For Love Or Honey Read online

Sure can, I thought back.

  Everyone turned when I made my noisy entrance. And the devil struck me down with icy eyes, a razor-sharp jaw, and a smile that could have convinced the Pope himself to eat forbidden fruit.

  “What do you want?” I shot, ignoring the recognition that I sounded like a child. I folded my arms across my T-shirt that read Don’t Mess With Texas.

  He stood, never breaking eye contact as he smoothed his tie and stepped toward me. My chin lifted the closer he got, his height imposing. In another life, in another time, he lived out here in the sticks with an ax in his beastly hand or the reins of an oxen yoke clutched in his hammer fist. But I bet his hands were smooth as a baby’s ass. I bet he wouldn’t last one fucking day in the full sun doing real work. I bet he’d rather die than get in that shiny little sports car’s bucket seats sweaty and peppered with dirt.

  I warmed, either from his encroaching proximity or the mental image of him shirtless and chopping wood.

  “I wanted to introduce myself since I didn’t get a chance at the press conference,” he said, extending that gargantuan appendage he called an arm. “Grant Stone.” When I didn’t take his hand, he added, “You threw an egg at me?”

  “I recall. But you didn’t just come here to meet me.”

  His empty hand returned to his side. “Then why did I come?”

  “You’re trying to butter us up. Come here being all polite as if that’ll change our minds.”

  “Sounds like you have me all figured out.”

  My temper flamed at his milky reaction. “You realize we run a bee farm, right? You think we’re going to let you run your diesel and pollute our flowers? Kill our bees? First it’s bulldozers and backhoes. Then diesel trucks bringing machines and parts. Then your diesel rig and diesel trucks to haul your fuel off. And I swear to god, if you say one word about clean diesel, I will chase you off my property with a whole crate of eggs.”

  “Funny to hear all the green talk coming from the girl driving the Hemi.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Can’t exactly pull a trailer with a Prius, can I?”

  “Can’t exactly get fuel for your Hemi out of the ground without diesel, either.”

  I shifted back to my point. “That’s not even to mention what you’ll do to our water. I’ll tell you what my family was too polite to say—we don’t want your money, so please get the hell out of our house.”

  He assessed me for a drawn out moment, his face unreadable. I was just about to repeat myself a little louder and a little slower when he said, “You don’t think I understand.”

  My face quirked. “How could you? Isn’t your daddy some big oil guy? Didn’t you grow up somewhere on the East Coast with seersucker and bow ties? Yacht club and boat shoes? So tell me—what do you know of small towns and the working class? I don’t even know how you can drive on half the roads in this town in that car.”

  “And what’s wrong with my car?”

  “It’s useless and out of touch, especially around here. I don’t even know how you can fit in it. What are you, like eight feet tall?”

  An amused sound through his nose. “So if I came here in a pickup truck wearing a Stetson, you’d listen?”

  “No.”

  “That’s reasonable.” He turned back to my family. “I’ll see myself out. It’s been nice to meet you. Thank you for the coffee.”

  My mother offered another smile, this time apologetic. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Stone. Good luck.”

  I didn’t know if he caught the little bit of snark in her well wishes, but my sisters and I did.

  He nodded once, then turned back to me, his eyes lit with the embers of challenge. As he passed, he leaned in, his lips close enough to my ear to feel his breath. “I’m afraid you’ve underestimated me, Ms. Blum—I understand you better than you think. So get ready. I’m coming for you.”

  I braced myself against a shiver of anticipation that wriggled down my spine. But rather than shy away, I turned my face toward him, forcing him to retreat or risk our lips connecting.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got, Stone,” I said with a wry smile. “You have a nice day, now.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  With a mirroring expression on his face, he headed out. The second his back was turned, I scowled at him the duration of his walk to that stupid car, laughing when he realized the back of my truck was full of bees. He hurried into the HotWheels like his pants were on fire. I had to admit that the rumble when he started the engine did something funny to my insides, but I never would have said so.

  “Iris Jo,” Mama scolded, though she fought a smile. “I cannot believe how rude you were.”

  “Really? I threw an egg at him on live television two days ago. Was I really supposed to pretend like I was happy to see him in my kitchen?”

  “Well, no, but you could have at least told him off politely.”

  “I can’t even believe you entertained him.”

  “What were we supposed to do, send him off when he came here being so nice?” Mom asked.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Oh, relax,” Poppy said. “I put a laxative in his coffee.”

  Mom spun around to face her with her mouth open. “Poppy June—you did not.”

  Poppy shrugged. “No, I didn’t. But I thought about it.”

  “Am I the only one who thinks he’s dangerous?”

  “He’s only dangerous if you give him power,” Daisy said, hooking her arm in mine. “So don’t.”

  I sighed. “Fine. But don’t let him in the house again. You’ll mislead him into thinking he’s got a shot at our rights.”

  “He brought an awfully big number with him,” Mom said as she cleared his place. “Lots of zeros. Enough zeros to make us rich.”

  “And kill our business. If Grandpa didn’t sell to oil in the fifties when the farm was actually in trouble, why would we do it now when things are fine?”

  “I didn’t say we should,” she noted.

  I made a derisive noise as Daisy towed me toward the coffee pot, ignoring the prick of fear that I didn’t have as much of a say as I liked to think I did. Mama owned fifty-two percent, and we each got a split of the remainder when we turned eighteen. At the end of the day, all we could do was tell her what we thought and what we wanted. And though I knew she’d listen and honor our wishes if she could, it was still up to her.

  Daisy leaned against the counter as I poured myself a cup.

  With the jerk of my chin toward a vase of fresh flowers on the counter, I asked, “Did Billy or Bobby Jenkins send those?”

  She sighed. “Billy. It’s been five years those twins have been courting us. They just won’t learn. And I don’t think they’ve discovered the line between persistent and creepy.”

  “Listen, any boys dumb enough to think that if they came after all three of us at the same time, one of us would cave, deserves every Tuesday’s bouquet rejection.”

  “I just feel bad, but they won’t take no for an answer. If they weren’t a couple of sweet little puppies, I’d worry.”

  Poppy snorted a laugh. “I’m pretty sure I could take them both at once. They can’t weigh more than two fifty combined.”

  The truth was, Billy and Bobby hadn’t addressed a single bouquet to me in a year. And as much as I’d like to say that it was because they’d somehow focused their attentions, the truth was that in most cases, none of the town boys came after me anymore. I’d become the prickly, unapproachable sister when it came to suitors, now directing my attention at warning everyone off who wasn’t worthy. Which was all of them.

  But somehow, it’d only isolated me from my sisters a little bit more.

  “How’d it go at Crowe’s?” Daisy asked.

  A smile flickered on my lips. “Oh, man—you should have seen it. The colony had set up inside the rusty carcass of an old ’74 Super Beetle. It was huge. I filled two full brood boxes. I thought Old Man Crowe was gonna have a coronary right there on the spot.”

  Daisy laughed.
“Well, the sight of you scooping up handfuls of bees without gear on can be alarming to the unpracticed eye.”

  I shrugged, taking a sip of my coffee. “Well, we are the Blum bee witches, aren’t we?”

  “How we didn’t burn in the pioneer days is beyond me,” Poppy said. “Although we did end up cursed, so I guess we didn’t escape unscathed.”

  The joke was an old one, and we laughed automatically, though I wasn’t sure we even thought it was funny anymore. Our men suffered one of two fates—desertion or death. But despite being the town Black Widows, Poppy and Daisy were still pursued by the same boys who tried to date us in high school. We seemed to be the only ones who took it seriously.

  I didn’t mean to say we believed in actual magic, more like some deep and unbreakable bad luck that followed us around like a thunderhead waiting to strike. If we didn’t fall in love, everyone was safe. Our hearts were safe.

  Loneliness was preferable to heartache any day of the week.

  Of course, there was the pact we’d made a million years ago to stay single as long as Mama did. If she didn’t date, neither would we, and there was approximately zero danger of her dating, not with the same old town fare as she’d ever had. She’d devoted her whole life to raising us, and the thought of leaving her here alone disturbed us.

  But one day, Poppy and Daisy would find someone, and off they’d go. But not me. I’d be here with Mama indefinitely.

  Daddy wouldn’t have left her alone, and neither would I.

  I’d heard it said that every child is different, physically and personality-wise, and though my sisters and I were very clearly sisters, we lived up to the adage. We all possessed a healthy sense of sarcasm, but Daisy was softer, sweeter than Poppy and me. I was on the opposite end of the spectrum, too salty to be sweet. And Poppy fell somewhere in the middle, which was how she ended up the glue of our trio.

  But where Daisy was just like Mama, I was the spit of my father.

  As long as I could remember, it was all anyone ever said. I had the strong jaw and determined chin. I had the skeptical eyebrows and tilted smile that reminded everyone of him. I didn’t know if my expressions were genetic or learned—I spent all of my time at his elbow. He taught me everything about bees and farming flowers, showed me what hard work meant and the difference between sarcasm and being an asshole. He even let me sit in his lap to drive a few times under the promise I’d never tell Mama.

  I was nine when he died. My family came unraveled, left frayed and threadbare. There was a moment at the house, on the day of his wake, that a realization dawned on me, giving me purpose.

  I was just like my daddy. So I was uniquely equipped to take care of them. Just like he did.

  Mama used to joke that I was the man of the house, but I wore the title with pride. I was a champion spider slayer and the mistress of fixing squeaky hinges and stuck windows. I’d lobbed off the heads of many a snake, and once, when I was twelve, I shot a coyote that’d cornered Mama outside the chicken coop.

  I cried for a week over that coyote, but never where anybody could see.

  I’d made every big decision in my life on what Daddy would have done. And I knew one thing for certain—he wouldn’t sell to Flexion’s well-suited goon. He wouldn’t sacrifice anything for the sake of money. And he wouldn’t leave Mama here to fend for herself alone, either.

  So neither would I.

  “Think Stone will be back?” Daisy asked, and I realized I’d missed part of their conversation.

  “I think he was sent here to get our rights, and he won’t leave until he’s done it or we run him out of town,” Poppy answered.

  And I smiled. “Then we’d better sharpen our pitchforks.”

  4

  Hellflowers

  GRANT

  I sat on the small back porch of the short-term rental, sipping terrible coffee from a mug that read Rosé All Day, wondering if my father had sent me here to set me up for failure.

  This town was too far off the highway to have a hotel, and the one motel in town wasn’t fit to take my shoes off in, so here I was in a tiny studio rental off the back of Salma Hayak’s old Victorian near Main Street. No, not that Salma Hayak—this one was so old that her age was indeterminate. She was nothing but cotton fluff hair and clacking bones, but she was kind, and the sheets were clean.

  Doilies saddled ancient furniture, including a television that looked to be from the 70s, complete with bunny ears connected by foil. The kitchen, which was in the same room as all the other rooms, hadn’t been updated since the fifties, nor had the bathroom—the showerhead hit me in the kisser. The bed was an iron contraption made before mattresses had standard sizes, so someone had rigged up the frame to accommodate a double mattress, which worked fine, so long as you didn’t move too quick. It’d already fallen through to the floor twice.

  After a few nights in Salma’s house, driving an hour from San Antonio was looking shinier than it had at first glance.

  The back porch was secluded enough, facing back to trees. We were on the edge of town—a solid two blocks off the main drag—but you’d think no one was around for miles, as quiet as it was. Besides the warbling bird in a nearby tree that thought we should all be up with him well before the sun was out.

  I’d been to towns like Lindenbach plenty of times but was always surprised by the alien culture in places like this. Jo wasn’t wrong about my upbringing—I’d grown up in the DC area where my father worked for the Flexion’s East Coast offices. I attended private boys’ school in Connecticut, and though I could tie a number of sailing knots, I’d never actually sailed on my own, preferring yachts with crews and a bar to any sort of manual labor.

  Most times, the key to cracking the code on small towns was making sure the check I offered was big enough to get them to throw their principles away. Everybody waved around their morals until you shook a bag of money at them. But when that failed, my job was to convince them I wasn’t the enemy. To earn their trust, I had to relate to them and make them feel like I was on their side. They didn’t need to know the only side I was on was my own.

  If that didn’t work, subterfuge would. All I had to do was find the chink in the armor and exploit it. Like turning brothers on each other. Or a couple’s divorce, which was one of the instances here in Lindenbach. Seduction was always an easy one, and sometimes there were ways to squeeze a farm into a situation they couldn’t get themselves out of.

  To my credit, I’d never done anything illegal. But I’d done plenty of manipulating to achieve my goals, motivated by a lack of subjectivity and a very, very large bonus on clearing a town of resistance.

  But Lindenbach was different. I knew the second I drove into town that this would be hard, maybe the hardest job I’d ever done. They were going to make me work for it.

  And I had to be ready for anything.

  I took another sip of the brackish coffee and made a face, heading inside to dump it in the sink, daydreaming about that imaginary hotel in San Antonio. I hadn’t unpacked anything, leaving the window open on my commitment. But I sighed, turning for the bedroom, resigned. If I was going to convince this town I had their best interest in mind, refusing to stay here wouldn’t earn me any points. I could already hear Jo Blum ranting in the diner about it.

  And I wasn’t going to hand her ammunition.

  Of the six farms I was here to acquire rights to, the Blum farm would be the hardest, and thanks to the size of its shale deposit, it was also my top priority. Leaving here without it would mean leaving with nothing, if my father had anything to say about it. Which he would.

  The easy paths to their shale had been blocked. Charm was useless—the Blums valued honesty, and they didn’t believe a word I said. Money seemed to be no object—anyone who turned their noses at seven figures was probably beyond the reach of my checkbook.

  The way I saw it, there was only one way in. One of the sisters.

  And only one of them held the keys to the kingdom.

  Jo.

/>   She was the smartest shot—if I took any other angle, she’d bar me with the ferocity of a cornered animal. But if I could figure out how to disarm her … well, that was another story altogether.

  I realized I was smirking as I pulled a pair of khakis and a navy Flexion button-down out of my garment bag.

  Because taming Jo Blum was going to be a damn good time.

  Khaki was as close as I got to casual, and paired with rolled-up sleeves and my lack of tie, I almost pulled it off. I’d work the festival booth today, turn on the smile, and see if I could win over a few townies. Flexion had sent a few people over to smile and hand out pamphlets and merchandise, so we could be seen and be seen as something safe.

  Appearances were everything, and this was my second shot at giving an impression. In the first, I’d ended up with actual egg on my face, and though I handled it, I could use an egg-free day.

  Hopefully, the Blum girls didn’t have any produce up their sleeves.

  Once groomed, I gathered my things and headed out. The day was warm already—September was just an extension of August, after all—but showing up to the fair in my Audi wouldn’t have impressed anybody. My father didn’t understand why I’d driven it here from Georgetown, enjoying the open road, the days of solitude, the radio and the rumble of the engine carrying me across the country. He’d suggested I take a Flexion jet and rent an Escalade when I got here, but in this, I didn’t care if he understood.

  In everything else…well, that was another story.

  Hand in my pocket, I walked toward downtown, staying in the shade as best I could. When I reached Main Street, eyes followed me to the coffee shop, nearly suffocating me once I was inside. They were curious and suspicious—not only was I an outsider, but culturally, I couldn’t fit in any better than they could at dinner at the yacht club.

  I smiled. Nodded. Used my best Yes Ma’am/Sir. Held the door open for a mother with two squiggling children in tow. Let the crowd look unimpeded and hoped they noted what I’d done and that it was to their satisfaction. But I knew they’d never see me as one of them. I was imposing by default, though I didn’t know if it was genetic or learned. My father called it charisma, and though he insisted I was lacking, I could hypnotize a room just as well as he could.