Stirred: A Love Story (10 page)

“No, I need to get back,” she heard Garrett say in a hurried voice, followed by the jangling of his keys.

At the sound of Logan’s laughter and swinging of the kitchen doors, Sage stood and threw the rest of the oranges in the sink.

“Garrett.”

He turned halfway to the front door.

What she was about to say had nothing to do with her book. In fact, the author would not approve because here came the vulnerability again, but she didn’t care. She wanted him to know. “About a year, maybe sixteen months.”

He laughed and then held her eyes as he realized she was serious. “Am I an idiot?”

She smiled and appreciated the occasional reward for telling the truth.

“I mean here I’m thinking you barely notice me.”

“I have great peripheral vision.”

They both laughed, and despite her head telling her to focus, to remember the lessons of her book, her heart soared.

“See you at the dinner rehearsal tomorrow?” Garrett asked.

“You will.”

He nodded, still smiling, and then he was gone.

Garrett hated games. Only a few weeks ago he’d had to remind himself he was the adult when Paige had kicked his ass playing Uno. Games were all about luck and chance. Luck was fickle, and chance scared the shit out of him.

But clearly he was on some self-destructive bent because he didn’t need to wait for her to come in after he’d made his delivery. He had more shit to do than there were hours in the day. He had no business casually sitting, drinking coffee. It had occurred to him, before she walked in wearing a skirt with what looked like glitter anteaters on it, that she could be screwing with him. Playing a game; most women did in his experience. He’d also thought maybe this was some kind of fantasy thing. Smart proper girl wants to roll around with a sweaty farmer, at least until she needs to clean up and return to her real world. Wasn’t that what his mother had done?

Shit, where the hell did that come from?

It didn’t matter. He’d convinced himself that this was a game and he wanted his turn. He was ready to bring on the charm, certain he would do better than the wine guy. But then she looked at him, refilled his coffee, and all he wanted was to know more about her. He wanted to know about her family, her world, why she wore animals on her skirt, and why the hell it looked so damn good on her.

By the time he’d finished telling her about his one and only trip to Mexico, he knew he was wrong. She wasn’t playing a game at all, or not with him at any rate. Who knew what she was doing with wine guy, but when she looked at him, it was different. Innocent and nervous in a way he couldn’t remember ever being. It was like she wasn’t hiding anything, anywhere. How was that possible?

Garrett threw Jack the last of his pizza crust and glanced out his office window. It was dark and past time to go home. He grabbed his jacket and followed Jack out into the night air.

He could still feel her hands on him. The woman had great hands. She was so delicate—no, delicate wasn’t the right word—she was intricate with lots of moving parts, and he suddenly found himself needing to pay attention to all of them. Most of the women he’d been with were easy to figure out once he identified the game. Sage wasn’t like most women, and he wondered if he’d noticed her even before the drunk text. With her short hair, which only managed to accentuate everything else about her, she was hard to ignore. Maybe he’d always known her mouth was full and supple, and maybe he’d internalized the color of her eyes: they were almost silver. He’d noticed her legs in the tiny skirt on New Year’s Eve, along with every other breathing male in the restaurant that night. That was nothing compared to practically looking up her skirt behind her bar. After she’d told him she loved him, wanted him, he’d told her it was “nice of her to say, but he didn’t see her that way.” He’d meant it at the time, but when the towel caught her skirt, when her legs had been right there again, he wanted to touch them, touch her. It was a good thing he could squeeze the damn oranges in his hands or Logan might have walked in on more than free-floating frustration.

Touching her, wanting to run his hand up the length of her, that was new, Garrett thought as he pulled up to his house. Every detail about her was suddenly right in front of him as though he’d turned a light on somewhere. Tipsy Sage, the woman throwing compliments at him and declaring her love, had been nice, manageable. What happened earlier was not nice. He hadn’t even touched her, but as he grabbed a beer and threw himself onto his couch, the whole memory felt downright naughty and suddenly he felt things shift once again.

Chapter Eight

S
elected staff worked through a mock run at Ryeland Farms on the afternoon before The Yard’s premiere farm-to-table dinner. As Sage unloaded her things, the nerves were palpable. The barn was a bustling space of
what if
or
how about we try.
She was happy her bar and the drinks for the evening had already been approved. Now, it was only a matter of working out where she fit into the timeline and if she could help out in other areas. Once she was set up and ready, Sage asked Kenna if she needed anything.

“We have too many damn men involved. Can you do something about that?” she asked before gesturing to two bussers who were leaning against the wall watching something on their phones.

Sage laughed, knowing full well Kenna loved both men who were currently driving her crazy, and slowly walked away from the storm. Turning in a circle to take in the barn, she could tell the entire thing had once been painted red because it was now distressed to allow the natural gray wood to peek through the flecks of red paint. It was beautiful. Sage put her hand on one of the walls and tried to remember if she’d ever been in a barn before. Unless it had happened when she was a child, she didn’t think so. Looking up at the beams and light, the angles and seemingly endless space, she had a feeling she would remember if she’d ever been near something like this. She passed through the huge barn door and out into the warm afternoon. The blue sky hung in stunning contrast to the white fluffy clouds that reminded her of the meringues her grandmother put out during Easter.

Fields of green stretched for miles, and Sage was suddenly inspired to create something new. She already had a warm hard cider if the evening turned chilly, but being in the fresh air, with the smell of tilled earth, she wanted to pull it all into a glass. Travis and Logan were huddled together as Kenna chewed something off a small plate and nodded with what Sage recognized as annoyance. She approached and very calmly asked if she could use the main house kitchen for a little while. Logan seemed confused for a minute, but then after looking at Kenna and Travis, he told her she was welcome to it.

“We’ll come and get you once we’re ready to do a full run-through,” he said.

“Unless we kill each other first,” Travis added with a smile.

After gathering a few tools, Sage walked past the rose bushes and felt a stir at entering the house by herself. The Rye family home was large by most standards and white with shutters. Placing her hand on the knob, she noticed the dark blue front door looked as if it had been painted at least a dozen times. She wondered if Garrett had painted it growing up. Did he plant the rosebushes with his father during one summer? The privacy of entering alone filled her with wonder.

The door opened into a small entryway that almost forced visitors to engage. A large staircase led from there to a second story. The floors were wood and some rooms, like the living room she peeked in on her way to the kitchen, had large rugs that looked like they’d been there for a hundred years. She’d shared meals in this house and heard stories. Kenna, her best friend, went to prom from this house, and Logan, she’d learned one night, had mirrored his own home, his own small urban farm, off the life he’d lived here. The house was intimate and spoke of a life played out season after season. There were beautiful houses, and then there were homes. This was the latter, and Sage was certain the love she felt for the lives raised in this space made it all the more personal for her.

Mr. Rye was gone for the day, so Sage was comfortable plugging in her iPod and taking over the Rye family kitchen for a bit.

She laid out mixing glasses and checked for ice before realizing she was working on the table Garrett, Logan, and Kenna ate at as children. There was something so omnipresent about the main house. It looked out over acres and acres of farmland framed by a few hills, which, depending on the time of day, looked like a painted backdrop.

Sage wiped her hands on a striped dish towel hanging below the sink and turned on her music. It was only supposed to drop to sixty degrees tomorrow night; it was a Sunday night, so she wanted something with a cleaner finish. Having yet to experiment with her creosote bitters, Sage had an idea.

She could see from the kitchen window that Logan and Kenna were huddled over the long table arguing about something, so she hoped she could squeeze out a little more than an hour. With all her basics prepped, she turned on the playlist titled “Shit Kicker.” Kenna had created it for her during her line-dancing phase last summer. Sage rolled her neck, let the twang of the music hit her, and started with a small batch of gin one of the local guys had delivered last week. He’d told her, “It’s more lemon peel and orris root than you’re used to.” Perfect, she thought, adding ice.

The feel of the glass, the clink of the ice cubes, and the smells of the fresh-cut palette swirled around her as she sipped and danced her way to something new. A reporter once asked her if she could only have one sense as a bartender, what would it be? He’d been surprised when she answered smell, assuming the obvious answer for someone making drinks would be taste, but she found her inspiration in smell and without it would probably be stuck serving standard, always understood, drinks.

Sage had worked at a florist when she was in high school, and tending bar often felt the same way: arranging, ordering, and splashing a sprig of a surprise. Making cocktails was like that. Marney, the owner of the florist shop, had said she had a gift, an innate feel for what went together. “Are you sure you’re good at math?” she’d asked one afternoon.

“Math figures into flowers. It figures into everything. Math and science get a bad rap for being cold, but they’re actually creative,” a shy and unassuming Sage had said. She’d found a little of herself working for Marney. The sunlit back room where things were chaotic and clippings could be thrown on the floor had been one of her first creative spaces. It was safe and she was never graded. Sage had often felt like an artist growing up, but her grades said she was an engineer. Her heart and mind were barely getting to know one another at that point in her life.

“Whatcha watching, big brother?”

Garrett rarely jumped, but his hand did clench into a fist before he realized Travis was standing behind him on the back porch. Relaxing again, he shook his head, as he often did at his future brother-in-law, and said nothing. Garrett had gone his whole life without a nickname, but jackass-soon-to-be-by-marriage had taken to calling him big brother. He would normally laugh Travis off and walk away, but he was glued to the spot on the back porch as music spilled from the screen door of their family home and Sage danced around the kitchen, rolling her body to the beat, hands overhead. It was a sight even Travis wasn’t going to pull him from. After glaring over his shoulder, he looked back to find her leaning forward, almost over the counter, to dip her metal straw into a glass and bring it to her lips for a taste. There it was again, that mouth, Garrett thought, forgetting Travis was still behind him.

“She does this all the time when she’s working up new drinks. She had some time, so she asked Logan if she could take over the kitchen for a while. If you need her out of there, I was coming to tell her we’re ready to get started.”

Garrett found that lately he did need Sage, but he still hadn’t figured out what for, and none of that needed to be shared with Travis. Instead, Garrett remained quiet, recognizing the song that was now playing. Since when did she listen to country, Zac Brown Band no less? The chorus was building and he didn’t want to miss a minute of the show. Sage wore Converse today, green high-tops, tight jeans that made her dancing all the more enjoyable, and a red top with beads or something around the neck. Her hair appeared a little spikier than normal and her earrings looked like playground swings, moving along in time with her hips. Watching her in the kitchen he grew up in, Garrett thought how much his sixteen-year-old self would have loved this. She was a swirling, sipping, smiling vision. The song changed and Garrett held up his hand, stopping Travis from interrupting for one more minute. Sage started to sing and Garrett’s head began inadvertently bobbing along to the beat.