deliver was wrong and when he was off-loading the cargo, he stepped onto a land mine.”

  He looked down. She watched his fists curl. The burn in her throat was getting easier to swallow around.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you. We’d been married for two years but knew each other since we were children. I miss him all the time, still, and it’s been almost ten years. He knew me about as well as I knew myself, I think. I miss that, particularly. The easy shorthand you have with a love of your life.”

  He met her eyes again, his gray irises transparent where the bright sun beamed through the cab windows. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I didn’t catch it before.” She turned in the bench toward him.

  “What’s that?”

  “The loss in you, all over you.”

  He shook his head. Then turned away and looked out the passenger window and shook his head again. “It’s not—Don’t.”

  “I had relationships—not relationships, do you understand? To … escape.” She watched the back of his head, how the muscles around his neck pulled at her words. “I’m not ashamed to talk about it. I believe it actually helped, for a while. He was deployed so much of our engagement and marriage, and then he was just gone, long past any amount of time he had ever been gone before, and I needed a warm body.

  “I wanted to remember what it was like to take solace like that. But it was an escape, because there were no attachments. When they left, I didn’t have to wait for them to come back. That was what made it an escape, for me.”