“I’m going to go ahead and split.” I looked at his watch. “Wow, I didn’t realize how late it had gotten, either; I was planning to catch that last train back to the city tonight. Gotta be at work tomorrow morning, you know . . .”

My ramble was cut off by a searing, toe-curling, tongue-­tangling kiss. When his mouth released mine, I continued. “So . . . yeah. Bye.”

I left with as much grace as I could muster, pulling his work boots back on for my trip across the yard to retrieve my own. He’d folded my muddy clothes and piled them neatly on a chair just outside the barn earlier, so it was a quick snatch-and-grab. I was all elbows and knees and flashes of bum as I slid my jeans on, wincing at the cold and the wet. I gave up trying to wrestle with my muddy Chanel boots, and finally ran, still half dressed, across the yard to the Wagoneer. Avoiding the mud puddle, I went around to the other side and climbed across. I started the car, tossed a wave to a grinning Oscar on the porch, a second wave to a white pinched face glaring at me through the kitchen window, and took off, the rear tires spitting mud and gravel back toward the house.

On the way home, every single pothole and rut in the road made me bounce, and I felt each bounce all over my body, reminding me of the good kind of sore I felt, and Oscar’s words about bouncing on his dick.

When I pulled into Roxie’s driveway, she and Leo came out to watch me hop out, half dressed, clothes in my arms and hay in my hair, smiling like a lunatic.

“Gotta catch that train,” I singsonged as I skipped up the porch steps and into the house, past their curious eyes. I popped my head back around the doorframe. “Is that your famous Sunday chicken I smell? I’m starving!”

Chapter 12

I caught the last train back into the city with only three minutes to spare. There’d been an earlier train, but that would have meant missing out on Roxie’s Sunday chicken.

As I sat in the last car with a take-out container full of leftover chicken, buttermilk mashed potatoes, and garlic and shallot green beans, I thought back over the weekend, balancing the pluses and minuses.

Plus: The town was adorable.

Minus: The air was almost too clean.

Plus: The scenery was lovely.

Minus: It was too quiet, especially at night. No horns.

Minus: It was too loud, especially at night. Fucking crickets. Fucking wind. Fucking scary scraping trees everywhere . . .

Plus: The dicks were large . . .

Plus: And in charge.

Plus. Plus. Plus.

I shivered from the excitement my body still felt whenever I thought about that mouth, those lips, that tongue . . .

That ex.

Hmm. What was the story there? I’d spent half a year fantasizing about this guy, and half a day letting him get me off twelve ways from Sunday. And I didn’t even have his phone number.

I waited for some part of me to feel guilty about that, to tsk-tsk me and shake an admonishing finger and make me feel the teeniest bit shameful for spending naked time with a man I barely knew. But it never came.

I wanted to know more about him, not because I should, but because he fascinated me. I wanted to know the story that was there, because while he occasionally had these wonderful verbal treasure nuggets, for the most part he still responded to every question with yep, nope, or great big ass.

He also responded with beautiful, pinup, and you taste incredible, but that’s beside the point.

I still should’ve gotten his phone number. At least then we could send dirty texts . . .

And as the train ran down the tracks, heading back to my city life, I started pulling up train schedules . . .

It’s funny how visiting a place just once can imprint it on your psyche. The first time I traveled to Prague, I fell in love with the smoky red-brick-topped roofs, the black-and-white-tiled sidewalks, the sound of a foreign language hopelessly unrecognizable to my American ears, all hard Z’s and clucking K’s. The first time I visited Dubai, I was captured by the skyline and the hard-driving sand that coated even the enormous shopping malls, and the oppressive heat that weighted every move.

Now, all week long I found myself thinking about the color of the fall trees on Main Street in Bailey Falls, the scent of burning leaves in the air, and the slip and slide of hay underneath my bare feet. My bare everything, to be exact.

But with all this daydreaming, work was still center stage. The T&T project was coming along very nicely. We’d begun casting for the commercials we were shooting, as well as for the print advertisement.

For the Bailey Falls campaign, I was still kicking around the idea of using the local-farmer angle, how to position it to show these wonderful local farms in exactly the right light. Not to mention lighting those farmers to look irresistible to any woman on the East Coast with a pulse and an overnight bag . . .

I wondered how Oscar would feel about being photographed for the campaign. I wondered if Casserole Missy would object. I further wondered why I’d taken to referring to her as Casserole Missy, since I was just having some fun, getting a taste of some local flavor, as it were . . .

I’d resisted the impulse all week to call up Roxie and ask if she had Oscar’s phone number. I wondered if Oscar had called her and asked for mine. Or maybe he’d ask Leo to ask Roxie to ask me if it was okay for him to call me—like a game of high school telephone, the kind with the windy knotted cord that I’d twine around one hand while holding the phone to my ear, giggling late at night on the phone with my girlfriend, talking about how he’d held my hand during lunch and asked me to the dance after the big game Friday night.

And how he’d told me how satiny soft the inside of my thigh was on his tongue.