Habit: the overall appearance of a plant.
PIERCE had shot off his big mouth, and now here he was at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, zipping past the colossally dusty grain silos of Angus Feed and Grain, pulling into a parking lot and feeling like he was doomed to end up ten grand lighter. Malcolm was right. He didn’t know the first thing about raising pumpkins, but he’d never let a lack of knowledge stop him from doing what he wanted to do.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. “C’mon, you lead football teams to victory. You can do this. The paneled van that was parked beside him pulled out, revealing a blue Toyota Corolla in the space on the other side.
His pulse did a strange two-step. Was it Lace’s car?
Pierce hopped out of his truck, rushed inside the feed store through the side exit. The desiccated smell of dried grain mingled with the vitaminy scent of the animal care medicine hit him head-on, stirring memories of the time he was courting Jenny Angus. Her uncle owned the business and she’d worked here as a clerk during the summers. The persistent smell had invaded her hair, and every time he kissed her, he’d thought of livestock.
What did Lace’s hair smell like? Flowers most likely. And sunshine.
His boots made a shuffling sound against the big-planked hardwood floors that constituted the store area. To the left was a teller’s cage. To the right, the wooden flooring ended as cement steps went down to the storage area and loading dock. A hallway to the side of the teller’s cage led to the front of the store with an entrance on Main Street.
A haze of perpetual dust—sawdust, deer corn dust, barley dust, hay dust, peanut dust, all kinds of agricultural dust—floated in the air, stirred by the lazy spin of the old-style industrial-grade ceiling fans mounted overhead.
He tasted grit on his tongue and his stomach tightened. He hadn’t been in the feed store since he’d gone off to college. Hell, who would’ve thought he’d feel nostalgic over a friggin’ feed store? Except for when he was chasing Jenny, he’d hated coming in here with Abe when he was a kid. Bored out of his skull, he’d spent his time perusing the bulletin board that had pictures of local animals for sale—Australian cattle dogs, donkeys, a llama or two, free barn kittens to anyone who would come and get them.
Pierce scanned the warehouse area through the haze, looking for Lace. One side of the warehouse was stacked almost to the ceiling with sacks of feed, salt for water softeners, pesticides, and potting soil. At the other end of the warehouse a tall, wide door was rolled up all the way and a couple of cowboys stood on the loading dock jawing with the teenage boys loading feed into the beds of their waiting pickup trucks.
Quickly, Pierce tugged the brim of his hat lower and ducked his head, not wanting the men to recognize him and stroll over for a chat. Constant attention could get tiresome.
“Can I help ya?” asked the blond girl sitting in front of an aged PC at a desk in the rear of the teller cage.
She sent a text message on her cell phone, stuck the phone in her cleavage, jumped up from her rolling swivel chair, and came toward the window. She was all of sixteen, had a tiny diamond stud in her nostril and a hickey on the side of her neck the size of a Krugerrand. She wore a baby doll T-shirt emblazoned with The Band Perry logo and jeans so tight he could make out the denomination of the change in her front pocket—two quarters, a penny, and three dimes.
Still glancing around for any sign of Lace, he sauntered up to the window. “I’d like to buy some pumpkin seeds.”
She pulled down a pad of the same order forms that Jenny had once used. Apparently, Angus Feed and Grain was going kicking and screaming into the digital age. Kind of nice, actually, that some things never changed. You could count on small towns for that and the fact that most everybody knew who you were.
“How much do you need?” she asked.
Pierce rested his elbow on the thin wooden ledge that extended out from the teller cage, crooked his grin out of habit, not an attempt to seduce. “How much should I need?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. How big is the area you’re planting?”
Hell, he didn’t know. He turned up the wattage on his smile. Surely she recognized him. “I’m planting for Abe Hollister. He buys his seed here every year. Do you mind looking up how much he buys?”
The girl wrinkled her nose. “I haven’t been working here long and I’m from Whistle Stop. Don’t know Abe Hollister. He any kin to Malcolm?”
“Malcolm’s my brother. Abe’s our dad.”
Her eyes lit up. “You are so lucky to have such a great brother. Malcolm is the sweetest thing. He brings us doughnuts every time he comes in.”
Malcolm? Sweet? Maybe to the women at Angus Feed and Grain. “Yeah, he’s a good guy.”
“Lemme go ask Toby.” She turned around, walked to the back of the teller cage, and knocked on the wall. “Toby!”
“Yeah?” a man’s voice called back from the other side of the wall.
“Some old dude wants to know how much seed he’ll need to plant Malcolm’s pumpkin patch.” Her cleavage dinged, letting her know she had a text message. She fished the phone out of her bra and went back to texting.
Pierce blinked, swallowed, and shook his head. Old dude? Wow. Talk about a smack to the ego.
Footsteps sounded to his left and he turned to see one of Malcolm’s former classmates, Toby Mercer, emerge from the corridor that led to another part of the building. Lace had to be in there.
Toby was shaped like a drinking straw, long and straight and thin. “Pierce!”
Pierce extended his hand, cast a glance at the corridor, and almost called the pale man by his schoolyard nickname, Casper. “Toby.”
Toby ignored his hand and instead clamped him in a back-pounding hug. With one arm slung around Pierce’s shoulder, he turned him back to the teller window. “Aimee, you dumb-dumb. This ‘old dude’ is Pierce Hollister, quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys.”
Using her thumbs in rapid texting mode, she never looked up from her phone screen, just shrugged and said, “Whatever.”
“She’s into swimmers. If you were Michael Phelps she would have known who you were,” Toby reassured him.
Aimee glanced up long enough to smile dreamily and murmured, “I love the way that man moves through the water. Like a dolphin.”
Pierce stepped back, waved at the warehouse. “You working here?”
Toby puffed out his chest. “I’m the general manager.”
“No kidding?”
“Hey, I saw the Super Bowl.” Toby hissed in a breath through his teeth. “Rough break.” He paused, laughed. “No pun intended. How’s the leg?”
“Healing. Thanks for asking.”
“I heard rumors . . .” Toby shook his head. “Never mind.”
Pierce widened the smile he wanted to drop. Hell, he could just imagine what kind of spiteful stuff was being said behind his back. That was part and parcel of being famous. You had to take the good with the bad. If you put yourself out there, folks felt free to say any damn thing about you that they wanted whether it was true or not. “No, go ahead. You can tell me what people are saying behind my back.”
Toby made a dismissive face. “It’s nothing. You know how people like to talk.”
“They’re saying I’m washed up.” Pierce said it so Toby didn’t have to.
“It’s just the contrary folks that are upset because the Cowboys lost the Super Bowl.”
“I wasn’t happy about it either.”
“No one thinks it was your fault, but with the leg and comparison to Theismann, gossip takes on a life of its own.”
“You can tell everyone that you heard it from the horse’s mouth. I’m fine. I’ll be back on the roster by mid-season. My career is going great guns.”
“Why, I sure am glad to hear that and not just because I have a Jackson riding on your return.”
“I appreciate that.”
Toby clapped him on the back again. “Now, let’s get you those pum’kin seeds.”
They went down the corridor and into the garden supply part of the building. A green water hose lay snaked over the cement, and trays of young plants were growing in cheap black plastic containers. The big picture windows, with the blinds drawn up, fronted North Main. To the far side of the room was a large carousel of seed packets, and beside the carousel sat big plastic bins like those in the supermarket that held gourmet nuts and candies sold by the pound, but here the bins contained a wide variety of seeds.
But Pierce wasn’t really paying much attention to any of that. He was on the lookout for Lace.
Another room opened up off the one they were in. When he’d come to the feed store with his dad, that room had been part of a family-owned hardware store, long put out of business by the big box home improvement stores.
“That’s new,” Pierce said.
Toby laughed. “You’ve been away too long. Mr. Angus bought Carter Ivy’s building and expanded it over ten years ago. That’s where we keep the tillers and lawn mowers and weed eaters and such.”
“Mind giving me a tour?”
Toby looked surprised by the request. Hell, Pierce was surprised he asked it, but there was this overwhelming urge to see Lace running through him like a commercial jingle you couldn’t get out of your head. It didn’t make any sense, but there it was. He’d been thinking about her almost nonstop since Monday and the only thing he’d ever thought about that much was football.
“Sure, this way.” Toby ushered him into the other room.
Pierce skimmed his gaze over the John Deere lawn tractors, the Ryobi cultivators, terra-cotta patio chimineas, barbecue grills, and a metal cage of propane bottles, but he didn’t see her. The starch went out of his spine and his smile drooped.
“Nice collection,” he said lamely.
“It’s a tough market with them building a Home Depot in Alpine, but luckily we got a loyal customer base who’d rather spend the pennies right here in Cupid than drive. Isn’t that right, Lace?”
Lace.
A right nice tingly sensation spread throughout his body and Pierce went up on tiptoes trying to find her amid the gardening equipment.
“That’s right, Toby.” Lace stood up from where she’d been facing away from them and crouched down beside a display of hedge trimmers.
She dusted her hands on the seat of her jeans—and what a fine seat it was—and turned around. She wore an agreeable red cotton shirt that clung loosely to munificent breasts the size of ripe grapefruits. The color accented her dark hair and fair skin, giving her an otherworldly appearance. He’d had a girlfriend once who dragged him to art galleries. Hadn’t gotten much out of the experience, except now he remembered one of the artists because Lace resembled the heavenly women he painted. Rubens. Like the sandwich.
Pierce tried to draw in a breath, but it felt as if his lungs had been frozen by liquid nitrogen and they could neither expand nor deflate. He sort of just gaped at her, mouth opening, trying to inhale.
For one brief second a look of alarm passed over her face, but she quickly covered it up with neutral nonchalance. The band around his chest tightened. What did that look mean?
“You need anything, Lace?” Toby asked.
“I’m good.” She waved a hand. “Go ahead and help your customer.”
Your customer.
Like she didn’t even know him. She wasn’t even going to acknowledge him.
Pierce would have said something to her, should have said something glib and flirty, but his lungs still weren’t cooperating. Even so, he must have been breathing on some level or he would have passed out. Right?
Speechless and confused about it, Pierce followed Toby back into the seed room. Toby got a paper bag from above the bins and started dishing seeds into the bag with a big stainless steel scoop. He paused after a moment to weigh it on a pair of scales.
But Pierce was not paying any attention whatsoever because Lace had followed them into the room, the hedge trimmer in her arms, although she was pointedly trying to make her way to the exit as fast as possible.
However, she did cast a quick glance at him and Toby and smirked. What was that about?
“There you go,” Toby announced. “Give this to Aimee.” He handed him a piece of paper with his purchase written on it. “You can pay her on the way out.”
“Thanks,” Pierce said, and grabbed the bag feeling as if he’d been zapped with a stun gun. What was it about Lace that grabbed him so forcefully by the short hairs?
She’d already exited.
He rushed to catch up to her, thought of—and discarded—a hundred different smooth-operator lines. Maybe he should start with an apology for the jerk-off thing he’d said to her in the hospital parking lot. But an apology would put him in a weakened position. Give her the upper hand.
When he got back to the main warehouse, he was relieved to see she was at the teller cage, settling up her bill for the hedge trimmer. She wielded the thing like she knew what she was doing.
“Hi,” he said breathlessly. Brilliant. That line will live in pickup infamy.
She nodded at him, barely. “Thanks, Aimee,” she said, and she turned to leave.
Pierce moved to block her way. “Aren’t you going to say something to me?”
“Something.”
“Cute.”
“May I go now?”
“Listen, about the other day—”
“This hedge trimmer is heavy. Could we have this conversation another day?”
“We sort of got off on the wrong foot—”
One eyebrow shot up on her forehead. “We?”
“Okay, me. It was my fault. I acted like—”
“Hedge trimmer.” She held it up. “Heavy.”
“Oh, right. Here, let me take it for you.” He stuffed the sack of seeds underneath his arm and reached for the trimmer.
She clung to it with a death grip. “I’ve got it,” she said through clenched teeth.
They were drawing a crowd. Toby had come into the room and the cowboys and loading dock workers wandered over, as well as a couple of other customers.
Fine by him. He was used to the limelight. “Let me carry it to the car for you. It’s the least I can do.”
“You don’t owe me a thing.”
Man, she wasn’t giving an inch. He tugged on the box.
“You want to carry my books for me too?” She hung on to the box like it contained her life’s savings.
“C’mon. What’s the big deal?”
“You want to carry it to my car for me?”
Damn, she was stronger than she looked. He tugged more firmly. “I do.”
She smiled slyly and then let go unexpectedly, sending him stumbling backward. “Okay, carry it to my car for me.”
He hustled toward the door.
“Hey, Malcolm’s brother,” Aimee called from the teller’s cage. “You gonna steal those pumpkin seeds?”
“Oh yeah, right.” He held one finger up for Lace. “Hang on a minute.”
She sighed but motioned him toward the teller cage.
“Be right back.” He winked.
She rolled her eyes.
“Don’t run off.”
“I can’t. You have my hedge trimmer.”
“I’ll get you another one, Lace,” Toby said. “Drive around to North Main and I’ll take it out to you.”
“It’s okay, Toby. I’ll wait.”
Pierce turned back to the teller’s cage, saw that everyone in the place was smirking at him. What the hell was so damn funny? He smiled big. He wasn’t about to let them know he was ruffled.
Aimee held out her palm even though she was behind a glass window. “Ticket?”
He juggled the hedge trimmer. The thing was heavier than you might expect and the shape of the box threw him off balance. He cocked the box on his hip, dug in his front shirt pocket, and fished out the ticket Toby had given him. In the process, he dropped the sack of seeds.
Someone chuckled.
Pierce bent to scoop up the bag and whacked the end of the box into Toby’s leg.
“You’re deadly with that thing, Hollister. Are you sure that you hold on to a football for a living?”
One of the cowboys snorted. No one was asking him for an autograph.
“Sorry,” Pierce apologized. He was not going to stop smiling. Was not going to let them see he was flustered. This was all Lace’s doing. She turned him into a tongue-tied idiot.
“That’ll be ten dollars and fifty-seven cents.”
He dug in his wallet.
The door creaked open.
Pierce darted a glance over his shoulder to make sure Lace wasn’t running out on him, but it was another customer coming in. He pushed the bill through the slot toward Aimee, all the while keeping his gaze trained on Lace. “Keep the change.”
He turned to Lace, being careful not to whack anyone else with the box.
“Hey, big shot,” Aimee called.
“Yes?” Distracted, he glanced back.
Aimee was holding up a ten-dollar bill. “You’re fifty-seven cents short.
“Sorry.” He thought he’d given her a twenty. He did the box-balancing shuffle again, dug another dollar out, and passed it to Aimee.
“Hang on, I’ll get your change.”
But he was already walking toward Lace, sweat beading on his brow. It was damn hot in there.
Lace gave him a Mona-Lisa-ain’t-got-nothing-on-me smile and he followed her out the door. Hell, he’d follow that butt just about anywhere.
She sashayed around to the back of her Corolla and opened the trunk. He rushed over to put the hedge trimmer in for her. Stood there breathing like he’d just run the ball fifty yards into the end zone himself.
The tip of her tongue flicked out to moisten her upper lip. “Pierce?”
Was she going to forgive him? Thank him? “Yes?”
“I think you should know something.”
He leaned in closer, getting a deep breath of her deliciously earthy scent. “What’s that?”
“That sack of seeds?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Take a look at them.”
Confused, but willing to do just about anything she asked, Pierce opened the crumpled paper bag and peered in at the thin, spiny, brittle seeds.
“Do those look like pumpkin seeds to you?”
His mind vapor locked, and for the life of him, he could not remember what pumpkin seeds looked like. He blinked, glanced at her. Talk about pressure. He felt like he was back in calculus class. “Um . . . um . . .”
“Did you ever carve a jack-o’-lantern when you were a kid?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Think back,” she said with extravagant patience. “What did the inside of the pumpkin look like?”
“It had this orange yucky crap in it and these big—” He met her eyes. “These aren’t pumpkin seeds.”
“Very good.” She gave a little half clap like he was a puppy who’d managed to hold his bladder until he’d gotten outside.
His eyes met hers. “What are these seeds?”
“Salsola iberica.”
“In English,” Pierce said. She was getting a kick out of his ignorance.
“Russian thistle.”
He frowned. “Russian thistle? What’s that?”
“Fancy name for tumbleweed.”
His face warmed. “These are tumbleweed seeds?”
She nodded.
“Why would Toby sell me tumbleweed seeds?” he asked.
Lace canted her head. “For one thing, a slick-talking salesman conned Toby into investing a thousand dollars’ worth of Joe Angus’s money for Salsola iberica, convincing him that it was the cattle fodder of the future, and Toby needs to unload it to stay on Joe’s good side.”
He swore, using one short, stark, succinct word. “Toby thought I was too dumb to know the difference.”
Lace shrugged, straightened her head, and raised her brow, but she didn’t say what he figured she was thinking. You did buy them, dumbass.
“I do know the difference,” he said defensively.
Her eyebrows went higher.
“I wasn’t paying attention when Toby was scooping up the seeds because I was busy looking at you.”
“So it’s my fault?” Her lips twitched in amusement.
He grinned back. “Totally. If you knew how hot you looked in those jeans—”
“For another thing,” she interrupted, ignoring his compliment, but a pale pinkness tinged her neck and slowly spread up her face to color her cheeks. “Malcolm called before you got here.”
“Malcolm called?”
“He told Toby about your bet over the pumpkin crop. They punked you, Pierce. It was a group effort.”
“So when Aimee called me ‘old dude’ and pretended she didn’t know who I was—”
“Setup.”
“And the part about people saying I’m washed up?”
“Untrue. People are on pins and needles waiting for you to get back on the gridiron.”
Well, that was something of a relief. He wasn’t a has-been. Yet.
Lace motioned toward the door of the store.
He turned to see everyone who’d been in the store standing outside grinning at him. Joke. It had all been a joke. Well, damn. He could take a joke. In spite of the hollow feeling in his gut, he grinned, held up the sack of seeds, and called, “You got me.”
The bunch at the door burst out laughing.
Toby waved him back inside. “C’mon. I’ll get you the real pumpkin seeds.”
“Be right there,” he said to Toby, and then turned back to Lace. “You were in on this prank too?”
“I wasn’t. I overheard them.”
“Why did you tell me the truth instead of letting me get home with the thistle seeds so Malcolm could do a gloaty dance?”
“Because I hate seeing anyone humiliated. Even you.”
He looked deep into her soulful blue eyes, and saw the remnants of childhood hurt lingering. She blinked and it went away, but for a brief second, he’d seen it, and while she’d clearly gotten past her teenage crush on him and the shame it had caused her, that public pain was part of who she was.
His throat constricted. Damn. He was so sorry for that. He reached out a hand to touch her, but she stepped back, just out of reach.
“Better go fetch your pumpkin seeds and get them in the ground or they won’t be ready in time for Halloween.” She slammed the trunk closed. “Then again, smart money says Malcolm’s going to win the bet.”
“The town is making bets?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How much did you put in?”
“Twenty on Malcolm.”
Pierce splayed a hand to his chest. “Ouch.”
“You might be good at flinging a football, but a farmer?” She shook her head. “You’re not.”
“I can’t believe you backed Malcolm.”
“What can I say? For once in your life, Pierce, you’re a long shot. Now you finally know how the rest of us feel.”