Chapter 4
Zane
It was the kind of early spring morning that made you forget the dark winter entirely.
I showed up with the post driver loaded in my truck bed and a load of thick, wooden posts I’d milled from my own lumber, while I told myself for the hundredth time that this was just a neighborly thing.
Nothing more.
Mallory was outside waiting for me, and the sight of her stopped me in my tracks.
She was wearing those jeans. The old ones, frayed at the hem and worn thin at the thighs, the ones that had always done something criminal to her figure back when we were younger. They still did.
I used to watch the little hearts on her butt walk away from me every single day at the Hungry Rooster.
They fit her differently now, snug across her hips in a way that made it genuinely difficult to think straight, and she had on a t-shirt I hadn’t seen in over a decade that read Girls Are Like Country Roads. The Best Ones Have Curves across the chest.
The cotton had gone soft with age, and it was pulling tighter across her breasts than it used to, and I made myself look at the fence line instead of at her while I climbed out of the truck, my dick going hard as I stood up.
“You ready to work?”
I hopped down from the truck bed and grabbed the first post, hefting it over my shoulder. When I glanced back, Mallory was watching me in a way that made my pulse kick up a notch.
She grinned and held up her gloves. “Born ready.”
That was a lie. She may have grown up as a country girl, but Chicago had turned her into a city woman. She was just playing dress-up today.
I knew her hands would be soft and her technique nonexistent. But she was willing, and willing counted for a lot.
I showed her how to create a pilot hole first. That would be her job. Then I showed her what I’d be doing, running the post driver to set each wooden post in place permanently. They’d be there until the wood rotted out.
She listened carefully, her brow furrowed in concentration. Then we got to work.
After her first hole, I stepped in behind Mallory to inspect it, close enough that my thigh brushed the back of her jeans.
She didn’t move away.
“That’s perfect.”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” she sassed with a little butt shake that made me crazy inside. “I’ve still got a little country inside me.”
Maybe she did.
My pulse sped up, and my cock hardened. Mallory had always had that effect on me.
We worked our way down the fence line together, trading off the heavy work at her insistence.
A few times when she brushed past me to grab another post, her shoulder slid against my chest, and I wanted to reach out and grab her, topple us to the ground.
Damn, I was hot for this woman.
While we installed the new fencing, we talked.
Talking to Mallory had always been easy.
The sun kept ducking behind the clouds and coming back out again, and I was having a hard time pretending I was here for the fence and not for the view of her in those jeans.
“I did 4-H all the way through middle school,” she said, tamping dirt around a post while I held it straight. “Goats, chickens, and one very stubborn cow named Loretta.”
“I remember Loretta.”
She laughed. “Everyone remembers Loretta. She bit the county extension agent.” She paused, pressing her boot against the packed earth.
“I always thought I’d go back to it as an adult.
Maybe volunteer with a local chapter and work with the kids.
But when I looked into the Chicago program, it was all about robotics and STEM competitions.
Which is great, genuinely, but it wasn’t what I was picturing.
I wanted the experience I’d had. The livestock contests and the county fair projects.
Kids learning how to care for something living. ”
“That’s still what it is out here,” I rumbled. “The local county chapter still has a full livestock program. Cattle, sheep, goats, and poultry. They do a working farm day every spring where the kids come out and learn fence repair, actually.”
She looked up at me. “You’re joking.”
“I’ve helped run it twice.”
Something moved across her face that I couldn’t quite name. She went quiet for a moment, pressing her lips together, and then she picked up the next post and carried it down the line without saying anything more. But I noticed she was smiling to herself.
By early afternoon we’d replaced eleven posts and restrung two full sections of wire.
We were both dirty in an honest way, soil on our knees and sweat darkening the fronts of our shirts.
I sat down in the grass and leaned against the last finished post, and she dropped down beside me, close enough that our thighs touched.
Neither of us moved away, even as fire sparked between us.
Pulling off her gloves, she said, “That was the most fun I’ve had in over a decade.”
“Your life’s been pretty boring then, hon.”
I opened the cooler I’d brought and pulled out the wine and the two mason jars I’d packed. It was a bottle of Holt’s elderberry wine, and I wasn’t sure Mallory had ever had it before. He’d only started selling it commercially a few years ago.
She held hers up. “What are we drinking to?”
“Loretta,” I said.
She laughed and took a sip. “Oh. My. God. What is this?”
I grinned at her. “Something you’ll only ever find here on Red Oak Mountain.”
Mallory pulled out the bottle and examined the label. “Holt makes wine now? I thought he worked in the hubcap factory.”
“That’s old news. He and his wife, Ellie, have a little winery now. Best elderberry wine in the Ozarks.”
We both stared out at the field, grasses and weeds swaying gently in the breeze while the sun beat down on us. It was perfection.
“This could be yours every day, if you want it,” I rumbled, and I meant for it to come out easy and light, but I didn’t quite manage that.
She leaned her head against my shoulder, and every muscle in my body tightened as if she’d just lit a fuse.
“I couldn’t see it when I was young. I thought small meant less. Leaving felt like the only way to be something.”
I grunted in response.
She was quiet for a moment. “I can see it now. The way people know each other here. The land feels like it belongs to you and you belong to it.”
“And nobody locks their doors,” I said. “When something breaks, three people show up to help fix it before you even have to ask.” I paused. “It’s a good life, Mallory.”
“I know,” she said softly, and the weight of those two words pressed down on both of us.
She lifted her head from my shoulder and looked at me. The sun came out from behind a cloud right at that moment and lit her up. I was done for.
Quietly she said, “I’ve spent twelve years wondering what would’ve happened if you’d asked me out back then.”
Her words seared through my soul.
“You were always one step ahead of me, Mal. Ready to conquer the world.”
I was a small-town guy, and I was comfortable with that. I couldn’t have a woman always looking over her shoulder, wondering what bigger life was waiting for her out there.
“Maybe I would have stayed if you’d asked.”
Did she really want to go there?
“You would have been miserable. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you lo—”
The word stuck in my throat, and I switched it out. “People have to want the same thing. I’m not made for city life. I’d rather dig my grave than move away from here.”
She bit her lip, looking sad and a little lost.
“Can we pretend?” she asked. “Just for today. That this is ours.”
I knew what she was asking.
It was the kind of thing I’d regret when she left and I was still here, stuck to this place, the only place I’d ever wanted to be.
But I looked at her face in the afternoon light and I couldn’t find the word no anywhere inside me.
Then she tipped me over the edge, whispering, “I want one real memory with you, Zane. Can you give that to me?”
Mallory Carpenter was going to destroy me.
I reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair back from her face, and I almost tumbled down onto the grass with her, lost in the magic of this moment.
But common sense held me back, so I just looped an arm around her and breathed her in.
If I kissed her now, I’d never stop.
And Mallory Carpenter was going to leave again.
She had a life waiting somewhere else. And I’d already met the version of her that didn’t belong in this town.
And I knew the truth. Mallory wasn’t a country girl at heart, even if she’d been born and raised here.
I could already feel the shape of what was coming. There was a long winter in my future.
One where I lost her all over again as she built a life far away from here.
Far away from me.
That future settled in my chest like a stone and stayed there even while I held her close in the warm sunshine on a perfect spring day.
After today, I wouldn’t see her again.
Spending time with Mallory was like stabbing myself in the heart over and over.
And today was all I’d allow myself to have, this one stolen moment, before I got back to reality again.
Trying to keep Mallory out of my life was easier said than done. And one night, not long after, I found myself texting her after midnight when I couldn’t sleep, thoughts of her dominating my mind.
We stayed up late that night, texting back and forth, my fingers flying over the screen on my phone while I lay in bed, hard as a rock, wondering why I’d been fool enough to turn her down the other day.
The night ended with me inviting her over to my place so she could see how I lived.
It was a mistake of epic proportions, and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop myself from doing it anyway.
After we finished texting for the night, I may have gripped my cock, imagining it was her hand instead. My mind got more and more imaginative as I stroked myself to relief.
And it was only then that I was finally able to fall asleep, with visions of those heart jeans in my head, and Mallory’s perfect smile.