Defending Hearts (7 page)

Then he noticed the truck was up on jack stands, and Gretchen was in the process of shimmying out from under it. Leaving his stuff in the Jeep for the time being, Alex got out and was greeted by Cocoa, who acted as if he’d been gone for
years
and was afraid she’d never see him again. He crouched down to ruffle the fur around her neck and scratch her head. Then he gave her a high five and they walked around the Jeep to see what Gretchen was up to.

She was out from under the truck and brushing dirt off of her jeans. “Hi, Alex.”

“What the hell are you up to now?” He’d swear she never just sat and relaxed, but was always doing something.

Gretchen frowned as if it was the stupidest question she’d ever heard. “I was changing the oil in the truck.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to have Deck do it?”

“I don’t see a lot of sense in paying somebody to do something I can do myself.”

Of course she didn’t. “I guess your grandfather taught you how to do pretty much everything around the farm, huh?”

“Yup.”

He couldn’t quite bring himself to ask outright about her parents, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t very curious about her family. “So you probably stuck to home a lot, then. That explains why I don’t have too many memories of you when we were young.”

She gave him a guarded look. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t remember a lot about elementary school, but I think I remember Kelly and Jen running around together. Not you, though. I do remember the three of you in high school, but I don’t know if it’s just that I saw Kelly more because of football and you were together a lot.”

“I didn’t live in Stewart Mills until halfway through fifth grade.”

That surprised him. “Really? For some reason, I thought you were born here.”

“I was.”

He could tell he was heading into emotional territory for her by the way she made her face and voice totally emotionless. The more she felt, the less she gave away, and the more he wanted to know. “Did your parents move away after you were born?”

“Yup.”

“And they moved back when you were in fifth grade?”

“That’s when Stewart Mills became home, yes.”

It took a few seconds for him to realize she hadn’t answered the question exactly as he’d asked it. “I’d really like to hear
about it. Not for my story, but totally off the record. Living with you two as I do, I can’t help but be curious.”

She stared at him for a few long seconds, and then she shrugged. “My dad hated the farm. He and Gramps didn’t get along, so he dropped out his senior year of high school. Met my mom. They had me, and then took off. They both had some problems and drank a lot. They had trouble keeping jobs and we moved constantly. Evictions. Running from people they owed money to.”

Her voice was so flat, he felt bad for pushing. “You don’t have to tell me this, Gretchen. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Another shrug, this time just one shoulder. “It got really bad when I was about ten. They were fighting all the time and drinking and I think we were pretty much homeless. My mom used to take me to gas stations right before they were closing and it was time to throw away the nasty old steamed hot dogs and pizza slices. The people that worked there would give it to us for free. Then things got so bad, they decided to come here and hit up his parents for money.”

He couldn’t wrap his mind around it. The fact that there was worse than living on stale gas station food left him speechless, though he wouldn’t have asked, anyway.

“I’d never met my grandparents. Gramps was quiet and just watched us, because that’s how he was. But Gram cried and wrapped her arms around me.” Gretchen paused, and then the wall cracked and her eyes shimmered with tears. “I think it was the first time I’d ever been hugged.”

His heart ached for her. “Where are your parents now?”

“I have no idea. The farm was still doing pretty well financially back then and Gramps had just bought himself a new pickup. I remember it being bright red because it
was the shiniest truck I’d ever seen, and I was afraid to touch it and leave fingerprints on the paint. Gram had six hundred dollars in cash tucked away and she gave it to them. Then Gramps signed that truck over to my dad, and my parents signed papers giving me to Gramps and Gram. When my parents left the lawyer’s office, that was the last time I ever saw them.”

Alex leaned back, trying to process that. She had a way of saying things so matter-of-factly it was impossible for a person to know how to respond. Should he offer sympathy for her having shitty parents? Knowing her, probably not. Then he remembered the framed photo on the desk. “Is that the truck in the picture in the living room?”

She smiled and nodded. “Yeah. When he passed away, Gram and I were going through pictures to find a few to put on display at the funeral home and we found that one. He’s scowling at the camera because he hated having his picture taken and he didn’t see why she was making a fuss about a truck. But it was the first new vehicle they’d ever owned—or
would
ever own—and she wanted a picture.

“Right after my parents left, I told Gramps I was sorry he had to buy a used truck with a dent in it because he’d given his pretty new one to my dad. He just smiled and said it was a bargain, and he was just glad my dad hadn’t been smart enough to ask for the property. I was too young to understand what he meant then, but looking at that photo with Gram, I realized he meant he would have given everything he had—even the farm—to keep me with him and Gram.”

In that instant, he felt like he really understood Gretchen for the first time. Her devotion to her grandmother and her determination to keep the farm going, even if it meant
growing pumpkins and changing her own oil, made sense. “You’re a lucky lady to have grandparents like that.”

“Yup.” She inhaled deeply, as if centering herself, and then she gave him a small smile. “Best day of my life.”

He thought about asking her if he could use that story, or pieces of it, but discarded the idea almost immediately. She wouldn’t want that, and the asking would just make things awkward again. “Need any help?”

“I’m done. Just have to get the truck back on the ground and clean up. We’re having burgers tonight, though, so if you want to fire up the grill when Gram’s ready, that would be awesome.”

“Sounds good. I’ve got to carry my stuff in and then I’ll find her.”

Cocoa went with him, watching with interest as he pulled his camera bag out of the back. He decided to leave the tripod in there, and then closed the hatch. “Come on, girl. Let’s go find Ida.”

She thumped her tail on the ground until Alex started to move, and then she shadowed him into the house. Ida was still knitting, but she set it down when he walked in.

“Did you get some good pictures today?”

“I did. And I see blue yarn there. Did you finish the purple set for the little girl in Ohio?”

She beamed. “I did, and it came out beautiful. I did a picot edging with a white yarn with sparkles in it, and it might be the cutest set yet.”

“Did you pack it up already? I could take some photos of it for your online store if you want.”

“I was hoping you’d offer.” She reached down to rub the dog’s back. “He’s a good boy, isn’t he, Cocoa?”

When the Lab gazed up at him, her tongue lolling out of her mouth and her tail thumping, Alex laughed. She was a joyful dog, and he could see why Ida had taken an instant liking to her.

“I’m going to run this stuff upstairs,” he said. “Gretchen said I could fire up the grill whenever you’re ready since she’s done changing the oil in her truck.”

“That girl’s always working, though she did meet the girls for lunch today.” Ida shook her head and leaned over the arm of the rocker to drop her knitting into the basket. “Maybe some night you should take her to O’Rourke’s for a nice dinner. She likes it there. I’ll stay home with Cocoa and make myself some soup and sandwiches.”

Because she wasn’t looking up at him—probably by design—he couldn’t tell exactly what she meant by that. Was it simply meant to be a treat for her selfless granddaughter? Or was she trying to hook them up?

“Maybe,” was all he said, because Gretchen wouldn’t appreciate this conversation happening without her. “I’ll be back down in a few minutes.”

As he carried his bag up the stairs, he mulled over her words. Taking Gretchen into town for dinner sounded nice, actually. He liked talking to her, and it wasn’t easy to make her stop and relax for a while.

But he suspected if he asked Gretchen to join him for a meal at O’Rourke’s, she’d come up with a reason why it was impractical or insist Ida join them. And that was assuming she didn’t flat out say no, which was also a possibility.

The thought of a date night with her was intriguing, though, and Alex knew imagining the sound of the ocean wasn’t going to be enough to bring instant sleep
tonight.

G
retchen tried to time putting the salad together with the burgers being done, which meant glancing out the window every few minutes at Alex, who was manning the grill.

Looking at him was certainly no hardship. It was a hot day, and standing in front of the grill probably didn’t help, because his T-shirt was molded to his body. And every so often, he’d pull up the hem and use it to wipe his face. Twice she managed to time her glance out the window with that glimpse of bared skin, and both times she stopped and gave herself the time to appreciate the view.

He kept up a conversation with Cocoa the entire time he was cooking, too, which amused Gretchen. The dog was thrilled to be out in the yard while supper was prepared, instead of in her bed, and it was obvious she credited that
to Alex by the way she gazed up at him in adoration. Occasionally she’d circle the grill, hoping he’d dropped something, or she’d do a circuit around the yard to see what was up, but mostly Cocoa sat and listened to Alex talk.

Gretchen wondered what he was talking to her about, but she refused to sink so low as to try to sneak up on them to eavesdrop. Instead she left them to their conversation and pulled out the macaroni salad Gram had made earlier in the day.

Everybody loved Gram’s macaroni salad, and she never made it while people were actually in the house, because she didn’t want anybody else to have the recipe. She’d made a big batch this time, so Gretchen was hoping there would be enough left over to save some for Jen and Kelly. Some of her happiest memories were the times they all gathered around Gram’s kitchen table with bowls of macaroni salad.

When Alex began laying cheese over the burgers, Gretchen started pulling condiments out of the fridge and setting them in the center of the table. Mayo, ketchup, mustard. She couldn’t find the pickles, though, so she assumed they’d used them up and went to the pantry for a new jar.

Alex walked through the door, juggling the platter of cheeseburgers, a plate piled with toasted buns, and the spatula, while Cocoa danced around his feet. “I don’t know what you put in the hamburger, but these smell amazing.”

“I don’t even know. Gram just grabs a few jars out of the spice cabinet and mixes it up. I’ve never really paid attention to which jars.”

“I might have to ask her. Where did she go?”

“She had to make a phone call, but it’ll only take her a few minutes.”

He set the burgers and buns on the table, then walked over to the sink to set down the spatula. Gretchen watched him as she gripped the top of the pickle jar. Then, as she met the resistance of the unbroken seal, she stopped. It was ridiculous. Downright stupid, even. She could open her own damn jars.

The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Can you open this for me?”

As soon as he turned, a questioning expression on his face, she wished she could take the question back. If she told him to never mind and popped the seal, he’d think she was an idiot. Instead she was forced to hold up the jar as he moved close to take it from her.

He had nice hands, she thought as he gripped the jar. They were large, with long fingers that curled over the lid. As he began to twist, she let her gaze travel up his tan forearm to the well-toned biceps below his T-shirt sleeve. As she stared, the muscles flexed and she wished she had more condiment jars in need of opening.

The loud pop of the seal made her jump, and Gretchen stifled an embarrassed chuckle.

“Thanks,” she muttered, reaching for the jar. She was afraid if she said any more or raised her voice, she’d sound as breathless as she felt. He’d opened a pickle jar, for goodness’ sake. There was nothing sexual about that.

But when her hand went to close around the glass and her fingers had to practically thread through his in order to take it, she felt a rush of heat through her body that couldn’t be described any other way
but
sexual.

Was it her imagination or did his hand linger a few seconds longer than necessary?

“I’m just in time,” Gram said from the doorway. “Those burgers look perfectly grilled, Alex.”

He winked at Gretchen before turning away, and all she could do was stand there and hope Gram hadn’t seen it. Any of it.

When they sat down to eat, Gretchen kept her eyes on the food. Maybe the wink was just a way of saying the
you’re welcome
to her
thank you
, without having to tell Gram she hadn’t been able to open the jar of pickles. Or maybe she hadn’t imagined his touch lingering, and he was flirting with her.

What the hell had she been thinking? It was one thing to want a man to open her pickle jar, so to speak, but Alex couldn’t be that guy. She’d even explained that to Jen and Kelly. But somehow, when she was around him, she forgot there were logical reasons she should be opening her own damn pickle jar.

“This macaroni salad is amazing,” Alex said, dragging Gretchen away from her thoughts.

“It’s kind of famous around here,” Gram said, not even trying for modest.

“I’m not surprised. I thought the burgers would be the star of the show because they’re delicious, but this macaroni salad is, without a doubt, the best I’ve ever had. What do you put in it?”

“She won’t even tell me,” Gretchen said.

“I don’t trust you not to tell Kelly or Jen. And they’ll tell somebody else—maybe even Cass, who’ll start making it at O’Rourke’s—and then everybody will have it.”

“Gram likes when people make a big deal out of it at potluck dinners.” Gretchen smiled. “If we opened a café
that served nothing but Cheryl Decker’s meatballs with a side of Gram’s macaroni salad, we’d probably be rich.”

“I remember the meatballs from the Eagles Fest spaghetti dinner,” Alex said. “They were extremely good, but I think I’d go with Ida’s macaroni salad as the entrée, with a side of Cheryl’s meatballs.”

Gram beamed, which made Gretchen want to roll her eyes. But she noticed he left a little more lettuce on his plate than usual, choosing seconds on the macaroni salad instead, which meant he wasn’t just blowing smoke. He must really like it a lot to go off his usual meal plan.

When they’d cleaned up the kitchen, the last thing Gretchen wanted to do was go sit in the living room, where she’d spend the entire evening trying to avoid making eye contact with Alex because of the stupid pickle jar.

“I’m going to go take a look at the pumpkins,” she told them. “Because I went into town today, I didn’t earlier, and I didn’t get out there yesterday, either.”

“I’d like to see them,” Alex said.

“What?”

“The pumpkins. I’d like to see them.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Because I’ve heard a lot about them, but I haven’t seen them. And I’ve seen pumpkins at little pumpkin patches for Halloween, but I’ve never seen a field of them growing before.”

“You could take a picture,” Ida said. “I don’t know if I have any good pictures of the pumpkin patch for my photo album.”

“I’d be happy to.”

Gretchen looked back and forth between them, trying
to come up with a single logical reason why she shouldn’t take Alex out to the field with her. But there was nothing, so she had no choice but to give in.

So much for avoiding being with Alex for the rest of the evening.

—

B
y the time Alex went upstairs for his camera and met Gretchen outside, she was leaning against her truck with her arms crossed, giving off the impression she’d been waiting for him for hours.

She was being especially prickly, which amused him because it meant she was trying to hide something, or at least deflect attention away from herself. And he’d bet anything it had to do with the jar.

That moment had thrown him off, too. Something had changed in that split second, but where he was the kind of guy who wanted to explore it and see what it meant, Gretchen was trying to shut it down and pretend it never happened.

He couldn’t do that. Whatever it was had definitely happened, even if he couldn’t quite figure out why it had affected him so much.

So he’d opened a jar of pickles for the woman. So what? It wasn’t the first time Alex had opened a jar for a lady, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. But all he could think about was their fingers almost interlocked around the glass. The way that blue gaze had locked with his. The slight parting of her lips.

“Are you ready?”

She sounded as impatient as she looked, but he just
smiled at her. “Yeah. We’re taking the truck? Don’t you usually take the ATV?”

“I take the four-wheeler around the farm because it’s better on gas. But with two of us, we’ll just take the truck. Probably safer for that camera, too.”

The camera had been through more hostile situations and terrain than she could possibly imagine, but he didn’t bother arguing. Riding behind her on the ATV, with her between his thighs—because he didn’t think for a second she’d let him drive—was probably more than he could handle at the moment.

The road was bumpy and the truck didn’t exactly have a state-of-the-art suspension system, so Alex did very little talking and a lot of bracing himself as she drove out past the tree line to the field she’d turned into a pumpkin patch.

To his eye, the field looked to be at least a couple of acres, if not three, and there were a lot of pumpkins. “You take care of this by yourself?”

She put the truck in park and got out, so he followed suit. “They’re more work than I thought they’d be, but it’s manageable. The field’s well suited for them, which helps. You can see the rain barrels set around, and it took me forever to lay out the soaker hoses. If we have a dry spell, I have to water them, so it was worth the work. I haven’t really had an insect problem—knock on wood—so I’ve gotten the hang of it.”

“When do you harvest them? You don’t do it all by hand, do you?”

She laughed. “That’s how you harvest a pumpkin. A sharp knife, a strong back, and a wagon hooked to the tractor. And I usually start in September, as they become ripe.”

“And they keep until Halloween?”

“Mostly. The earliest ones, we don’t usually save that long. Gram has a seasoning recipe that makes the best roasted pumpkin seeds you’ll ever taste. And she starts the pie filling. Even though I have the field broken up in sections so I can keep up with going through and turning them so they don’t get a flat surface, some of them aren’t pretty enough to be Halloween pumpkins. Those Gram uses to can up her famous pumpkin pie filling, and the local stores sell the jars leading up to Thanksgiving.”

Alex stopped walking, looking around him. “I’m impressed, Gretchen. Do you have any idea how amazing you are?”

She stopped, too, turning to face him with color burning on her cheeks. “If you put seeds in good ground and tend them, stuff grows. That’s not amazing. It’s just farming.”

“A lot of people would have given up, you know. Once the milking doesn’t pay enough and the cows are gone, the farms slowly slip into disrepair or get taken by the bank or the government. Or people go out and get nine-to-five jobs and it just becomes a house with more outbuildings than most.”

“I’m not really qualified to do much out in the job market,” Gretchen said, turning slightly so she was looking out over the pumpkins instead of at him. “By the time I found a job and commuted to it and . . . I hate being inside. My paychecks wouldn’t have been big, anyway, so if I’m going to scrape out a living, I’d rather do it outside.”

“It’s Ida, too,” he said. “With her knitting, and I guess the pumpkin pie filling, which I hadn’t heard about. The way you both just find a way to keep the farm going is pretty amazing, whether you want to accept that or not.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Our needs are pretty simple. Gramps didn’t leave us with a mortgage on the farm, so we mostly need to pay taxes, heat the house and put food on the table.”

He was willing to bet the taxes weren’t cheap and neither was heating that house, but he let it go. She wasn’t going to admit she and her grandmother were special, no matter how hard he tried to convince her otherwise. “How did you decide on pumpkins?”

“We grew a few near the garden every year for pies, and they did really well. I decided to try it and I’ve planted a little more of the field every year. This is it, though. This is all I can manage by myself. The rest of the fields we just hay off.”

“What about corn? Don’t people love fresh corn?”

“We were doing corn for a while, but you can’t go a mile around here without passing by somebody selling corn on the side of the road, and we’re too far off the beaten path to compete with the farm stands out on the main road. And even if I hired seasonal help, I don’t have the equipment to compete with the bigger outfits who supply the stores, so corn wasn’t making money. We still have some, of course, but it’s mainly just for us. The more food we grow, the less we have to buy.”

He loved watching her as she talked. When it came to the farm, she was a fascinating blend of practicality and passion that he had to admit he found sexy as hell. Very conscious of the camera in his hand, he wanted nothing more than to capture that aspect of her personality on film, or the digital version of it, anyway.

“I wish you’d let me photograph you.” She scowled, and
he tried to head the inevitable rejection off at the pass. “At least let me take a few. Not for my work, but for you. For Ida, actually. I could take a picture of you with the truck. I bet your grandmother would get a kick out of having that framed and sitting next to the photo of your grandfather.”

“I hate pictures,” she said, but he could tell his words had hit home. There wasn’t much she wouldn’t do for her grandmother.

“It would be a perfect Christmas present. In the photo of your grandfather, you can see the barn and cows behind him. I could take one of you right now, with the pumpkins behind you and the truck. It’s not only side-by-side images of Ida’s husband and granddaughter, but it’s a history of this farm. It shows the resilience and how, even when things change, this place and the people you are remain the same.”

When she looked out over the fields, pride shining in her expression, he knew he had her. “I think she’d like that.”