by Black, Tasha
She tore down the lawn so fast he could feel the impact of her steps in the ground as she approached.
“Riggs,” she gasped, dropping to her knees at his side.
“I’m okay,” he said softly.
She smelled heavenly, like soap and fresh coffee, and the lighter muskier scent that was Sage herself.
“You aren’t okay,” she half-moaned. “You just fell from a thirty foot ladder. You’re in shock.”
“I wasn’t all the way up,” he said, hating himself for the lie. “I was coming down.”
“You were coming down, alright,” Sage said. “Right on your head.”
He shifted, meaning to sit up and show her he wasn’t hurt.
“Don’t try to move,” she said firmly.
He paused automatically at the authority in her voice.
But then he went ahead and sat up anyway - he couldn’t risk her wanting to call in a doctor.
“See,” he said. “I’m fine.”
She observed him, speechless for once.
Riggs was filled with a desire to fill the silence, but he had no idea what he was supposed to say. Then it came to him. Now was his chance.
“Sage,” he said, emotion welling in his chest. “You are the smartest, most resourceful woman to inhabit the universe. In your wisdom, you already know my feelings, but I wish to speak them aloud to you. I adore you, Sage Martin. I choose you as my mate, the only woman I will ever bond with. Will you accept me?”
She gaped at him for a moment.
“You did hit your head,” she said, recovering at last. “Wow, you are going to laugh later when I tell you what you just said. Let me find your brothers and see if they can help me get you back to the house. I know you won’t want to go to the hospital, but maybe Dr. Bhimani can send over a nurse to check on you.”
“Sage,” Riggs said. He placed a hand on her arm and watched her pupils dilate as the pleasure rushed through her at his touch, just as it rushed through him. “I did not hit my head, and I don’t need a nurse. I only need you. You do not have to answer me now. I just wanted you to know what’s in my heart.”
He hopped to his feet and offered her his hand.
She took it, an expression of wonder on her face.
He hoped it had more to do with his words than his apparent skill at falling.
3
Sage
Sage looked up at Riggs, amazed.
He studied her with an expression of concern, which only made his already angelic face more handsome.
She closed her hand around his and allowed him to help her up.
When she was standing, she realized how close she was to him - his big body inches from hers, her hand still lost in his.
The air between them seemed to sizzle. She felt her body start to respond the way it always did when he was near - a planet orbiting a sun.
Her dreams had taught her well. She could practically feel him kissing her already.
“What are your plans for the day?” he asked her.
It took her a moment to make sense of the words.
When she put them together she felt the blood rushing to her cheeks. She was in an agony of attraction and he was asking for her daily agenda. He had meant what he said about not needing an answer to his outrageous proposal right away.
She chided herself for the unexpected wave of disappointment that washed over her.
“I was planning to go to the printers in town after breakfast,” she said. “I need to have flyers made.”
“Someone in town makes aviation devices?” Riggs lifted his eyebrows, impressed. “Where do you need to fly?”
“What? Oh. No,” she said. “I see why you thought that, but no. Flyers are just advertisements printed on a sheet of paper.”
“I see,” he nodded. But he didn’t look convinced.
“Here,” she said, letting go of his hand to slide her cell phone out of her pocket. “Here’s the one I’m having made today. I’ll go back after lunch to pick them up and see if I can get some of the local businesses to hang them in their windows.”
She handed him the phone.
He looked down at it and chuckled.
“Do you get it?” she asked. She hadn’t though he would understand the joke.
“This is an idiom, right?” he asked, handing the phone back to her.
“Yes,” she smiled.
The top of the flyer said, Take your sweetie to Martin’s Bounty for Pick-Your-Own-Peaches.
The image below showed a cartoon couple under two peach trees. In a dialogue balloon, one character said to the other, “You’re a peach!”
Below the picture it said, Here at Martin’s Bounty the skies are blue, the berries are ripe and everything is peachy keen!
“This is a very good advertisement,” Riggs said. “It makes me want to pick peaches.”
“Thanks,” Sage said, unable to hide her grin.
She enjoyed working on things like the flyer and designing the signs for the peach pick. Although she had an accounting background, she’d always had a fondness for marketing and graphic design.
“May I accompany you to town?” Riggs asked.
“This morning?” Sage asked.
“And this afternoon,” he offered.
Sage was a little surprised. Riggs and his brothers normally fed and mucked up after the animals in the afternoons and then took a swim in the pond. They clearly enjoyed the time together with the animals, and swimming was a favorite pastime of everyone on the farm.
“Are you sure?” she asked, not wanting to cut in on his time with his brothers, she could only imagine how much they must rely on each other to make sense of this strange world. “It will be a lot of walking around in town and talking to people to get permission to post the flyers.”
Riggs was not just the quiet type. The big alien was deeply, profoundly silent. She really couldn’t imagine him approaching strangers to ask if he could hang flyers in their windows.
“Sounds good,” he said, giving her a nod.
She was surprised at how delighted she felt, as if she were headed to a birthday party this morning instead of a dreaded task.
“Morning guys,” Arden said from the barn door.
Drago was with her, their hands intertwined. The two of them looked, supremely, wildly happy.
“Good morning,” Sage replied. “You’re up early.”
“We’ll help you with breakfast,” Drago offered.
“No need,” Sage told him. “It’s already taken care of.”
“Otis?” Arden asked.
Sage nodded.
“I guess it’s cake for breakfast,” Arden laughed.
“Oh, we know that one,” Drago said. “Dad is great. Give us the chocolate cake!”
“You have so much catching up to do when it comes to pop culture,” Arden said playfully.
The two of them headed up the hill toward the picnic table, where Otis was setting out the morning’s treats.
Sage turned to Riggs.
He smiled at her, blue eyes crinkling.
“What are you smiling about?” she asked, smiling back.
He shrugged and jogged up the hill to join her.
4
Sage
Maybe it was just the sugar rush from the almond mini croissants, but Sage was feeling fantastic as she pulled out of the gravel lot in Grandma Helen’s pick-up truck.
The morning was clear and pleasant, still cool after last night’s showers.
Riggs sat by her side. His big body barely fit in the cab and his thighs, encased in skintight jeans, were so close to hers she could practically feel the heat pouring off him.
He looked out the window, a pleased expression on his handsome face.
“It really is nice out,” Sage agreed with his unspoken thought. “It will probably heat up this afternoon though. Hopefully we can be the first one at the printers’ and pick up early too.”
“Mmm,” Riggs agreed.
“You know, I can’
t believe that Grandma Helen did all this herself every year,” Sage marveled, not for the first time. “I mean she had a few hired hands, but all the cooking, organizing the tourist picks, keeping the books, she did it all herself.”
“Was it difficult for her?” Riggs asked.
Sage thought about that as they passed the last of the farmland and neared the little village.
“I’m sure it wasn’t easy,” she said. “There were bad years. And even in a good year, there’s so much work to be done. But she always seemed happy. Do you know what I mean?”
Riggs nodded thoughtfully.
“I mean there’s a certain kind of person who is busy and they talk it to death,” Sage said. “I’m so busy, I’m so stressed. That wasn’t her at all. And there’s the kind of person who wears thin under stress. They might be suffering in silence but you can see the exhaustion in their eyes. But Grandma Helen enjoyed hard work, so I think it was difficult, but that kept it interesting for her.”
She smiled, thinking of Grandma Helen at the end of a long day on the farm, sitting in her rocker out on the porch, telling little Sage and Tansy funny stories about the chickens or the farm hands or her own blunders.
“Do you miss her?” Riggs asked.
Sage’s breath caught in her throat.
Of all things, she had not expected that question. But his instinct was right. It was just like Riggs to listen so well that he could get to the heart of the matter.
“I do,” she said, nodding.
Riggs nodded too.
“I guess I’ve been so busy worrying about Tansy’s mourning I never really thought about my own,” Sage said after a moment.
“You’re like her,” Riggs said.
“Like Tansy?” Sage asked.
“Like your grandmother,” Riggs said softly. “You work hard to care for your sister and for the rest of us.”
Warmth bloomed in Sage’s chest. It was a wonderful compliment. The more so because she was surprised by it, yet knew it was true.
“Grandma Helen was a good example for us,” Sage allowed.
They had arrived in the little town. She pulled into a space right across from the post office.
“Here we are,” she said.
Riggs hopped out and opened the door for her before she even had her purse out of the console.
“Thank you.” She rewarded his chivalry with a smile, which he returned.
It was still quiet in town. The coffee shop on the corner was bustling, but almost nothing else was open.
“It’s this one,” she told Riggs, indicating the copy shop.
Since the arrival of the aliens in Stargazer, the little town had re-embraced the outer space theme they’d taken on decades ago, when they first expected extraterrestrial contact.
The print shop’s formerly faded sign had been replaced by a purple awning with Cosmic Copies emblazoned on it in gold lettering.
She pushed open the door, setting the sleigh bells hung over it jingling.
“Someone’s up early,” Howard crowed from behind the counter.
“Hey, Howard,” Sage called to him.
Howard Gillespie had been working at Cosmic Copies since Sage was a little girl. And he was an old man with a white beard back then.
“Hey yourself, Sage Martin,” Howard chuckled. “Oh, who’s your friend there? Paul Bunyan? Ha.”
She gave him a moment to laugh at his own joke.
“I am Riggs. I work on the Martins’ farm,” Riggs explained politely.
“I’ll bet you do, son,” Howard said. “You look like you could work the whole farm all by yourself.”
Sage worried that Riggs would not understand the joke.
But the big alien wisely kept his trap shut, studying the elderly printer carefully, as if he might contain important clues.
“I’d love to get flyers made,” Sage said.
“Oh, right,” Howard ripped his eyes away from Riggs. “Same Peach-Pickin’ flyers on orange stock, like your grandma always ordered. Not a problem.”
He didn’t even look up from his computer.
For a moment, Sage thought about just going with what Helen had always done.
“Sage has designed a new flyer,” Riggs said.
Howard looked up at her over his bifocals in surprise.
“You did, eh?” he asked. “Let’s have a look.”
“I can email it to you,” Sage offered as she pulled it up on her phone.
Howard pointed to his email address on his business card on the counter.
She tapped it into her phone and hit send, then waited for him to open it.
“Well now, let’s see,” Howard said, bending over the computer screen and scowling at it, as if he were trying to figure out alien technology rather than just opening the email program he used each day to do business.
At last he succeeded.
“Peachy keen,” Howard said from behind the counter. “That’s cute, Sage. It’s simple and funny - really nice work.”
“Thanks,” she said with a sincere smile.
Although she knew her accounting talents were wasted designing flyers for a tourist farm, Sage enjoyed the praise.
Once the farm was up and running in the black, there would be no place for her. Tansy and Burton could hire some hands. Arden and Drago would most likely stick around too.
And Sage would get back to her entry level accountant position at Myriax Pharmaceuticals. She’d already burned through a lot of the unpaid time off she could legally take on the Family Medical Leave Act.
She found herself considering how Riggs might fare in the real world.
She watched him looking around the print shop. He spun to take in the brightly colored sheaves of paper, the tiny boxes of paperclips and pencil erasers. She wondered what he made of it all.
Though all three men had adapted to farm life quickly and knew the place inside out, it was moments like this one when she realized how unrealistic it was to expect that they could easily join the regular world.
She and the other women had experienced a lifetime of preparation in language, culture and manners beginning when they were incredibly impressionable, and too small to walk or talk.
As she watched, he fingered a pyramid of unsharpened pencils.
The lowest one slipped out and pencils rained down on the floor.
“My apologies,” Riggs muttered, bending to retrieve the pencils. “I thought it was solid.
“No worries, son,” Howard said. “Just stick ‘em in the bin. I just stack them up for fun.”
“Thanks,” Sage said, leaning over the counter again.
“The pretty ones are never the sharpest,” Howard whispered and then gave her a garish wink. “Fifty copies on white card stock okay?”
“Uh, yes, thank you,” she said, trying not to be offended on Riggs’s behalf. “We’ll be back after lunch.”
Howard nodded. “Anytime after eleven is fine.”
She turned to see Riggs had re-stacked the pencils in a pyramid shape already.
“That was quick,” she said. “Ready to go?”
Riggs winked at her - a nice friendly wink, very much unlike the one Howard had just given her - and nodded.
5
Riggs
Riggs observed his intended as she drove the vehicle back to the farm.
Sage gazed at the road before her with her usual determined expression, both hands firmly on the steering wheel.
Burton had described riding in the truck with Tansy as being similar to taking a ship out of Ajyxdrive. But Sage was slow and steady at the wheel, which Riggs appreciated very much.
There was so much he appreciated about her.
Her hair had dried in the sun. It fell around her shoulders, looking as glossy soft as a kitten. Her full breasts bounced and shivered at each bump in the road.
Riggs knew it was the height of bad manners to stare, but he was having a hard time helping himself. His body was beginning to make demands that could not be fulfil
led until she accepted him.
He forced himself to look away, wishing more than anything that Sage would speak. Her thoughts and feelings were even more attractive to him than her body. But they did not have the same unintended physical consequences for him.
Usually.
“I wonder if any of the newcomers will be interested in picking peaches,” Sage pondered out loud, as if in answer to his unspoken request.
Riggs had a hard time understanding how anyone could fail to be interested in picking peaches. But this was something the women in his life worried about very much.
“I guess they only want to see aliens,” Sage went on. “Though isn’t it funny? They would be much more likely to see aliens on our farm than they are in the open air market in town.”
She laughed and Riggs laughed with her.
“At any rate, we only need to hit the crowds we got last year,” Sage went on. “Since the Wilsons aren’t open for tourists maybe we’ll get a few extra customers. Though that means the Wilsons won’t be advertising either. I always thought Bud got people in the mood for pick-your-own when he drove his truck around with the logo on the side. Well, here we are.”
Riggs was startled to find that they were home already.
They pulled up the gravel drive and Sage gasped.
Riggs followed her gaze to the source of her alarm.
“I guess someone spotted that ladder and decided to play a prank,” Sage said, a mix of anger and surprise in her voice.
In his haste to get to breakfast, he must have left the ladder out.
The big sign over the barn no longer read Welcome to Martin’s Bounty. Bright red spray paint adjusted the lettering so that it now said:
Welcome to Martian’s Booty
“Do they know we’re here?” Riggs asked.
“No,” Sage said immediately. “At least I don’t think so. I hope not.”
A line formed on her forehead. She was concerned too.
“But it’s not good that they’re referencing aliens,” she said.