A Fallow Heart (Tommy Creek #2)(61)

She hadn’t meant anything rude or vindictive or spiteful, but he’d looked crushed regardless.

She’d come to Tommy Creek to tie up loose ends, not unravel more. And she’d known—she’d known—someone would get hurt if she did anything with him. But honestly, she’d thought that person would be her, not him. Which only made her feel worse. The idea of hurting him hurt her right back.

She couldn’t leave Tommy Creek until she made peace with him.

Her sister-in-law had demanded Jo Ellen visit while she was in town, which gave her a good reason to get out of the house. And as luck would have it, the Gerhardt farm just happened to be on the way to her brother’s place. She pulled into Cooper’s lane minutes later.

No matter how much she told herself she only wanted to make amends with him, deep inside she recognized this was just an excuse to see him again. She felt so extremely alive and aware of everything whenever he was near. She craved that fulfillment again.

She spotted Loren right away, sitting on an overturned five-gallon feed bucket, shucking corn in the shade of an oak tree. A handful of chickens closed in around her and picked stray kernels from around her feet.

“Looks like I showed up just in time to help,” Jo Ellen offered with a smile after she parked her car and approached Cooper’s mother.

“Actually, no,” Loren quipped back, winking. “That was the last one.” She tossed her freshly shucked ear into a brown paper grocery bag sitting by her feet and dusted stray corn silk off her fingers onto her pants.

After she struggled to her feet, she began to bend to pick up the bag of corncobs, but Jo Ellen swept in faster, determined to carry the load for her. “I got it,” she offered, proud of herself for snatching the bag.

“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart?” Loren took the leftover wire basket full of husks and silk and shooed away the chickens, making them flutter off with indignant squawks of outrage.

Frowning as she wished she’d picked up the basket too, Jo Ellen fell into step behind Loren as she tromped off.

“Come to see Cooper, did you?” Loren asked over her shoulder.

Cheeks burning, Jo Ellen cleared her throat and ducked her chin. “Umm…well, yes. Is he around today?”

She glanced back at the house they passed as Loren trooped along the garden to a nearby fence. After the old woman dumped the contents of her basket over the top rung, a pair of muddy pigs waddled out of a doghouse to snort and root through the pile.

“You’re in luck,” Loren said as she turned back to Jo Ellen. “He’s working in the barn today. Why don’t you follow me inside and we’ll fix him up a snack. He didn’t eat much at noon, so he’s probably worked up an appetite by now with a powerful thirst for something to drink too.”

Jo Ellen nodded and swiped away a bead of sweat forming on her brow. Wondering how Loren could bear the heat, she watched in bemusement as the woman paused at the edge of her garden to snap a fully-grown cucumber from its leafy plant.

Noticing half the garden grew nothing but weeds dotted with a couple wild flowers, Jo Ellen motioned toward them. “Growing a prairie garden too?”

Lauren straightened, her joints popping and creaking. “No. I’m just letting that side rest for a couple years.”

Burrowing her eyebrows in confusion, Jo Ellen cocked her head. “Rest?”

“It’s an old custom farmers used back before they invented all those chemical fertilizers and such. They’d let half their fields lay fallow for a while to let the soil build back its nutrients all the crops from the year before had just sucked from it. The next year, they’d switch and plant the fallow side for a better yield and leaving the other half unplanted to rest up and recuperate.”

“Hmm,” Jo Ellen murmured as she glanced at the garden with deeper understanding. “And here, my mom used to order a load of manure to fertilize her garden.”

Loren grew somber. “Well…Cooper’s been so busy I didn’t want to bother him with that task, so I did this instead.”

Sensing a sudden tension in the air, Jo Ellen opened her mouth, but wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask exactly. She just wanted to know what trouble lay between Loren and Cooper that hadn’t been there ten years ago.

“Sometimes a man can be a lot like a farm,” Loren said in a conversational tone as she started for the back door of her house. “He lets his heart lay fallow for a while, and instead of his feelings dying out, they just go dormant, his emotions growing deeper and stronger as time passes. A person only needs to clear away the weeds on the surface to uncover them.”

Jo Ellen didn’t comment but she didn’t think she needed to. When Loren glanced back, Jo Ellen nodded to let Cooper’s mother know she had received the message.

Whatever heartbreak lay between mother and son, Loren definitely wasn’t removed enough from Cooper to warn a girl not to hurt her baby boy.

Jo Ellen fell quiet as Loren piled snacks into her arms. She wasn’t certain if Mama Bear had been warning her away or encouraging her, but she was certain she felt worse than ever about how her night with Cooper had ended. She wanted him to get hurt from whatever it was they were starting less than she wanted herself to get hurt.

Even as she worried, though, her skin tingled as she neared the barn, remembering how he’d looked first thing this morning in the hayloft, his bare golden shoulders glistening in the early sunlight as he slept wrapped up in the sleeping bag they’d made love in.