Chapter Two
ATLAS
FIVE A.M. COFFEE. HIVES. Same as every morning for the past six years, except this morning I kept replaying someone crashing through my bee yard. A compact natural disaster who hadn't stopped talking the entire time she was face-first in my dirt.
I pulled a frame from the first hive and held it up to the early light.
Good brood pattern. Queen laying well. Foragers already heading toward the balsamroot along the south meadow.
Spring was cracking the mountain open. Snow pulling back on the peaks, wildflowers pushing through wherever the sun hit, everything waking up on its own schedule.
I usually liked this part. The quiet. The hum.
Just me and sixty thousand bees who didn't need me to make conversation.
Then yesterday happened.
She'd talked for five straight minutes without pausing for air.
I counted. She'd lied about at least three things in those five minutes, and I'd caught every one.
I'd also caught the way her jeans stretched across her thighs when she stood up, the curve of her hips when she turned.
The kind of body that made a man want to grab hold and not let go.
My jaw clenched thinking about it. Still clenching now.
I closed the hive. The bees didn't care about my problems.
She showed up at six fifty-three. Seven minutes early. I was at the second hive cluster near the tree line when I heard tires on gravel and looked up.
Work boots. Canvas pants that sat on her hips in a way that tightened my grip on the hive tool.
A fitted top under an open flannel, the fabric losing its fight against her cleavage, and my teeth locked on instinct.
Dark curly hair pulled into a braid already coming apart.
She had a bag over one shoulder and a sketchpad under her arm, walking toward me with the confidence of a woman who'd been invited.
Which, technically, she had. That was on me.
She stopped ten feet away. Grinned. "And here we see the landscape designer in her natural habitat," she said, doing a pitch-perfect nature documentary narrator, "approaching the grumpy beekeeper with caution."
I stared at her.
The grin got bigger.
I hadn't given her my name yesterday. I'd told her a time and walked away. Real smooth.
"Atlas Morrow," I said.
She blinked. "Sorry — what?"
"My name. Atlas Morrow."
"Oh." Her expression shifted. Surprise, then warmth, then a flicker I couldn't pin down. "Flora Diaz. But you already know that because I word-vomited my entire resume at you yesterday while facedown in your bee yard."
She stuck out her hand. I took it. Small. Warm. Rough with calluses. The contact hit my bloodstream and settled south of my belt buckle. I let go faster than I should have.
"You're early," I said.
"Seven minutes. That's basically late in plant time." She was already scanning the property, those dark eyes moving across the meadow, the hive placement, the south-facing slope. "Your girls are busy this morning."
She meant the bees. I knew what she meant. The rest of my brain went somewhere else entirely with "your girls are busy," and I stared at the wax until it passed.
"Spring build-up," I said. "They've got work to do."
"So do I." She pulled out her sketchpad. "Walk me through your setup."
I walked. She followed. And within twenty minutes she was the one leading.
She crouched beside a patch of early penstemon, rubbed the soil between her fingers, and squinted toward the creek bank. "Shooting star coming in over there?"
It was. I'd spotted the first blooms two days ago.
"Your south exposure is doing the heavy lifting for early forage," she said, standing up and brushing off her pants, which pulled the fabric tight against her thighs.
I looked at the hive. "But you've got a gap between the spring bloomers and the summer perennials. Your bees are scrambling in mid-June."
She'd named the exact problem I'd been chewing on for two seasons. In forty minutes. While her top kept shifting every time she pointed at a plant, each shift giving me information I hadn't asked for and couldn't stop receiving.
"Hm," I said.
I broke a chunk of capped comb off the nearest frame, spring wildflower, first real harvest, and held it out. "Taste this."
She took it. Her fingers grazed my knuckles and the buzz went straight to my groin. She bit into the comb. Her eyes closed. Honey ran down her chin. She made a sound — a low, wrecked little moan — and my cock thickened so fast I had to shift my weight.
Gone. I was just gone. All I could see was honey on her skin and my tongue following it down her throat, across her collarbone, over the swell of her breasts above that neckline, lower.
Drizzling it on her stomach and licking it clean.
The inside of her thighs and my head between them, tasting her underneath the sweetness, her skin warm and her back arched and —
"Oh my God," she breathed, eyes still closed. "That is obscene."
Yeah. Many things were obscene right now. Several of them were happening below my belt.
"Spring wildflower," I said. Flat. Controlled. The voice of a man whose thoughts were firmly on nectar sources and not on spreading honey along every inch of her and eating it off until she made that sound again.
She opened her eyes. Honey on her chin. Looking up at me. "Do you just hand women chunks of honeycomb at seven in the morning? Is this how you say hello in Montana?"
"Quality check."
"Uh-huh." She ran her tongue across her lower lip. Slow. Catching the honey. Watching me while she did it. "Consider your honey very thoroughly checked."
I turned away. Adjusted my belt because my jeans had become a structural problem and my cock was not getting the message that this was a professional interaction. Thought about varroa mites. Colony collapse. My quarterly tax filing. The specific moisture content required for proper honey curing.
None of it worked. She was behind me with sweetness on her fingers, that sound still echoing through my chest, and I was thirty-three years old and undone by a piece of comb.
"You should try the late-summer buckwheat," I said, because apparently my response to the most gorgeous woman I'd ever met moaning at my honeycomb was to recommend seasonal varietals. The bees had better game than I did. The bees at least danced.
We worked through the rest of the morning. She sketched while I inspected hives, and the silence should've been easy — I was built for silence — except she kept filling it with questions.
Different questions. Personal ones.
"So — Montana State?" she asked, crouched over a patch of lupine with her sketchpad on her knee.
"Entomology. Yeah."
"Right, right." She nodded. Too fast. She already had the answer. "And your family, they close by?"
"Parents in Billings. Brother in Missoula."
"Nate, right?"
My hands went still on the frame.
I hadn't told her my brother's name. Yesterday she'd been facedown in the dirt and I'd said maybe thirty words total, and not one of them was "Nate."
She caught the stillness because her pen stopped moving. "You — mentioned it yesterday," she said. Quick. Bright. "When we were talking."
"When you were on the ground."
"Yes. When I was on the ground. I'm pretty sure you said—" She was turning pink from her ears down to her collarbone and the flustered backpedal was almost distracting enough to make me miss the fact that she absolutely, definitely, knew my brother's name without being told.
Almost.
"Huh," I said. And went back to the frame.
I didn't push. But the way she asked questions — not casual, not curious, more systematic. It sat funny in my chest. My jaw tightened. My answers got shorter.
"How long have you been up here?" she tried. Breezy now. Steering.
"Six years."
"You like it? Being alone?"
I looked at her. She was watching me with those warm brown eyes and there was a weight behind the question that didn't match her light tone.
"I don't miss anything I left," I said.
Her lips parted. Closed. She looked at her sketchpad and started drawing with way too much focus for a woman sketching lupine.
By afternoon the sun had warmed enough that I'd stripped to a T-shirt.
She'd unbuttoned her flannel and pushed up her sleeves.
The combined effect of her bare forearms and the way her top clung when she leaned forward was actively destroying my ability to form thoughts.
She was on her knees near the east hive cluster, sketching, and I was behind her trying very hard to look at the brood comb and not at the curve of her ass or her hips or the strip of skin where her shirt had ridden up above her waistband.
I was failing.
She rocked back on her heels and looked up at me. Dirt on her cheek. Braid half wrecked. Eyes bright. "The thing about cross-pollination," she said, "is you can't just throw any pollinator at any flower and expect results."
"That so."
"You have to match them." She stood up. Brushed her knees clean. Looked me dead in the eye. "The right pollinator for the right bloom. It's all about... compatibility."
The word hung between us. Thick as pollen.
I knew exactly what she was doing. She knew I knew. Her eyes were dancing, her teeth catching on a grin, and she was standing in my meadow in the afternoon light, sunburned and dusty. She looked like trouble I wanted to walk straight into.
My neck flushed hot. I turned back to the brood comb. "Compatibility."
"Mm-hm." I could hear the grin. "You want the pollinator to really commit. Deep, sustained visits. Not just a quick pass."
My cock strained against my zipper so hard I saw stars. I thought about American foulbrood. The lifecycle of the varroa mite. The going rate for a queen cell in spring. Useless. She was still talking and her voice had dropped into a register that vibrated in my spine and lower.
"Good to know," I said, voice level, hands white on the hive tool. A man absolutely thinking about pollination science and not about pressing her up against the nearest tree and finding out what sounds she made with my mouth on her throat.
She grinned at my back. I couldn't see it but I could feel it — warm and impossible to ignore.
Flora: one. Atlas: zero.
The sun was dropping behind the western ridge when she started packing up. Gold light across the meadow. Bees settling for the night. The air smelled like warm grass and the faintest trace of her shampoo, and I was not going to think about that.
She should leave. It was the end of the day. She had a cabin in town. I had a kitchen full of nothing and a life that did not include someone who said "deep sustained visits" with a straight face and lit up when I couldn't answer.
Let her go, Morrow.
"I have trout," I said.
She froze. Bag half-zipped. "I'm sorry?"
I have, in my thirty-three years, spoken in complete sentences.
I've communicated complex ideas to other human beings.
I gave presentations in college. I talked to my bees this very morning with full paragraphs and tenderness and correct grammar.
And what I said to this woman — the one with honey dried on her fingers, hips that'd been ruining my focus all day, a laugh I'd been hearing for hours — was "I have trout. "
What I meant was: stay for dinner.
What I also meant: stay after dinner.
What I was not going to say out loud, because I was a man with self-control and a rapidly thinning grip on it: stay in my bed and let me find out if you taste as sweet as that sound you made this morning.
"Are you..." She tilted her head. "Offering me fish?"
"I'm saying I have trout and I'm cooking it tonight."
"That's the same thing."
"Are you staying or not?"
She said yes too fast. I turned toward the cabin so she couldn't see my face, which was doing something dangerously close to a smile. I didn't smile at anyone I'd known for two days no matter how good they looked covered in earth and sunshine.
I have trout. The bees got tender soliloquies. She got I have trout. My bees had a more sophisticated courtship ritual. At least they danced.
She stayed for dinner. She left after. I stood on the porch and listened to her tires crunch down the gravel until the sound faded.
The mountain went still. Creek running with snowmelt. A varied thrush in the conifers. The last of the light going purple over the peaks. Same porch. Same sounds. Same view I'd looked at for six years.
But the silence had a shape now — her shape.
The space where her voice had been, her laugh, her closeness.
My kitchen smelled like trout and beeswax, and I could still feel the buzz in my knuckles where her fingers had touched mine fourteen hours ago.
I had not stopped thinking about it for a single second.
I finished my coffee. Went inside. Stood at the counter and thought about a woman with dirt on her cheek and honey on her chin who knew things about me she shouldn't know.
She'd be back at seven. And I'd be paying attention.