Page 22 of Where It All Began
He had two rows of seats to go when Michael spotted him. His friend’s feet hit the floor, and he was already out of his seat as he tossed a friendly, “Gotta go!” to Phoebe and Elvira. Michael vaulted over the two empty rows behind them before veering into the aisle and sprinting out of the building.
Phoebe watched him go. “You two have the oddest friendship.”
They bid Elvira goodbye but not before Phoebe exchanged phone numbers with her. “I could use someone with lady parts to hang out with on occasion,” Phoebe joked.
“Count on me. And I’ll be on the farm Sunday for the party.”
“Party?” John looked at her blankly.
“Yeah, the farmers and everyone are coming over to talk about the farm sharing?” Elvira prompted him.
“That happened seven seconds ago, and it was just a couple of farmers coming over for a meeting,” John argued.
Elvira gave a dainty shrug. “Not what I heard. You better stock up on picnic food and beer. It’ll be a prequel to the festivities on the 4th.”
John watched her go with a sinking feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. And here he’d thought the speech would be the worst part.
Phoebe patted John on the shoulder. “You okay?”
He shook his head. “I just want a cold beer and my nice quiet house and to never see any of these crazies again.”
“Come on, let’s go home and get you that beer,” she said, leading him up the aisle. “You know. This is why people own TVs.”
Chapter Ten
Needing a little distance from Phoebe, John strapped a spray tank of weed killer on her back and sent her off to trudge the perimeter of the wheat fields. She’d cheerfully skipped off for the fields, whistling some pop song that he should know but didn’t, leaving him broody.
Last night had opened a door. One that he hadn’t been prepared to open. One that he needed to close again. Yes, he was attracted to her. Yes, she interested him beyond just house guest status. But attraction and interest? Those didn’t outweigh responsibility and plans.
He’d been surprised by his uncomfortable, visceral reaction to Michael flirting with Phoebe. Sure, he was responsible for her while she was here, but that reaction had bordered on territorial. He didn’t need the distraction of attraction stirring him up every five seconds.
She’d dressed in a tight t-shirt today that he’d immediately noticed and appreciated on an uncontrollable biological level. Her jeans had more rips than denim, and she’d borrowed one of his ball caps from the coat closet and fed her hair through the back in a long tail. And all he could think about was how pretty she looked. Then she’d smiled at him, and she was beautiful.
Fortunately, she’d immediately peppered him with questions about his pull-behind sprayer, its age and dimensions, and whether or not he reckoned it would last one more season. The yammering demands for information made the beauty a little easier to ignore.
The woman had him tied up in knots one minute with her incessant interrogation and then left him smiling like a dope after her as she sauntered out of the room tossing insults at him. She hadn’t oversold her energy or commitment to work. He knew that now and was grateful, even if it did unnerve him. Hell, everything about her unnerved him, including how much he wanted her. His attraction to her was a complication, and John hated those.
Phoebe Allen was the walking contradiction of everything he thought he’d wanted in a woman. Opinionated, aggressive, pushy, headstrong. She made snap decisions, and she never shut up. But here he was, up to his elbows in grease trying to coax the ancient sprayer into operation for one more season, and his thoughts were on her.
He plotted through his options in his mind as he liked to do when faced with a decision.
As far as he saw it, he had two choices. He could pursue some kind of summer fling with her, or he could stay the course, maintain a professional relationship with her, and wait out the summer. Or, they could defy the odds, fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.Okay, three choices.
He smirked at the ludicrous idea, twisting the reassembled nozzle back into place on the boom of the sprayer and moved on to the next one. He’d taken them apart, cleaned them, fixed what was broken, and was now reassembling the whole, hoping it would perform as good as, if not better than, before. That’s how he worked. That’s how he lived. He didn’t make snap decisions—with the exception of being conned into taking on a grad student. He figured out how things worked and then carefully maintained, tweaked, and finessed until he was satisfied. It was part of the appeal of farm life. Something always needed fixing, there was always a better way to do things, and there was always a simple way to measure success.
Phoebe operated on a manual he didn’t have access to, and there’d be no fixing her rashness, her loud opinions. Polar opposites did not make solid marriage material. He was a “stop and smell the bee balm” kind of man. Phoebe was a “blindly stomp all over the bee balm while listing six different ways to make it grow better” person.
John tightened the bolts on the boom and moved on to inspect the hoses.
He was a man that committed whether it was to a task, a woman, a livelihood. He didn’t take relationships lightly. Loyalty, to him, was the most valuable component in a relationship. And an affair with Phoebe while exciting and fun—he shook his head to ward off the half dozen visions of her naked and gasping his name—was still ill-conceived. There was no long-term to be had there. Not even if they magically became more compatible.
Phoebe was here for school, not sex. And at the end of the summer, she’d be off to take some fancy job out of some fancy city—that he’d likely never visited—to buckle down and take care of her family. From the gossip Mrs. Nordemann had dumped on him, it sounded as though Phoebe needed cash and a lot of it. She couldn’t make that kind of money here.Hecouldn’t provide that kind of money for her.
They couldn’t make a go of it long-term, and he knew that.
And without that potential for long-term… well he was no Michael Cardona. Sex was more than a hobby to John, and he had to care for his partner.Sex.An image of Phoebe, lips parted, eyes heavy-lidded, bloomed in his mind. Her breath warm on his face, her body soft and pliable under his.
His dick stirred, making known its contempt of the recent dry spell. John’s grip on the wrench slipped and he rapped his knuckles hard against gritty metal. “Get it together, you fucking idiot,” he muttered to himself, shaking out his bloody hand. He looked for a rag to clean up the blood and finding none, shucked off his t-shirt to use as temporary first aid.
