“Back then, marigold would have been planted all the way around. It’s a great insect repellent,” he explained as we made our way through the herbs. “You needed dill, right?”

“Yeah, I’m turning some of those little cukes and green tomatoes we picked into zombie pickles,” I said.

“Should I know what that means?” he asked, kneeling down and picking a handful of dill.

“I’d hope not. Chad asked me to teach him how to make pickles. So he and Logan are coming by the diner after we close this weekend, and I’m going to show them how. The zombie part is harder to explain.”

“They want to learn how to pickle?” he asked, incredulous. He bundled the dill together, wrapping the ends with a bit of kitchen twine. “Is this enough?”

“Perfect,” I said as he offered it to me like a bouquet. And like a bouquet, I sniffed it. Mmm. Nothing smelled like warm, fresh herbs. “And you’d be surprised how many people want to know that stuff. The most popular class at the Learning Annex at UCLA is canning and pickling. A bunch of my clients used to take classes there. All these gorgeous plastic women with more money than they know what to do with, and they’re learning how to make fifty-cent fridge pickles.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh yeah. Your slow foods movement here is all about getting back to the land and local and sustainable, but it’s also a rampant food trend. And nobody knows trendy like LA wives. It makes sense, though. No one in our generation knows how to do much of that stuff.”

“Stuff like . . . ?”

“Pickling. Canning. Putting up preserves. Also sewing. If I lose a button on anything, I’m screwed. My mom knows how to sew, but I never bothered to learn. And she’s in the minority—most women these days are at least two generations away from those skills. Does your mom know how to sew?”

He threw his head back and laughed. “You’re adorable.”

“Exactly. But I bet her mom did—money had nothing to do with it. People used to know how to do these things, and now they don’t.”

“The Learning Annex. Interesting,” he said thoughtfully, rubbing his beard. “Can I come to the pickle class?”

“It’s not really a class,” I said, playing with the dill fronds. “But, sure. If you want.”

“I want.”

I ran my fingers over the frothy green herbs, feeling the silk slide across my skin. I want. I enjoyed the way that sounded, more than I cared to admit. But what I didn’t enjoy was the telltale buzz that suddenly zoomed by my ear.

“No! No no no!” I shrieked, dropping my dill and my basket and running halfway across the field before Leo knew what had happened.

“Rox! Hey, Rox!” he yelled after me, but I was running full out. “Roxie!”

I looked over my shoulder to shout back, “I told you, bees are assholes!” And because I looked over my shoulder, I tripped over a left-behind bucket, and down I went into the softly tilled dirt.

Catching up to me a few seconds later, Leo crouched down next to me. “Are you okay?” he asked, scanning me hurriedly.

“Of course.” I sighed, holding my hands over my face. “I really have this thing with bees.”

He pried my fingers loose, but didn’t release them. He inhaled deeply. “Must be that honey.”

I held my breath, aware of every point of contact between us. On the ground, surrounded by walls of green ruffling in the breeze, we seemed cut off from the world, and asshole bees—just me and this farmer and a skirt rucked up around my thighs.

He leaned down, releasing my hands to brush my hair back from my forehead. “If you get stung, guess what happens?”

“The world ends,” I answered promptly, and he gave me a pointed look.

“You get stung. That’s it. It hurts, sometimes worse than others, but then it’s over.”

I raised up on my elbows, deliberately pushing into his space. “I’d rather not get stung at all.” And then I kissed him. My lips brushed his once, twice, and I was gearing up for a third when I heard a rumble nearby.

He groaned, but held me to him for one more kiss. “Unless we want the afternoon tour to catch us taking a tumble in the catnip, we should probably get up.”

“Probably.” Reluctantly, as I could hear voices getting closer, I let him pull me up and we went back to where my fifty-yard dash had scattered vegetables every which way.

After Leo helped me gather them back up, he sneaked one more kiss just before the tour crested the top of the hill. We waved from where we stood, and headed in the opposite direction. We wandered from this field to that, chatting about anything and everything. He told me all sorts of trivia about the property, asked me endless questions about different ways I might use certain products from the farm, and we laughed more than I can remember doing in a very long time.

“It’s great that you have access to all this history, knowing the hows and whys of how this estate came into being,” I remarked as we started back toward the barn.

The day was winding down. From up high on the ridge, the only thing we could hear was the wind and the birds chirping. My hands were dirty from digging in the beds, fingertips stained green from tugging on a stubborn parsnip.

“We didn’t come here that often; mostly in the summer,” he said, stopping and looking down at the big house, silhouetted against the setting sun. The Hudson was just on the other side, wide and unhurried, and he pointed in the opposite direction. “I’d spend hours out here, running through the woods, playing with the dogs. There’s a creek on the far side of the property, and I can’t tell you how many arrowheads I used to find along the banks. I’d come home covered in chigger bites and absolutely filthy, usually to the horror of my mother and her friends.”