They’d heard nothing since. Three years of not knowing. Was she alive? Safe? Straight? Or had she fallen back into the vicious cycle that had claimed her teen years?
Piper kept it simple. “We pray. God’s bigger and stronger than any force on earth. We pray for her and for the girls. And us.”
Luce nodded, fighting emotion. “All right.” She dashed an apron to her eyes and moved toward the kitchen. “If you and Berto need help in the morning, call me.”
She said that same thing every night, because she didn’t trust Piper’s brother to show up. Chas hated the farm.
He despised being in the fields, so she put him in charge of the milk production room, where fresh, ultrapasteurized dairy products were bottled for sale under cool conditions while she labored in the hot sun. He had two people working with him, and still whined about it all, the narrow profit margins, the uselessness of tempting people with vintage-style glass bottles of fresh milk products.
Piper knew that thin profit margins beat zero-profit margins. She bit her tongue on a regular basis, not wanting to fight with her older brothers.
She loved the farm.
They didn’t.
But they couldn’t sell without her permission. Unless she went under. And no way was she about to let that happen.
Chapter Two
“Missing something?”
Zach’s questioning voice rumbled, ripe with wry humor.
Piper forced herself to maintain an outer calm she didn’t feel and looked up from a tractor seal that seemed determined to give her a hard time. She saw Zach holding the girls’ Nigerian dwarf goat, a favored pet. The brown-and-white miniature creature looked quite content in the big man’s arms. “Beansy? Where did you find him?”
“In what used to be my vegetable garden.”
First the roosters. Now the goat. Piper winced until she read the humor in Zach’s eyes. “You haven’t lived there long enough to have a vegetable garden.”
“It appears he didn’t know that. How’d he get out?”
“The better question is, where are the twins? And did they engineer his escape or escape right along with him?” She jumped down from the huge wheel and strode toward the barn door as she spoke, using the sides of her jeans as grease rags. Thin streaks of motor oil left telltale marks. “He was in your yard? And before you answer that, why aren’t you sleeping? It’s after twelve. Too hot? Or did the roosters wake you? Because I penned them and I haven’t heard them crowing, but I can block the sound. Was it them? They wake you?”
“My current dilemma is which question to answer first,” he drawled, his slow talk making a valid point. She tended to jabber in stream-of-consciousness fashion. Maybe she’d slow down someday when she didn’t have to cram thirty hours of work into a twenty-four-hour day.
“Yes, he was in the yard,” Zach continued. “My father noticed him. And I did catch a quick nap, but something’s come up. I’m taking the next couple of weeks off, so I didn’t need to get more than that today.”
“You’ll be ruing that choice tonight,” Piper supposed over her shoulder. “Dorrie! Sonya? Where are you?”
Silence answered. She reached into her pocket and withdrew her cell phone. When Lucia answered, she put out an APB on the girls.
“Berto’s got them,” Lucia assured her. “He’s giving them a ride on the hay wagon before lunch. Why? What have they done now?”
Piper wasn’t sure they’d done anything, but from the look on Zach’s face, she figured the two girls may or may not have been trying to catch a glimpse of their new favorite policeman.
He’d been in uniform both times she saw him yesterday. Tall. Broad. Strong. Dark hair. Bright blue eyes that warmed with humor.
Today?
Better, if possible. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt that proclaimed him the winner in last year’s October breast cancer run, along with well-worn blue jeans. Piper noted his pants with a glance. “Jeans? In this weather?”
“I’m a farm kid,” he admitted, which surprised her because she’d noted reluctance in his gaze as he scanned the farm the day before. “You always wear jeans on a farm.”
“True.” She slipped the phone back into her pocket and turned toward the barn, noting the fresh oil streaks on her work pants with a grimace. “Denim’s handy when you forget to grab a stack of rags while doing engine maintenance. Luce will have something to say about this, no doubt.”
Her look of repentance made him smile. “Where would you like Beansy?”
She growled and led Zach and the goat through an adjacent barn. Calf pens lined the semishaded side of the building. One pen sat to the side. The perimeter fencing was decked out with trinkets and miniature signs done in little-kid scrawl. Beansy the Goat read one. Beware of Goat said another. A half dozen similar signs swung strategically around the enclosure, leaving no doubt about the ownership. “Here we go, Beans. Scoot in there and bleat real loud if they take you out again.” Piper scratched the little fellow’s head, and Zach was pretty sure the tiny creature preened.
“Beans is a pet, I take it.”
Piper hemmed and hawed, then nodded. “I’m a softie and I have a hard time saying no to those girls.”
Zach laughed out loud. “Well, who wouldn’t? They’re the cutest things I’ve ever seen. So Beansy is theirs?”
“Beansy was left behind by folks who moved away and abandoned their animals. Luke Campbell brought him by last spring.”
Luke Campbell was a deputy sheriff for the county. But did Luke’s visit here mean he and Piper had something going? And why should Zach care if they did? One glance her way said he had a grocery list of reasons to back away from this attraction, but the look on her face made him wish the list away. “But Beansy is just a baby.”
Piper shook her head. “He’s not. He’s a small breed, and he’s smaller yet because he wasn’t properly fed, but he’s probably two years old. Luke thought the girls would love him. And he was right. We have room. And forage. And he’s so little and cute.” Her voice went soft. Sweet. Maternal. But one snap of her hand to her thigh brought back the dogged farmer within the pretty, petite woman. And Zach had enough of farms and farmers growing up to last a lifetime. “I’ve got to get back to that oil leak. Zach, I appreciate what you did.” She tipped her hat and held up her grease-stained hands as evidence. “I’d shake your hand but that’s pretty undesirable right now, so I’ll just thank you again for Beansy’s safe return.”
* * *
Despite the sheen of grease on her palms, Zach didn’t find her hands one bit unbecoming, but he shoved that opinion into his “don’t go there” file. “You’re welcome.” He started walking away, but something―manners, interest, guilt―made him turn back. “Do you need help, Piper? I know a few things about tractors.”
She turned and met his look. For long seconds they stood separated by a matter of ten feet, but the look in her eyes said they might as well be light-years apart. “You’re kind, but no. I’m fine.”
Cool. Concise. As if she were shouldering him off because she loved working with smelly, greasy engines?
No.
Because she didn’t want to work on the engine with him.
Zach reached into Beansy’s enclosure, gave the fuzzy fellow a nice ear rub, then headed toward his house. Helping on a farm ranked dead last on his list, so most of him was glad she’d rejected his offer. But he’d