Laugh (2 page)

Too much.

“You’re a redhead. And have freckles all over. I can practically see more popping out all over from here. You’re going to be as bright as one of my tomatoes before we even get started. You remind me of the one redheaded kid, with the freckles, on that old television show. The one set in the small town with the cops and the auntie—”

“Opie. You’re thinking of Opie. And believe me, I’ve heard it before.”

She leaned back against her worktable. Crossed one racehorse-worthy leg over the other and gazed into the middle distance. “No. That’s not it. You know, the little precocious boy who’s always going fishing. Real popular show that’s on cable rerun all the time—”

“
The Andy Griffith Show.
Opie. That’s what you’re thinking of.”

She met his eye. Shook her head. “Hm. Yeah. I don’t think so. Must’ve been one of my mom’s old
telenovelas
I’m thinking of.” She pushed herself away from the table. “Ready?”

“For what? Getting confused to death?”

“Do you at least have a hat, Opie?”

“No. I do not have a hat. I have about five hundred petunias you don’t want and a headache.”
And a mental note to take a contract out on Lacey’s life.

“It’s the heat.”

“What’s the heat?”

“Why you have a headache. You need a hat. I’ll see what I can find. You might as well take those petunias home to kill. This heat’s not good for anything but tomatoes and zucchini. I told Lacey to donate salt hay. You can bring that tomorrow.”

She turned around and walked toward the shed, stepping around debris Sam had no name for. He stood in his wet T-shirt and closed his eyes, listening to the insects hum.

His mind was empty, for once.

Stunned, probably.

He opened his eyes to the farmer standing right in front of him, holding out something that looked like a hair bezoar he had once removed from an eighty-five-year-old woman’s stomach after she took up the habit of grooming her toy poodle with her teeth. “What the fuck is that?”

“Your hat.”

He looked at it. It might have been straw once, but now it was mostly fungus. He shivered. “I am not putting that on my head.”

She looked at it, and before she could completely school her features back to polite helpfulness, he saw her adorable nose wrinkle with disgust.
Ah. So that’s how she’s playing it.
Well.

He had been a medical student. A freakishly hot farmer, no matter how amazing her legs, could not haze him.

She started back toward the shed. “Well, if you’re certain. It’s just that you look a little—pink already. There around your nose, where most of your freckles are.” She tilted her head and squinted up at him. “Though, it’s hard to tell where
most
of your freckles are. You have these massive crops everywhere. You should wear sunscreen.”

Crops of freckles his
ass.
He had two dozen
at the most
, and not a single woman had ever complained. In fact, women loved his freckles. The last woman he was with had told him that they
made his handsomeness more approachable.

Direct fucking quote.

“Give me that hat.”

She looked down at the green-and-brown clump. They watched something drip off of it. Something that was not water. She held it out. “This hat?”

“Do you see any other hats?”

“No. This was the only one I could find. I don’t even remember putting it in the shed. It’s probably been in there for years. Vintage.”

“Hand it over.”

She straightened her arm out and dangled the hat on one finger. He stepped forward to take it, and then noticed the
smell.
As if a creature in that shed had eaten the hat, and the hat hadn’t been agreeable, and so the creature dispatched some kind of foul, hat-shaped dung.

He looked back at the farmer.

Her eyes were
dancing.

He took the hat delicately by its crumbling brim, ignoring the vaguely slimy texture, and raised it to his head, breathing through his mouth. He looked directly into her glittering brown eyes and brought the hat closer.

He watched a dimple crater her left cheek.

He wanted to put his tongue in it.

The dimple got bigger, and deeper; the corners of her mouth started to tremble. He felt the cool, wet edge of the hat against his brow.

She burst out laughing, so loudly that a pair of birds startled out of one of the grow boxes. She actually
had her head thrown back, and the sweat-shiny hollow of her throat was a revelation.

His farmer looked back at him, her smile wide and easy. He hovered the hat over his hair.

“
Ay Dios mio.
Give me that hat.” She laughed.

“This hat?” He dangled it by a finger in her direction.

She laughed again. “You see any other?”

“Actually, I don’t see
any
hats. I think this might be shed monster scat.”

She laughed again, her hands on her hips, and took the hat, turning to toss it in a penned-in pile of dirt so dark it looked black. It landed neatly onto the top and settled into the loam.

She stepped forward and stuck out her hand, streaked with dirt. “Nina Paz.”

He took her hand, surprising himself by not caring about the dirt. “Sam Burnside.”

“I know.” She didn’t let go of his hand, which suited him. “Lacey told me she was sending me an uptight ginger doctor and not to go easy on you.”

He squeezed her hand and tugged it two millimeters toward him, which was proof of his showing just a little restraint, for once.

She was pretty close now, and there were little beads of sweat along her upper lip.

She was pretty close and she was also
pretty.
It felt like the two of them were caught in slow, thick seconds, the air actually green and live, something growing.

He felt good, on the verge of laughter and a little helpless.

He didn’t really know Nina Paz, he reminded himself. He didn’t know her, and if her eyes seemed knowing, he didn’t have to keep holding her hand and looking her over, just to find out what she knew.

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.

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 sent him home once she got the most useful work from her volunteer.

Yet she
had
seen that hidden Sam.