Chapter Five
John was already regretting his decision when his feet hit the bedroom floor the next morning. The sun wouldn’t be up for another hour yet. He could at least wrangle a little peace and quiet before his new “farm hand” woke up and started rattling off questions like a damned parakeet.
He’d told her she could stay, even voiced his “concerns” that the work would be too much for her. If Phoebe had picked up on his warning hint that he wasn’t going to go easy on her, she’d brushed it off and looked at him with those glass green eyes, and he found himself nodding dumbly.
She hadn’t thanked him profusely, tears glistening and lip trembling. She’d merely nodded smugly as if she’d expected that answer all along.
He’d at least had enough wits about him to put a trial period on it. She had until the fourth of July to prove herself to a) be helpful and b) not be a nuisance. She’d agreed and immediately forgot about b, demanding to know the story of every person present in Peace of Pizza.
He came home with a dull headache, one measly leftover slice of pizza, and a house guest for the next two weeks.
John crept down the stairs determined not to wake Phoebe so he could at least have a cup of coffee in peace. He was debating whether he could get away with making that lone slice of pizza his breakfast when he realized the kitchen lights were already on.
“Morning,” Phoebe called cheerfully from the stove where she was scrambling something in his one and only fry pan.
Goddamn it. Just half an hour of quiet. Was that too much to ask?
She nodded toward the coffee maker as it sputtered to life on the counter. “Best part of waking up,” she said with the perkiness of a true morning person. John skirted around her and caught a whiff of his own shampoo in her hair.
He blamed his knee-jerk arousal on his lack of sleep and his foggy brain. He’d slept like the dead alone in this house for a year now. But Phoebe’s presence across the hall—on his only set of sheets, no less—had dominated his brain for the majority of the night. He’d counted ceiling tiles for hours. There were one hundred and forty-four of them in his bedroom. He’d triple checked before finally falling asleep into a restless dream about green eyes begging for help.
“Hey, where’s your TV? I poked my head into the living room, but I didn’t see one.”
“Don’t have one,” he said gruffly. And he was sure she’d have a thousand things to say about that. But he changed the subject before she could. “Did you sleep well?” John knew it was mean, but he hoped she’d slept like shit.
“Slept like there was a carbon monoxide leak in my room,” Phoebe said, plating up fluffy yellow eggs. Two slices of bread popped up like a jack-in-the-box out of the jaundice yellow toaster his mother had given him when she and his father had packed up for their big move west.
She handed him the plates jerking her chin toward the table, and while he stared stupidly at the breakfast in his hands, Phoebe efficiently filled two thick handled mugs with coffee.
“So,” she said, setting the mugs down on the table. “What are we doing today?”
He followed suit with the plates and pulled out a chair. John couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat down for breakfast. Usually it was a bowl of cereal eaten standing up or a piece of toast on his way out the door.
He reached for his coffee with a twinge of desperation. “Feed the cow and turn her out.”
“You mentioned a limping cow yesterday. Is she livestock?”
He shook his head. “She’s a pet. She was a neglect case from over in Cleary,” he said shooting his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the neighboring town. “The vet needed a place to keep her while she healed, and I opened my big, fat mouth. Now Pierce Acres has a cow.”
It was the most words he’d spoken pre-dawn in years. But it still wasn’t enough for Phoebe.
“After our pet cow, what then?” She dug into the eggs with enthusiasm.
Maybe he could put Phoebe on shoveling out the grain bin that needed emptied while he handled the roadside mowing. He’d get some quiet time before lunch. If he gave her too much information up front, she’d be asking him questions about the sprayer apertures and his life goals while they were weeding the borders of his fields.
“Let’s just start with Melanie and go from there.”
She put her fork down. “You named your cow Melanie?”
The piece of toast stuck in John’s throat. “She, uh, has these deep, soulful brown eyes. Reminded me of my girlfriend in high school.”
Phoebe’s laugh lit up the room brighter than the basket weave pendant light over their heads. “Does human Melanie know about her namesake?”
John swallowed hard, the coffee warming a path to his stomach. “I hope not. She moved away after she graduated from college. Married a dentist and lives in Milwaukee.”
“So, Blue Moon isn’t one of those small towns where everyone knows everything and someone didn’t write Melanie a letter saying ‘You’ll never guess what John Pierce named his new cow.’”
Shit. That was exactly the kind of town Blue Moon was.
He rose and carried his dishes to the sink, guzzling the last of his coffee. “Let’s get this day started,” he grumbled.
--------
He stuck her in the grain bin on purpose, Phoebe thought as her shovel scraped metal under the last dredges of grain. Her grandfather had done the same thing when he was tired of answering her incessant questions. But she couldn’t help it. As a child, she’d been endlessly fascinated by every aspect of life, and adulthood had done little to dull her interest. It was interesting to note that her questions seemed to have the same effect on John as they did her grandfather: one word answers that devolved into grunts and then finally redirection.
She wondered if farmers by design preferred solitude. That kind of life would never suit her. She needed people and stories and connection. Squatting on a piece of land and only seeing your neighbors every other week when you rode into town for supplies sounded depressing. It was why she was more interested in the business of farming than the actual field work.
But there was something to be said for the satisfaction of manual labor. The familiarity of the work, the shuffle and scoop motion designed to save lower backs, reminded her of summers that seemed to stretch on forever. Of her grandmother hanging wash on the line in the backyard, and strawberry preserves in neat rows on the cellar shelves, and the smell of her grandfather’s pipe tobacco.
John thought he was torturing her with the menial task, but he was providing an unintended and very pleasant trip down memory lane.
So, she did what she’d done then, entertained herself by singing her favorite songs of the ’70s. Her words, accented by the sharp slice of shovel, echoed all around her off the metal of the bin. There was barely a foot of grain left in the bottom of the bin, and she figured she could get about half of it fed through the auger before John came to check on her progress.
She switched from “I Will Survive” to an enthusiastic rendition of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” adding a little swing to her hips with each shuffling step forward.
“Didn’t know this was American Bandstand in here.” John’s voice bounced off the curving metal walls, cutting off her superb solo.
“Didn’t know someone without a TV could be up on pop culture,” Phoebe quipped back. She paused in her shoveling to swipe an arm across her sweaty forehead. He’d given up on her solitary confinement sooner than she’d thought he would, and Phoebe felt a twinge of disappointment that she wouldn’t be able to blow his mind with her shoveling prowess.
John eyed the floor of the bin and silently picked up the second shovel leaning against the wall. Together they dug back into the grain, and Phoebe gave the silence a few minutes. When it became unbearable, she started humming and soon after that returned to her homage to Michael Jackson.
John didn’t join in. He didn’t seem like the singalong type, but Phoebe noted that his shovel scoops were timed with her beat, and that made her smile. She stole glances as they circled in opposite directions and wondered dispassionately what made men doing physical labor so appealing.
The sinewy bulge of his biceps, the sweat stains on his t-shirt, the way his Levi’s hugged those muscular thighs. All those parts added up to a pretty spectacular whole. She wasn’t feeling so objective now, Phoebe noticed. But she’d never doubted John’s physical attraction. What she’d yet to nail down was his analytical sex appeal. Was he kind? Smart? Funny? Interesting?
He was sending her mixed messages. First, he was beyond reluctant to welcome her into his life for the summer and made her beg to stay. Not a good start. Then, he’d stripped the sheets off his own bed and put them on hers. She’d fallen asleep wrapped in the scent of him, subconsciously finding it a comfort for her first night in a new place. Thoughtful and generous. But he treated her questions—and her presence—like a nuisance. Irritating and pompous.
To Phoebe, her questions served dual purposes. They gave her information that she sought for her thesis, and they added to her measure of the man. Unfortunately, John hadn’t wholeheartedly committed himself to being the A to her Q’s. Phoebe knew herself well enough to know she’d tolerate his intolerance only for so long before she set him straight. Currently she was pretending to be a polite houseguest, but with her entire future and her family’s well-being in John’s hands, she couldn’t afford to stay politely patient.
She noticed the change in his pace. He was shoveling faster now, and she adjusted to match. Her breath was coming harder now, and the sweat was running freely, but Phoebe could pull her weight. She could hang with the big boys. She’d proven it before and wasn’t opposed to proving it again to a new audience.
There was nothing on God’s green earth that was going to make her stop first. Even when her low back gave a creaking warning and when she felt the definitive beginnings of blisters rising on her thumb and palm. She didn’t stop until he took the shovel from her rigor mortis fingers.
“It’s not a race,” he said, looking amused.
“That’s usually what guys say when I beat them.” Her flippancy would have come off better if she wasn’t so winded.
John tossed the shovel down and quick as lightning reached for her hands. He turned them palms up and examined the red welts. “First of all, a good job is better than a fast job. Secondly, a farm hand is only as valuable as the hand they’re able to give,” he said quietly.
“There’s nothing wrong with being quick, and I can work through blisters,” Phoebe protested.
“The point is you don’t have to. You could have taken it slower, worn gloves, taken breaks,” John pointed out. “Now, we have to stop what we’re doing and go patch you up.”
He was chastising her like a child, and Phoebe bristled at it.
“I’m perfectly capable of slapping on a few bandages just fine by myself. You don’t need to be so inconvenienced.”
He looked at her, his mouth grim. “There’s a difference between rushing through something to get to the other side and doing it right.”
“There’s also something to be said for speed and efficiency over plodding,” Phoebe shot back.
“Let’s go,” he said gesturing toward the doorway.
“Oh, after you,” Phoebe insisted. She smirked at the tension in his shoulders as she filed out after him.