Chapter 5
Mallory
Zane’s text had come out of nowhere.
Then we stayed up until three in the morning texting back and forth.
Rose said it meant he was in love.
Kelly said he was horny.
I hoped it was a mix of the two.
When I climbed out of my SUV at his place the next day, I turned in a slow circle taking in the land around me.
I hadn’t known what to expect, but this was nicer than anything I’d imagined.
“This is all yours?” I asked.
“All of it.” Zane came to stand beside me, close enough that I could catch the scent of his soap on his skin. “One hundred acres.”
The forest had been logged, but then replanted.
There were careful rows of saplings stretching all the way back to the hills.
And I could see where he’d done selective logging, leaving the biggest, oldest trees in place, mighty oaks standing tall over the young trees around them. This was what responsible land management looked like.
The farmhouse itself was nothing fancy.
It was an old two-story with white clapboard siding. But it had an inviting front porch, and it sat on the land like it had always meant to be there.
I loved it immediately.
I turned to look at Zane. “How does it work? You buy land and log it?”
There was a big logging operation in town, but Zane ran a small, private logging company with just a handful of men who reported to him.
“More or less.” He nodded toward the replanted sections. “Buy a property, log it clean, replant for the next generation, then sell and move on to the next one. That’s the model my father set up. And it’s the same model I use today. Although I keep a little more old-growth intact than he used to.”
“That’s impressive,” I said, eyeing the man.
Zane was a quintessential Red Oak Mountain man. Tall, dark, and handsome with thick, strong arms that could protect me from anything.
“Been thinking lately that I might not want to sell this one,” he rumbled. “I took a liking to this old farmhouse.”
Then he smiled in a way I’d never seen before, soft and a little sideways. It landed deep in my chest.
“It looks like the perfect place to raise a family,” I mused, getting lost in a dream for one short minute.
“I never took you as a family woman, Mallory.”
Then I shared something that had been a pinch in my heart for a long time. “Wade didn’t want kids.”
His brow furrowed. “Makes it hard to have kids if your husband doesn’t want them.”
“Ex-husband, thank you very much. I prefer to keep that man in the past.”
“Point taken. Well, here’s to the future, Mal, wherever it takes you.”
Then Zane led me out to an old oak tree standing guard over a small field behind his house. It had a perfect view of his old, red barn.
He spread a picnic blanket out on the grass under the tree with the kind of easy confidence he brought to everything, shaking it open with one snap of his wrists, and I thought that was probably the most Zane thing I’d ever seen him do.
“Sit,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
So I sat, and then I lay back, and I looked up at the sky.
It had been a stormy few weeks on Red Oak Mountain, the way spring always was up here in the Ozarks.
Spring around here meant sudden downpours and rolling thunder that rattled the windows and turned the dirt roads to mud overnight.
But today the sky was a clean, brilliant blue, and the clouds that drifted through it were the lazy white kind that had no intention of doing anything dramatic.
The sun was warm on my face, and the grass had that new spring green color. Somewhere at the edge of Zane’s property, a bird was singing its little heart out.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this still.
Actually, I could. It had been at my going-away party, the summer I finally left for Chicago.
Kelly had organized a bonfire out at Hidden Lake, and half the town had shown up to send me off.
I’d sat in the grass watching the fire and feeling the bittersweet pull of leaving everyone behind. I’d looked for Zane that night. Kept turning my head every time I heard footsteps. But he never came.
Back then I’d told myself it didn’t matter. I was leaving anyway.
But lying here in his backyard with the sun on my face, I knew with quiet certainty that it would have mattered. If he’d shown up at that bonfire and looked at me the way he’d looked at me today when I pulled up, I might have made very different choices with my life.
Maybe that’s why I unbuttoned the three top buttons on my blouse, trying to goad this man into action.
The thought was still settling over me when I heard his boots on the grass.
I propped myself up on my elbows and watched him come around the side of the house.
Warmth moved through me at the sight of him. He’d rolled his flannel sleeves up to his elbows, and he held two large paper bags in his hands.
His dark hair was loose around his shoulders today. It was the one wild thing about a man always so focused on doing his duty.
Zane Thompson was, without any room for argument, the most attractive man I had ever known in my life.
And he seemed completely unaware of that fact.
How many of the local women had tried to catch him over the years? Tina was the only one who’d succeeded for any length of time, as far as I knew.
I sat cross-legged on the blanket with the sun on my shoulders, studying this man, wondering what had compelled him to text me last night.
He dropped down onto the blanket beside me and started unpacking everything onto it.
Looked like he’d been to the farmer’s market. He had Annie’s fresh bread and Kat’s goat cheese. Nancy Hunt’s hothouse tomatoes, and a generous bowl of local lettuce. Plus a plate of sliced deli meat, probably from the Red Oak Market.
“This is nice. Did you get all this from the farmer’s market?”
“Most of it. I make sandwiches for lunch all week out of these supplies.”
“You don’t go to the Hungry Rooster for lunch anymore?”
He gave me a lop-sided smile. “Naw. I quit that place a long time ago.”
“But you used to eat there every day.”
“Yup, but things change.”
He’d been my daily fixture. I could rely on him staking a claim in my zone every shift I worked.
We dug into the picnic lunch, eating without fussing over it.
We tore the bread and layered cheese, tomatoes, and basil inside it. The goat cheese was creamy and sharp. Kat had gotten better over the years.
In between bites, I grinned at him. “I’m surprised I never got fired.”
“Me too.”
Then we both laughed.
I used to slide across from him in his booth and chat for twenty minutes every day, insisting I take my lunch break whenever he showed up.
Somehow my boss had always overlooked it despite the place being jam-packed and the other servers making a fuss about me slacking with Zane.
“So,” Zane asked. “What actually happened? Why are you back here applying for cashier jobs at the bookstore?” He paused. “You don’t even like to read.”
I laughed out loud at that, a real laugh, surprised out of me. “You remember that?”
“I remember a lot about you.” He said it simply, without decoration, and the directness of it made my breath catch.
“We talked almost every day for three years. It was a shock to my system when you left.” His brown eyes rested on mine, soft and steady and warm.
“The Hungry Rooster was never the same.”
I held his gaze for a moment and felt the weight of all those years sitting quietly between us.
“Is that why you quit going there?”
He shrugged. “Your conversations did keep me coming back.”
All these years, I’d thought he was there for the food. My heart warmed at the idea that he might have been coming in to see me.
“My boss always thought we’d get married,” I confessed.
“My parents did, too,” he countered, rocking me to my core.
“Oh.” Our eyes locked together, a fire burning hot between us.
And it was in that moment that I felt like I could trust him with the story of my trainwreck life.
“I only applied at Bookish to keep myself from going completely insane,” I admitted. “I came back to Red Oak Mountain to lick my wounds. Right now I’m scattershot applying for jobs online.”
“There can’t be that many fancy marketing jobs around here.”
Reluctantly, I admitted, “There aren’t. I’m applying all over the country.” The words felt honest and a little bleak as I said them out loud.
His eyes dimmed briefly as he reached for another slice of bread.
“You’ll get whatever you want,” he said, and there was a cheerfulness in his tone that didn’t quite fit the quiet man I knew. “Just be patient.”
I tilted my head. “How do you know that? Maybe I suck. Maybe that’s why I got a pink slip.” It probably wasn’t true. They’d let a lot of people go at the same time.
He bit into his second sandwich. When he was done chewing he told me, “I’ve followed your website over the years.” A pause. “The testimonials are impressive.”
“Have you been tracking me?”
He gave me a shy smile. “Naw. Not in a crazy, stalker way. I just… wanted to see that you were doing all right.”
The thought of him doing that tugged at my heart.
“Zane,” I said softly. “That’s sweet.”
“Eh,” he growled. “I’m not really a sweet kind of man.”
“Oh. I meant to say, that’s fucking hot. What a rugged, beastly thing you did.”
His lips curled up at the edges, and his eyes got a wicked sparkle in them. “That’s better.”
This was how it had always been between us. Easy.
Maybe that’s why I stammered out my troubles to him. I’d had a hard time sharing the nasty details of my divorce, but with Zane I felt like I could open up more.
“Wade wasn’t terrible at first. He was charming and ambitious. Being with him was exciting… for a while.” I set the bread down. “But he needed me to be smaller than I was.”
Zane’s brow furrowed. “He wanted to put you on a diet? You’re perfect, Mallory. Don’t lose an inch unless you want to.”
I squeezed his hand. What a nice thing to say to a woman as well-rounded as myself.