by Melissa Tagg
And before she could catch her breath, before she could contemplate the nervous energy tingling through her, he pushed away and began his descent.
“Unfair!” She tried to yell the word, but instead it came out a breathless gasp. What just happened? Not until her feet touched the ground did she regain even the barest hold on her senses or still the curious racing of her heart enough to jokingly call, “You let me win.”
“I did not let you win.” He started toward the wagon as the crowd turned back to their apple picking. But not before she caught the amusement glinting in his inky eyes.
“A hundred one-on-one games of basketball, laps across the swimming pool, races from your house to my house, and you never once went easy on me. Why now?”
He stopped at the wagon. “Katherine Louisa Danby, I did not let you win. You are the better tree climber. Accept it.”
“We’re doing a rematch tonight.”
“Fine.”
“You promise?”
“I said fine, didn’t I?”
“After closing.”
“Fine.” He nabbed the winning apple from her hand.
“Stop saying fine.”
“Fi—okay.” He took a bite, studying her as he chewed.
And why that should make her fidgety, she didn’t know. He’d seen her looking worse than this plenty of times. She’d even halfway dressed up today—though by now her dark jeans were dusty and one of the rolled, quarter-length sleeves of her hunter green shirt had unsnapped and unrolled. Her shoes were scuffed, and her necklace tangled in her collar.
She was a wreck. She was a tired, happy, exhilarated wreck.
“You did it, Kit. You made it to opening day and it’s a complete success.”
The admiration in his voice warmed her. “The crowd could dissolve this afternoon.”
“It won’t. You’re going to make a solid go of this.”
Oh, how she wanted him to be correct. It just felt so indescribably right to be here. More right than grad school ever had. More right than London and her job at the university and Nigel.
Nigel. Was it harsh to admit she’d hardly thought of him in the passing weeks? They’d exchanged a few emails shortly after he’d left, one stilted phone call. It all seemed so distant now.
She felt rooted to this place—this land, these trees.
And if it was a success—if they could continue to attract visitors all autumn long and keep the fire blight from recurring and pay all the bills, if they could keep the store’s shelves stocked and stay on top of field chores and bring in a healthy harvest . . .
If they could do all that, it might convince Dad to let her manage the orchard for years to come. Maybe he’d even begin to show some interest, come home at some point. And Lucas, they could find him and . . .
And she’d have a whole new life.
One she’d owe to Beckett. Because there was no possible way she’d have made it to opening day without him.
“Beckett, I . . . you . . .” Words weren’t enough to thank him.
As if sensing her grateful intent and strangely wary, he turned and jumped onto the wagon seat. “Now, if you really want to be a success, you could accept my offer of a loan and get started on that barn. I saw Drew’s estimate, Kit. It’s not undoable.”
She looked up at him, lifting one hand to shield her eyes from the sun. “I can’t take your money.”
“You could. You’re just being stubborn.” He reached his hand down to help her up.
She grasped his palm and climbed up beside him. “Anyway, Willa offered too. Apparently she has quite the nest egg.” It’d taken Kit completely off guard, but she supposed it made sense. Willa had never married. She lived in the house she grew up in—no mortgage hanging over her head—and she’d inherited money from her parents. “I think the only reason she ever worked at the orchard is she loved the land as much as my grandparents.”
“And you, Kit. She loved you.”
It was true. Kit had spent too much time over the years bemoaning the people who’d abandoned her—Dad, Lucas, and, well, Beckett. But why hadn’t she been more grateful for the people who’d stepped up—Willa, her grandparents, and, again, Beckett? “I always felt like Dad used his Army career as an excuse to stay away. Willa did the opposite—used her career as a reason to stay.”
Beckett stiffened on the wagon bench beside her. Was it the career talk? She’d been so consumed with her own work, she hadn’t stopped to think how unsettled Beckett must feel these days—no law firm to return to, stuck in Iowa until his community service was complete. What would he do once he was done here?
“Kit . . .” His tone was serious, uncertain. He shook his head, apparently closeting whatever it was he’d intended to say. He never used to do that.
After a pause, he spoke again. “You should do it. Accept Willa’s loan. Build the barn, expand the business like your grandpa always wanted to.”
It wasn’t what he’d meant to say, she could tell, but she latched onto his words all the same. “You think so? What about Dad?”
“He put you in charge. So take charge.”
The wagon was beginning to fill with visitors, and soon they were rolling over bumpy grass toward the main grounds. Within minutes, grass shifted to gravel and they were unloading in front of the store. Beckett was chatting with Megan, more cars were filling the parking lot, the bells jangled over the store’s front door.
Beyond all the activity sat the unadorned frame of Grandpa’s barn. What if I did it?
The thought trailed her through the next half an hour as she checked in on the store, restocked a few shelves, set Beckett to work at the press. She stopped to chat with Willa and then eventually made her way to the office, remembering she needed to feed Flynnie. Inside, signs that Beckett had been here earlier were all over the place. His abandoned coffee mug. His hoodie over the chair.
He’d jumped into his community service with both feet. All in. Because that was who Beckett was.
Take charge.
She glanced at the papers on her desk. Drew’s budget estimates, Grandpa’s blueprints. She plopped in her chair and fingered through them. Drew was convinced he could have the building up in a month. What if . . . ?
She pulled a folder from underneath the papers. This wasn’t from Drew. Was it something of Beckett’s? Community service paperwork she needed to sign? She opened the folder, scanned its contents.
Not community service paperwork. No, instead they were papers about . . . a Judge Advocate Office Basic Course. This isn’t any of your business. But something that felt an awful lot like desperation propelled her to keep reading. Application instructions. The address of an office in Boston.
An Army office.
Her heart plummeted.
Beckett wasn’t just heading back to Massachusetts for a couple days to pack up his office. Nor was he as up in the air about his future as she’d thought.
He was joining the military.
“Kit?”
At the sound of the voice, the sight of the figure in the doorway, the snarl of emotions she couldn’t even name—hurt? anger?—evened out into stark, suffusing shock.
Lucas.
Now Beckett knew why Kit had jumped so quickly on his offer to take over at the cider press. Only twenty minutes cranking the cast-iron flywheel and he was ready for a break.
At least the roof jutting over the store’s front porch shaded the spot where they’d set up the old-fashioned cider press.
“How long do you have to do this?” Raegan peered into the grinder, where a series of serrated stainless steel knives chopped the apples as Beckett turned the flywheel.
“Until we run out of apples, I guess.” Which, by the looks of the barrels lined at the edge of the porch, could last until eternity. Kit’s crew had done a fine job picking, sorting, and polishing apples in the past few weeks. Although the bulk of the crop was just now ripening, some of the apples that ripened earlier in the season—Bonners, Whitney Crabs, Pristin
es—had been bagged and either sold at the Farmer’s Market or kept in cool storage. “Takes thirty or forty apples just to make a gallon of cider.”
The process was engrained in his head from his years of working at the orchard as a teenager. Once he’d chopped a good amount, he’d move the pieces into the mesh-lined tub at the other end of the press. Then he’d use the wooden pressing plate to squeeze juice into another tub. The cider would oxidize into a rich, amber brown within minutes.
The bells jangled over the store’s front door as a customer exited. Raegan reached for one of the plastic glasses they’d already filled and handed it to the visitor. Then she was back on her perch, sitting on the porch railing as she had been for the past ten minutes.
She wasn’t the only Walker helping out today. Kate and Colton had taken a shift out in the field, and Dad was around here somewhere. Even Logan, Amelia, and little Charlie had driven all the way home from Chicago for the event.
When Beckett had gaped in surprise after they’d arrived late last night, Logan had laughed. “You do remember calling to invite us, right? Pretty much demanding that we show up?”
Yes, because he’d wanted to make sure Kit had a good crowd. Figured the least he could do was ensure the Walkers showed up in full force. “Just didn’t expect you to actually make the trip.”
“Well, you know how much Dad likes to see Charlie, and with everything else . . .”
He hadn’t known what Logan meant by “everything else,” nor the reason for the flicker of concern in his older brother’s eyes. It was there and then gone in a blink. Had he imagined it?
“So back to Megan.” Rae circled one arm around a porch beam as she leaned down.
“Not that again.” She’d been teasing him about the barista on and off all morning. “She does not have a crush on me.” Even if she had taken to giving him free drinks whenever he stopped at Coffee Coffee.
“Guess how long she’s lived in Maple Valley?”
“Why guess when you’re going to tell me?” He reached into the grinder to clear a jam of apple pieces around its blades.
“Two years. And guess how many town events she’s been to in that time?”
“I repeat: Why guess when you’re going to tell me?” He rose and gave the flywheel another series of turns.
“None. Considering we’ve got at least one major event each month, that’s twenty-four missed events. Until now.”
He began scraping the chopped apples into the tub underneath the pressing plate. “So Megan dug up some town spirit. Good for her.”
Raegan hopped down from the railing. “All I’m saying is you, big brother, have a fan. And, you know, just be careful with it, okay? From what Kate says, she hasn’t had an easy time of it.”
At the shift in Raegan’s tone, he turned, wiping sticky hands on his jeans. Bracelets crowded both Raegan’s wrists and she’d switched out her usual eyebrow ring for a smaller metal stud. The streaks of bright color in her hair had faded to barely noticeable.
Even with her quirky style, her cropped hair, she looked so much like Mom. He and the rest of his siblings had all inherited Dad’s darker coloring. Too, the rest of them had all come with some kind of built-in career drive. Sure, Beckett might’ve taken a little longer to lean into his own ambition, but since the day he’d decided to get serious about his college classes, it’d been an undeniable force.
Raegan? She’d never wanted to go off to college. Never targeted a career goal and gone chasing after it. Never even wanted to leave Maple Valley, it seemed. She said she was content still living at home for now, working a slew of part-time jobs.
But looking at her now, hearing the personal echoes in her light warning about Megan, it made him wonder if she was really as content as she insisted.
“You could’ve said something about Bear, you know.”
She shoved her hands in her pockets. “Who told you about him?”
“Seth.”
“Figures.” She turned away, propping her elbows on the porch railing.
“This is me, Rae. You used to talk to me.”
“That was before you went off to Boston without so much as a ‘see you later’ and didn’t come home for six years.”
She made it sound like he’d abandoned the family entirely, which wasn’t the case at all. He’d made trips to LA when Logan lived there, Chicago back before Kate moved home. They’d all come to Boston a few times for holidays. He’d emailed and called. Not often, but . . .
But he’d hurt his little sister without realizing it. He’d been so stuck in his own hurt, consumed with his own striving to make up for all the ways he’d messed up. He grabbed a cup of cider and moved to her side at the porch railing. “I’m sorry, sis.”
She shrugged. “I just didn’t get why you had to leave. For a while there, it felt like everyone was leaving. Logan and Kate. And Mom was gone. And . . .”
And now this guy named Bear, who Beckett didn’t know a thing about. Other than if he ever encountered the dude, he might revert to his firebrand days and take a swing.
“Anyway, I wasn’t purposely not telling you.” Raegan angled to face him. “And it’s not like we were ever a thing. We were just, like, really close. And then last fall he says he’s moving to South America but he doesn’t actually move ’til this summer, and Maple Valley’s basically the size of a bowling alley so I had to see him everywhere. But it’s over so there’s no point in talking about it.”
Except by the slump in her voice, it sounded far from over. And didn’t Beckett know better than anyone that some things just didn’t up and go away solely because you wanted them to?
Mistakes. Memories. Arrest warrants.
The guilty voice in his head constantly accusing him of wasting his life. It’d only gotten louder since coming home.
He swallowed a gulp of frothy cider. Maybe it was seeing Kit so focused, so purposeful. He’d watched her yesterday with a couple guys from Hampton House, showing them how to check soil moisture before the orchard opened.
“What you want to do is dig a hole about six inches deep right at the tree’s drip line. Grab a handful of the soil. It should be moist enough to make a ball when you squeeze it, but not so moist it doesn’t crumble.”
She’d had dirt under her fingernails and grass stains on her jeans. Her ponytail had long since loosened and hung limp over her shoulder.
And he hadn’t been able to stop the trail of his thoughts: He’d never seen her look so at home. So moored and confident. So effortlessly . . . what?
Captivating. That was the only word for it.
He hadn’t been the only one to notice. Eric Hampton, leaning against a tree laden with not-yet-ripe Braeburns, hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Kit. The guy had been spending more and more time at the orchard lately. Instead of just transporting the Hampton House residents, he’d begun lingering during their shifts.
Now that was a guy with purpose—running a nonprofit, making a tangible impact on hurting lives.
Longing coursed through Beckett, overwhelming and intense, pungent as the cider in his glass.
But this conversation wasn’t supposed to be about him. It was supposed to be about Raegan, her hurt. Yet it seemed he’d lost the right to play the protective older brother. “Well, if you ever do want to talk—”
“Beck! Rae!” Logan’s panicked call barreled in from across the yard.
Beckett pushed away from the porch, his cup of cider tipping to the ground. “What is it?”
That’s when he saw Kate running toward the wagon.
And Dad on the ground beside it, face in the gravel.
Raegan’s shaky voice sounded beside him. “I’m calling 911.”
8
The ambulance roared down the road, throwing up gravel and leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.
Everything in Kit screamed for her to jump in her car and follow.
But she had an orchard full of people and there was already a crowd of Walkers on their way to the h
ospital and . . .
“I’m sure he’ll be all right, Kit.”
Lucas.
She hadn’t had more than a couple minutes to process the jolt of seeing her older brother standing in her office doorway before the chaos of Case Walker’s collapse outside had taken over. Now a weary numbness draped over her.
“He was so white. He wouldn’t wake up.” Fear clenched every muscle.
And there was something else, something Logan had said as the paramedics were loading the stretcher into the ambulance. “I told him not come today. It was too much. He knew he shouldn’t . . .”
He knew he shouldn’t what? Confusion had clouded Beckett’s eyes in response, and then he’d climbed into the ambulance. His gaze had found hers in the seconds before the ambulance doors closed. And in that moment, the papers she’d found, the Army application, none of it had been important.
Late-afternoon sun spilled from the sky now, drenching the landscape in fiery light. But a chill grabbed hold of her. She wound her arms around her waist.
“He’ll be all right,” Lucas said again.
Lucas. He’s here. He’s home.
She turned, willing her brain to focus. Shouldn’t she hug him? Come up with some kind of emotion other than shock? But she feared if she pushed past the surprise, anger might be the only feeling she’d find treading under the surface.
For ditching the orchard. For disappearing again. For scaring her all these weeks.
“Where were you?” She didn’t mean to sound so accusatory.
Or maybe she did. Or maybe it was just her clinging alarm. Please, let Case be okay. Beckett needs him. The prayer murmured through her.
“Huh, I thought maybe I’d get a ‘welcome home’ or something.” Lucas shrugged. “It’s been two years, after all.”
For the first time since he’d appeared in her doorway, she looked at him—really looked. The gaunt frame he’d brought home from the Middle East had filled out in the years since his prison release. His dusty brown hair was long enough to be pulled into a disorderly ponytail of sorts; his skin, coppery.