Love on Lavender Lane

by Karis Walsh

  Kassidy’s stomach growled at the thought of food. She had spent hours fussing over her chicken dish but hadn’t had anything to eat since her breakfast of fruit and a cinnamon roll. She gathered her bowl of sauce and boxes of pastry off the back seat and crossed the street. Once inside the store, she hesitated in the doorway for a moment, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light and as her mind adjusted to the presence of the crowd that filled the room. The winter had been a lonely, dreary one, and she felt overwhelmed by wall-to-wall people.

  Not for long, though. Drew was at her side before she had a chance to give in to her initial reaction and escape back into the anonymously dark evening.

  “Ah, our lavender keeper has finally arrived,” he said, bending down to kiss her cheek and take the containers out of her hands in one smooth movement. “This smells heavenly. Does anything need to be reheated or prepped?”

  Kassidy felt the knots that had been forming inside her loosen. She had needed privacy while she healed and shored up her personal defenses again, and now she was ready to be back in the world. Among friends who cared about the same things she did and who cared about her, but who never intruded on her privacy as a person.

  “Thank you, Drew,” she said, giving his arm a squeeze, grateful for more than his offer to help with the food. “They don’t need reheating. Just put a scoop of chicken in each of the pastry cups, and that’ll be perfect.”

  “Will do. Now, go find Jessica and make sure you try a glass of the reserve. She’s been moping because she hasn’t seen you for ages.” He held her food with one hand and used the other to turn her toward the corner of the room and give her a gentle push toward the bar.

  Jessica was waving at her, so Kassidy bypassed the loaded food table with a longing look and headed toward her friend. Jessica was an ex-model who had come to the Willamette Valley to do a photo shoot, met Drew when she stopped to taste some wine, and never left. She still had the ultrathin physique and angular cheekbones of a high-fashion model, but a ruffled peasant blouse and genuine smile softened her look. She came around the bar and gave Kassidy a tight hug.

  “Don’t even,” she said, slapping Kassidy’s hand away when she reached for one of the prefilled wineglasses. She took her place behind the counter again and surreptitiously poured some wine out of a bottle hidden under the lip of the bar. “We’ve already sold out of most of this year’s Best Bête, even though Drew just announced it a few weeks ago, but we put a couple bottles aside to share with special friends.”

  “Thank you,” Kassidy said, touched by the gesture. Drew and Jessica were giving her more than a glass of fancy wine. This gift encompassed all the time and effort and passion they put into their winery, and Kassidy took the time to fully appreciate it. The color of the wine was deeper than the less mature ones in the glasses on the bar, but it was still the clear burgundy of Oregon’s ubiquitous pinot noir. She had been surprised by the flavor of these wines when she first came to the Willamette Valley because she had expected the lighter-colored wines to lack dimension and flavor. If she hadn’t recognized how wrong she was before, then tonight’s wine would have clearly shown her the error in her thinking. She sipped it slowly, savoring the strong taste of cherry and the underlying hint of earthiness. She had been transplanting some new varietals this week and had marveled at the rich, healthy smell of the soil and how substantial and nourishing it felt in her hands. Drew and Jessica had captured that in a glass.

  “I taste Oregon,” she said, and Jessica grinned at her.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Every year the wine gets better and tastes more like a place instead of just a handful of anonymous grapes.”

  Jessica turned away for a moment to hand glasses to a couple Kassidy didn’t recognize. She noticed more drop-in traffic than she had seen last year. Word must be spreading about the so-called private party. When Jessica looked back at her, Kassidy saw an expression of concern on her face. Here it came…

  “How are you doing? We haven’t seen much of you this winter, and I’ve been worried. I was going to come by, but I didn’t know if you needed some time alone after…”

  Her words trailed off, but Kassidy knew exactly what she meant. The community was too small for it to have gone unnoticed when Audrey had moved in with her, and then moved out again not long after.

  “I’m fine,” Kassidy said, forcing a smile. It didn’t feel convincing, so she covered it by taking another drink of her wine. She nudged the conversation out of the personal sphere. “I’ve been keeping busy, expanding the number of plants I have in the north field and experimenting with some new varietals.”

  “I think it’s a good idea for you to experiment with someone…oops, I meant something new,” Jessica said, apparently not fooled by Kassidy’s deflection of the conversation from personal to business related subjects. “If you ever need a friend to talk to about these varietals, or anything else, I’m here for you.”

  Kassidy smiled and thanked her, but she knew she wouldn’t accept the offer, even though she was grateful to receive it.

  “Ugh, here comes Alexandra,” Jessica said, looking over Kassidy’s shoulder. “She always compliments our wines while managing to let me know how much worse they are than her own.”

  Kassidy laughed and held up her glass. “You should give her some of this. That’ll shut her up.”

  “No way. She doesn’t deserve its deliciousness.” Jessica topped off Kassidy’s glass with more of the reserve and nodded toward the food. “You should get something to eat before everything is gone. Plus, you might want to be out of the line of fire in case I dump a glass of wine on her head.”

  “Your wines are too good to be wasted like that,” Kassidy said.

  She slipped away as Alexandra approached the bar, and turned her attention to the food. Finally. Jessica’s dire prediction about everything being gone wasn’t holding true, and the table was overflowing with offerings from all the local farms and restaurants, showcasing the best products they had. The invitations sent by Drew and Jessica had included a small decorative card used to identify the dish, and Kassidy had written Lavender Chicken Cups on hers and put it in the box with the pastries. She found it on the table where Drew had placed it next to an artfully arranged plate of her hors d’oeuvres.

  In the center of the table, looking sadly out of place among the gourmet dishes, was a large bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa. There wasn’t a handwritten card next to this selection, since all one had to do was read the bag to know what it was. Kassidy moved around the table, putting a small taste of everything around the edge of her plate. Spicy onion pakoras from Sarai’s Pakistani restaurant. Panzanella with bright red tomatoes, vibrant green strips of basil, and chunks of what was surely homemade bread, glistening with a hefty drizzle of Everett and Brian’s olive oil. Tiny rhubarb and pear tarts from the Moorhouses’ orchard. When she finished the circuit of the table, she added a huge pile of chips in the middle, topped with a generous dollop of salsa.

  She happily crammed a loaded tortilla chip into her mouth and looked up just in time to see a woman watching her from the far corner of the room. Kassidy swallowed the chip and looked away quickly, but she could still picture the woman in her mind with a disturbing clarity of detail. She was standing next to Sarai and some other local restaurant owners, seeming to be part of their conversation but still looking like an outsider. She held her wineglass like someone unfamiliar with the tenets of wine tasting, cradling the bowl so her hand would warm the liquid instead of holding the stem. Kassidy tried to fixate on that fact instead of letting her mind wander to the stranger’s shiny brown hair and the way it curled across her jawline and barely brushed her shoulders. Her hazel eyes that had held a look of amusement, as if she was carrying on a private and funny conversation with herself while she observed the world around her. Kassidy was struck by how much she wanted to know what thoughts were taking place inside her mind.

  Experiment with someone new. Jessica’s advice leaped unbidden
into her mind. No way. Kassidy wanted to focus on what was old and comfortable. Her farm, her solitude, her privacy. Salty chips and earthy wine. The smell of lavender. She put all her attention on the plate of food she was holding, resolutely banishing the image of a beautiful stranger from her thoughts.

  * * *

  Paige was feeling out of place. Oddly disjointed, as if she had entered another dimension instead of merely driven to a town that was a couple hundred miles from her own. Not because she had been shunned for being an outsider, but because she had been welcomed in with open arms. She had been to parties before, of course, but never ones that were as equally welcoming to people wandering in off the streets as they were to invited guests. She had come with her friend Sarai, but she saw random people stumbling through the door as if inexplicably drawn to the lights and crowds, and they were gathered into the fold by their hosts as if they were long-lost family members.

  Sarai had said it was a potluck but insisted Paige didn’t need to bring anything. Paige had, of course, ignored her advice and brought what would be a nondescript and acceptable appetizer at any other party. Chips and dip. How could she go wrong? Ha. At least she hadn’t opted for the bottle of Italian wine that had been her second choice. Paige thought she should probably feel embarrassed, but instead she had an irresistible urge to laugh every time she looked at the table with its ring of elegant hors d’oeuvres surrounding her plastic bag of chips.

  And then a goddess had descended from the heavens and accepted her offering. Well, not a goddess. A beautiful mortal woman wearing a cute T-shirt and incredibly well-fitting jeans. With asymmetrical hair that walked a fine line between being light brown and honey blond, tucked neatly behind one ear and softly curling a little longer over her other cheek. Eating chips and salsa as if it was as perfect an example of epicurean delight as anything else on the table.

  Paige couldn’t stop herself from walking over to the table, even though she tried. She had just broken up with Evie—or what constituted a breakup in their overly subtle relationship. She was in town to work, not to engage in some sort of ill-conceived fling. She had no idea what to say to someone who would be at this kind of party.

  All too soon, she was standing right behind her chip-munching goddess with no idea how to initiate a conversation. The woman smelled intoxicatingly wonderful, with an aura of something floral and delicate surrounding her, and the scent obviously had the ability to make Paige completely lose the ability to form words. Talk about the food. Make a joke. The woman was obviously not a food snob, so she’d surely appreciate a little self-deprecating gourmet humor from the outsider who had brought store-bought chips.

  “Hi,” she said, rolling her eyes internally at her awkwardness.

  The woman turned around quickly, as if surprised to have someone approach and talk to her. At a party filled with a crowd of people. Paige wasn’t sure why she should be startled, since she must be accustomed to having random women fling themselves at her all the time.

  “Hi.”

  Paige gestured at her plate. “Do you like those chips? I picked them myself just this morning.”

  The woman looked toward the door, then back at Paige, seemingly trying to decide between the two options she faced. Luckily, she chose Paige and gave her a small but pulse-affecting smile. “I’m surprised to see them this time of year because I thought they were only harvested during football season. You must use a lot of fertilizer to keep them crisp after February.”

  “Yeah, I really pile it on,” Paige said. She was rewarded for her small joke when the woman’s shy-looking smile turned into a real grin, making her nearly drop her wineglass. She had been beautiful when she had been eating chips with a slightly rapturous expression, but once her nose scrunched with laughter, Paige was lost. She needed to keep this conversation going and find more ways to make her laugh. If they joked around long enough, Paige might dredge up enough courage to ask her out, even though she was feeling decidedly out of her element in this community.

  Paige turned to the table for inspiration and luckily found it right in front of her. She gestured toward a plate of creamy discs labeled as Herb and Garlic Chevre. “I’m guessing this town has outlawed microwaves, but if we can find a wood-fired oven in the back we can make some nachos.”

  The woman shook her head with an exaggerated sigh. “And here I thought I was talking to a real gourmet. Nachos need to be made with shredded orange cheese from a plastic pouch. You didn’t happen to harvest any of that, did you?”

  Paige mimicked the deep sigh. “Sorry. I picked my orange cheese vines clean a couple months ago. Blame it on the Seahawks for making it to postseason.”

  They shared another smile, and Paige moved on to the next platter of hors d’oeuvres as a source for her jokes. If she worked her way around the table and kept talking about food, an invitation to dinner would seem like a natural segue from their banter. Halfway around, ask for her name. After the circuit had been completed, ask for her phone number. Paige loved an organized plan, and she struggled for something comical to say about the dainty pastries on the next tray. “Look at this one. Lavender chicken. Who puts perfume in food, right?”

  She picked up one of the little puff pastry cups and crammed it in her mouth, more to stop herself from saying something stupid than because she wanted it, but once she started to chew she was hooked. The flavors exploded in her mouth, filling her with earthy and floral notes as if she had taken a very deep, delicious breath while standing in the middle of a forest. “Oh my God, this is amazing. Is it really lavender? I expected it to be nasty and perfume-y, but it isn’t.”

  She paused, giving the other woman a chance to add to the conversation while Paige swallowed the tasty morsel and snagged another pastry cup. She was met with only silence, and when she looked around, she was standing all alone.

  “Huh,” she said. Hadn’t their conversation been going well? Paige had thought the woman’s laughter seemed genuine, but maybe she had been merely humoring her and waiting for a chance to escape. Paige ate the second hors d’oeuvre as a consolation prize and picked up a third as Sarai walked over to her.

  “Oh, good. You got a chance to meet Kassidy.”

  Paige choked on her third appetizer. “What? When?”

  “The woman you were just talking to,” Sarai said, with a confused-looking frown. “Didn’t you say you were here to work with Kassidy Drake? Something to do with her lavender farm?”

  Shit. Had she really just insulted her new client’s product directly to her face? And in a completely unwarranted way, since it was wonderful?

  Paige sighed. This was why she always met with clients in their boardrooms and offices, where they usually had a placard announcing their names and titles. That way she could pick them out of a crowd and be sure not to inadvertently cram her foot into her mouth. She supposed she should count herself as fortunate because Kassidy’s hors d’oeuvres had been at the beginning of Paige’s attempt to joke her way around the table and not at the end, when her comments might have been paired with a request for a date. If that had been the case, Kassidy might have dumped the jar of salsa over Paige’s head instead of simply walking away from her. Paige ate another lavender chicken cup, just to ease the feeling of anxiety creeping over her. She had some serious groveling to do tomorrow when she went to visit Kassidy’s farm.

  Chapter Three

  Paige pulled to the side of the road and parked next to the Lavender Lane Farm sign. She wasn’t quite ready to face Kassidy in person yet, so she decided to get a tourist-eye view of the farm first.

  A thick hedge of large domed shrubs lined the street, with spiky green stems and small dots of deep purple. The plants were almost a yard high and would likely be stunning when in full bloom. Paige got a glimpse of the neat rows of shorter plants beyond the border and a small cottage in the distance. The place was beautiful—like its owner—and Paige wished yet again that she could go back in time and not say anything derogatory about lavender. She had replaye
d the evening over and over in her head, always imagining a different scenario than the one that actually took place. She had called Sarai from the road yesterday, and when she was invited along to the party, she had been more concerned about getting some food to bring than with finding out about Kassidy Drake. She had mentioned Kassidy’s name but must have given Sarai the impression that she knew all about her new client. Unfortunately, she had been missing the key parts of the equation, including Kassidy’s occupation and what she looked like. Of course, knowing that she was entering a realm dedicated to the Slow Food movement would have been helpful, too.

  Oh, well. She couldn’t change what had already happened, but she could move forward and make the best of the situation. While completely ignoring the fact that she had been awkwardly angling toward Kassidy as a potential date last night, against her better judgment. She was here to work and she had just broken up with Evie, she reminded herself yet again. Even though the dissolution of their relationship hadn’t induced any trauma in either of them, she still wasn’t ready to jump into another cycle of meeting someone, getting bored, and moving on. Luckily, the only woman who had managed to make her rethink her decision was her new client.

  She needed to focus on the business aspect of Kassidy’s life, not on her sexy blue eyes or the way she had eaten Paige’s chips and salsa as enthusiastically as if they had been rare truffles or some other exotic treat. Paige brought her full attention to the farm and her first impressions of it as she stood facing the road with her hands on her hips. She hadn’t seen many cars since leaving McMinnville and following the rural streets to Kassidy’s farm, and she hoped this would change in tourist season. For now, though, she enjoyed the peace and quiet, and she let Dante out of the ancient Tercel so he could explore with her. He smiled exuberantly, tongue lolling out to one side, as she unbuckled his safety harness and set him free.