Bittersweet (True North #1)

by Sarina Bowen

  “I was gettin’ the paper,” he said.

  “You’d be on time if you moved into the farmhouse.”

  He threw the paper on the table. “I’m not moving, because you’ll watch everything I do. Hell, Ruthie. If I wanted someone to nag me, I’d get remarried.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I don’t nag. I suggest.”

  “I suggest you leave me be,” Grandpa said. He sat down in a chair and pulled the newspaper closer.

  “Let me get your plate,” I said.

  “You should eat, too, princess.” Griffin eyed me over the rim of his coffee cup.

  God, was it just me? Or did everything he say sound dirty? “I will.”

  I hustled back into the kitchen and used the now-empty tins to set the last six pies to bake. Then I took one of the finished ones for myself and came back to the dining room just in time to hear Grandpa read a couple of lines from the front page of the local paper.

  “The movie showing was interrupted again by the arrival of police cruisers and two ambulances.” He looked up. “Exciting night at the drive-in last night.”

  Ruth cut into her tart. “Griff, you didn’t mention any of this! Did the accident make a big mess?”

  My gaze flew to Griff’s. His expression flashed with a quick display of both panic and humor. “Well…I didn’t really see it up close. Lot of people crowded around, you know? Didn’t seem like a good idea to get in the way.”

  “You don’t see a hay truck tip over every day,” Grandpa said, slurping his coffee.

  “You’re right,” Griff agreed. “Can I see that paper?” His grandfather passed it over. Griff scanned the article, nodding solemnly. “Yeah. Terrible mess. Took us forever to get out of there after the movie.” He looked up and winked.

  A tipped-over hay truck wasn’t even half as messy as my feelings for Griff Shipley.

  After breakfast I helped Daphne prep for lunch. She and her mom would probably be waiting around for an x-ray, so we made up big platters of lunchmeats and covered them with plastic wrap. “Aren’t you going to stay?” she asked, giving me a pleading look that made me feel guilty.

  “Nope. There are things I need to get done today.” And it was just as well. I’d spent too much time already en famille with the Shipleys. They made me feel useful in a way that was rare for me. But hanging around in their kitchen wouldn’t get me where I needed to go. “Do you mind if I take one of these last pies? There’s someone I want to give it to.”

  Daphne just shrugged. “Take whatever you want! And come back to make them again tomorrow.”

  “We’ll see. Good luck at the hospital.”

  She made a face. “Fun times in radiology! I’d better bring a book. Bye, Audrey!”

  I got in the car and, after making a short drive, carried a bag containing the bacon, egg and cheese pie to the kitchen door of The Mountain Goat and knocked loudly. Even so, I couldn’t be heard over a radio which was blasting out some Guns N’ Roses. So I opened the door and let myself in.

  When I found her, Zara was scanning the contents of a walk-in refrigerator and singing along with Axl Rose.

  “Hey,” I said, tapping her hand gently.

  “FUCK!” she shrieked, jumping away from me, slamming the door to the refrigerator, her eyes wild. “YOU STARTLED ME!” she shouted over the music.

  I turned it down. “I noticed that. Sorry.”

  She clutched at her chest. “Jesus Christ. I think that took a year off my life.”

  “Bummer. But I brought you breakfast, so we’re even.”

  Zara raised one inky eyebrow. It stood out like a slash mark against her pale skin. “You brought me…breakfast? Why?”

  That’s the moment I knew Zara and I had something in common. The look of mistrust on her face seemed awfully familiar. “Because I had an idea for you. About the coffee service you were considering. You said pastries would get you in here too early to make morning hours sensible. But you could do pies. They could be prepped by your chef the night before—the whole thing. They’d be waiting in the cooler on trays, and you’d just put them in the oven. You could charge four or five bucks, and it’s mostly dough and a couple of eggs. The bacon would up the cost, but it’s tasty…” I pulled my creation out of the bag.

  “Wow.” Zara grabbed a plate off the tall stack beside the salad station and slid it under the pie. “That’s kind of a great idea. But why were you thinking about my problem?”

  I shrugged. “It’s what I do. I like solving kitchen problems. They’re a lot easier than regular problems.”

  “True.” Zara broke off a piece of crust and shoved it in her mouth. “Okay, I need a fork and knife. Coffee?”

  “Of course.”

  We sat down at the bar and chatted while Zara ate. I was procrastinating. There was plenty of work to be done today, including a call I needed to make to my boss. But Zara was full of neighborhood gossip, which I could almost write off as gathering business intelligence.

  “If you’re dealing with the Honeyweights, ask Mr. Honeyweight for a price. His wife is a cheapskate.”

  “Good to know,” I said, trying to remember if I’d agreed on a deal with that farm yet. My phone rang. I peered at the screen. “Sorry, one second. It’s my corporate overlords. Hello?”

  “Audrey,” one of the Burtons barked. “There’s a problem with transporting the perishables you’re buying.”

  It took a second for that to sink in. “What do you mean?” I did a mental count of which farm goods were perishable. It was damn near everything.

  “Last year when we were buying our farm-to-table products in Massachusetts, we asked our regular produce distributor to truck in our farm purchases. But we switched distributors a few months ago, and the new one can’t accommodate our purchases in Vermont.”

  I turned that over in my mind for a moment, looking for a solution. “So how are all these vegetables getting to Boston?” If he said they aren’t, I would throw the phone across the room.

  “We’re going to have to find another solution.”

  “By we you mean me, don’t you?” I asked point blank.

  He had the balls to chuckle. “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Burton,” I sputtered. “I spent the last week looking two-dozen farmers in the eye and promising that you were a good business partner.”

  “Don’t panic, Audrey. It’s not that much food. Nobody dies if we don’t buy this stuff. The local produce is expensive, and if I can’t get it to Boston on the cheap, BPG’s shareholders won’t be happy.”

  “What can I do to solve this?” My voice was shaking.

  “I guess you need to find an inexpensive rental truck and drive it down yourself.”

  “Every Friday?”

  He thought that over. “Yeah. You can drive up from Boston and bring the weekly shipment back. Either that or find a farmer with a truck and pay him a little something for his time.”

  Shit. I couldn’t even imagine driving a loaded vegetable truck through Boston’s North End.

  God, the things I did for these jerks. But what was my alternative? “I’ll find a truck,” I said.

  “Do that. But make sure there’s enough on the back of it to make this worth our while. Gotta jump. Bye.”

  Click.

  I put my head down on Zara’s bar. It was either that or fly into a rage. Burton sat in his cushy Boston office, lecturing me about shareholder value. Meanwhile, he’d been the one to screw up his farm-to-table initiative from minute one. Every night I spent in the cheap motel was costing him. And all because he’d already burned through the goodwill of every organic farmer in Massachusetts.

  What an idiot. And what an asshole.

  “Bad day at the office?” Zara asked.

  “You could say that. I need a truck and someone who’s not afraid to drive it into Boston. Every week. For almost no pay.”

  “Sounds like a party.” She mopped the bar, a thoughtful look on her face. “As much as I hate saying this, Griffin Shipley could p
robably help you. Not that he’s all that generous with his time. But he’s pretty invested in the whole farm-to-table thing. He has trucks. And his sister May drives to Boston a lot to visit her best friend.”

  I picked my head up off the bar and thought that over. “True…” But Griff hated BPG. On the other hand, his ciders had to get to Boston somehow. The produce deliveries were meant to start up in a week. But a month after that, he’d need to get his product into the city, so he could collect his big fat check. “I’ll call him. He’s gonna yell.”

  “Could happen,” Zara agreed.

  I dialed the Shipley household, hoping that someone other than Griff would answer. No luck.

  “PRINCESS!” he boomed. “Got another flat tire?”

  I adjusted the volume on my phone to avoid going deaf. “Not exactly,” I hedged, resenting the implication that I was always bumping into shit and asking him to bail me out. If only it weren’t true. “I’ve hit, uh, a snag, and I was wondering if you had any ideas for me.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Okay. Try not to say I told you so…” Then I explained the problem.

  “Holy shit,” he said when I was through. “I told you so.”

  “Griff!”

  His laugh boomed into my ear. “Just a joke, princess. Don’t rent a U-Haul. Get those assholes to pay a few cents a mile for one of my trucks and get them to pay one of my employees minimum wage for five hours each Friday. Oh—and make sure they’re only expecting one drop-off location. I can’t have my guys driving around Boston all day. Once the goods get into the city, it’s their problem.”

  “That sounds entirely fair,” I said, feeling the first hint of relief. “I hope they go for it.”

  “It’s minimum wage. How much better could they do than that?”

  “They pay me less than minimum wage.”

  There was a silence on the line. “Do you want to hear what I think of that?”

  “Nope.”

  He sighed. “Didn’t think so. Take care, princess. Thanks for all your help this morning.”

  “No problem. If your mom has to stay off her feet, I can help again tonight. Or tomorrow.” Shit. There I went again, inviting myself into their lives. “Only if you need it,” I hedged.

  “Sounds good to me. I was thinking about ordering pizza. But that only works once or twice in a row. And we have to drive twenty minutes each way to pick it up.”

  “That’s a pain. I’ll call you later.”

  “I’ll count on it. Bye, princess!” He hung up.

  That had gone better than I expected. I was puzzling over the easy result when I saw Zara’s face. “What’s the matter?”

  “Griffin Shipley calls you princess?”

  “Uh, yeah. Isn’t it awful?” My whole life people had assumed I was a pampered brat. I always had the newest clothes and went to a fancy school. And as payment, my mother told me every day what a great disappointment I was.

  Good times.

  I shoved my phone in my purse and zipped it closed.

  “It’s not awful.” Zara’s face had a dreamy look on it. “It’s…wow.”

  “Why? I don’t get it.”

  She sighed. “He thinks of himself as Han Solo, you know? He has a crusader complex a mile wide.”

  I snorted. “Yeah. So?”

  “What did Han call Leia? Princess. I watched that fucking movie a dozen times to try to figure that man out. Never did crack the code. Looks like you did, though.” She put her chin in a hand. “Seriously. I never saw Griff put any effort in with a girl before. Well done, sister.”

  “Um…” My head was practically exploding by now. I didn’t think it was possible that Griff’s nickname was anything more than a dig. But it was something to think about later. “Thanks for coffee. I have to run.”

  “Feel free to come back anytime you’ve brought me breakfast.” She gave me a smile and a wave and I was out of there.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Griffin

  September

  In spite of Mom’s injury, the next couple of weeks were some of the best ones I’d had in a long time. The harvest looked good, and the weather cooperated. My guys picked apples like crazy. My new cider tanks arrived on the back of a flatbed truck. I scrubbed them out, grinning like a fool. This is what the big time looked like—three cylindrical steel columns in the corner of the cider house. When nobody was looking, I ran my hand over them, admiring the racking-off spouts at the bottom and the high-tech pressure gages at the top.

  As August progressed, I cranked up the cider press every afternoon and juiced as many bushels as I could before dinner. Much of this juice went into one of my new tanks, while some of it was frozen for blending with later-season juice.

  Mom’s injury was healing slowly. When she’d first returned from the doctor’s visit, I’d gotten all excited when she’d opened with, “It’s not broken.” But even as she’d said it, she’d winced on her way into the farmhouse.

  “Not broken,” I’d repeated. “That’s great, right?”

  Daphne had shaken her head. “It’s a high-ankle sprain. Those take even longer to heal then a break.”

  “We’ll see,” my mother had said, holding her head up high.

  It was just like Mom to assume that she could will her ankle to heal. And hell, if anyone could, it was her. Mom was tough. But I made it my job to be sure she followed the doctor’s orders to put no weight on it at all. They’d sent her home with a hundred-dollar pair of crutches and an irritated look in her eye.

  At first, the pain and humiliation of being hurt made her irritable. There were moments when I considered handing over the trophy for Orneriest Shipley to my mother. I didn’t know how to help.

  But other people did. Jude surprised me by volunteering to help out with lunch prep. I’d forgotten that he’d said he worked in the prison kitchen. But Mom said yes, and he left the orchard at noon every day to pitch in. The first time I went into lunch and found him wearing her frilly apron I almost bust a gut laughing, and I think that was the point. It was hard for Mom to be snappish and depressed with Jude there to play the part of kitchen slave.

  And then there was Audrey. She seemed to turn up every afternoon around the time that Mom usually started the kitchen prep. And Mom accepted her help in the kitchen more easily than anyone else’s, even Jude’s. Maybe because Audrey was a chef, or maybe because she was just so fucking adorable. My mother welcomed her assistance, and Audrey was kind enough to give it.

  You have to make hay when the sun shines, as they say. So I did what I could to keep Audrey around when the workday was done. We actually made it to the movies for real. We even watched the film, while I drowned my lust-filled thoughts with popcorn and soda. And we went to the Goat now and then, where I was surprised at Zara’s warmer greeting.

  At some point I realized the greeting was for Audrey. Which just figured. She could win over anyone, and usually did. Some nights Audrey and I played euchre with Dylan and Daphne. We tried to let the twins be a team, but when things went badly they fought too much. So after that we played girls vs. guys.

  The women clobbered Dylan and me. It’s just the way of the world.

  After most of these fun evenings, I followed Audrey home to the motor lodge and stayed the night in her bed. I’m pretty sure that undersized cabin of hers was nearly rocked from its foundation once or twice by our enthusiastic sex. We christened every surface of that shabby little room together. It was so, so good.

  The Friday night after Mom’s injury, Audrey and I lay in her bed, naked. “Can I ask you for a favor?”

  “Another one so soon?” Her fingers walked down the centerline of my chest toward my groin.

  I chuckled. “Not a sexual favor.” I was already too satisfied to move. “I wondered if you’d pour cider for the tourists tomorrow. I’m trying to keep Mom off her feet.”

  She lifted her head from my shoulder. “Sure! I’ll be giving out tastings?”

  “Exactly. It’s not brain
work, but it’s not digging ditches, either.”

  “Can I taste, too?”

  “Of course.” There was nothing I wouldn’t have given her at that moment. Skin to skin with her was the only place I ever wanted to be. “One thing, though? Don’t tell them any of the cider tastes like a blowjob.”

  She giggled into my neck. “Fine. I’ll be very proper and boring. All your ciders taste like apricots or morning dew.”

  I rolled sideways and kissed her. And maybe it was the power of suggestion, but she tasted like apricots and happy girl.

  Saturday dawned sunny, promising great weather and a whole lot of tourists.

  I left Audrey snoozing in bed after setting her phone alarm for eight o’clock. Then I went home to prepare for the onslaught.

  First up—loading the truck for the Norwich market. When that was done, May—returned from her trip to Boston—and Zach drove off together. I was sticking close today to keep an eye on Mom, who was quite put out by her injury.

  She’d insisted on scrambling a big batch of eggs for breakfast, which she did with a crutch in one hand and a spatula in the other. After we ate, I set up a table outside the cider house and put the cash register there. Usually we put it on the tasting counter, but I knew she wouldn’t stay seated if I left it there.

  By a quarter to nine everything was ready. There were pumpkins piled high—those were grown by the Abrahams down the road at Apostate Farm. It wasn’t just apples and cider that brought tourists to the orchard on a late August Saturday. They came for an experience, and we did our best to provide one.

  Mom was in her seat, counting out change as the first cars pulled up, families sliding out of minivans, ready to pick Paula Reds and Ginger Golds. I became distracted by a pair of shapely legs unfolding from a rental car. When Audrey showed her face, she was smiling as brightly as the late summer sun. Damn, my farm looked better with her on it.

  “Morning!” she called, swinging her purse.

  I met her in the driveway and stole a kiss. She tasted like toothpaste and happiness. “Mmm,” I said, wishing there were time for more of those. “Did you sleep well this morning after I left?”