Page 77 of Love Off-Limits
“So what the farm needs is someone who hooks up with random farmhands while everyone else works hard?”
“Don’t reduce everything you do for this place, how hard you work, into one singular moment. We made a mistake yesterday. Fine. But you are so much more than one bad decision.”
His words sounded so similar to Lennox and Brody’s, I was momentarily distracted, wondering ifhelistened to Brené Brown, too.
I started walking again, needing the movement to clear my head. To resist him. To figure out the words that would get the message across.
He followed beside me, his hands hooked over his pockets. To a casual observer, we might look like we were simply strolling, having a casual chat. But I was too finely tuned to Tyler’s body not to sense the tension he held in his shoulders or detect the clench of his well-defined jaw. “The thing is,” I finally said, “I don’t think it’s possible for me to be with you and not be wholly irrational all the time. You fill my head so completely. And I can’t afford that much headspace to be on anything but work.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. People have jobsandrelationships all the time. Entrepreneurs, business owners, a lot of them are in love. It doesn’t hinder their work.”
My eyes jumped up sharply at the word love, but Tyler’s eyes were clear, his gaze steady. He knew what he’d said, and he wasn’t sorry about it. I considered what it might feel like to throw my hands up and fling myself into his arms. To forget about Perry’s judgments and my father’s concerns and just give in. I could leave Stonebrook. Find a job somewhere else. But that thought was just as painful as living without Tyler. And my roots at Stonebrook were a lot deeper.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said softly. “I told you from the start I wasn’t in the right space to be in a relationship. And yesterday proved it.”
We walked in silence for several minutes, all the way until we reached the enormous sign framed by inlaid rock that read,Stonebrook Farm, established 1991.The sign was flanked by a white picket fence that extended in either direction, crossing the rolling green hills that made the entrance to Stonebrook so idyllic. A footpath that ran the length of the fence to the right of the sign would take us to the babbling, stone-filled brook that had given Stonebrook its name, and beyond that, the east pasture where the goats normally grazed. I hesitated at the start of the path. I suddenly wanted to walk it, to see the spring-fed brook, to feel its cool, refreshing water. But I didn’t think Tyler would want to stay with me for that long, not after what I’d just told him.
“Do you remember Dani?” Tyler eventually asked. “Isaac’s sister?”
I started down the path, and Tyler followed without hesitation. “She made Rosie’s wedding dress.”
“Right. I’ve known Isaac and Dani since we were kids. I was better friends with Isaac, but they’re twins, so she was pretty much always around. Until high school. Then she found different friends and... anyway, she hated it when Isaac started his YouTube channel.Hatedit. Isaac’s really smart. Got into MIT. Was offered a full ride to Clemson. And he said no to all of it because by the time we graduated, he was already making a few hundred thousand a year. But Dani didn’t see that. She didn’t see the good he did, the positivity in his message. And she was convinced his income was more a flash in the pan type deal. She didn’t think it would last. When she looked at Isaac, all she saw was a whole heap of untapped potential.”
“But she doesn’t feel that way now, does she?” I hadn’t spent a ton of time with Dani at the wedding, but from what I’d observed, she and Isaac had seemed really close.
“Nah. But it took her coming home—she used to live in New York—and getting to know Isaac as the adult he is now to let go of how she’d seen him when they were still kids. She was judging him based on what shethoughthe was, not on what hereallywas.”
Ah.So that was where this was going.
“Olivia, you shouldn’t have to change who you are to work with your family. If they don’t appreciate what you have to offer, work somewhere else. Do something else.” He grabbed my hand to stop my walking and turned me to face him. “Don’t put yourself in somebody else’s box.”
I shook my head and shrugged away from his touch. Mostly because with him so close, I could catch faint traces of citrus and pine coming off his skin. He’d been using Mom’s soap.
“I appreciate your confidence in me, but that’s not what’s happening here. I’m telling you that I can’t be in a relationship with you. Not right now. Not with what’s going on with my family.”
“Why? Why does it have to be one or the other?”
“Because I have to focus. I have to convince my dad. I’ve already told you this.” My voice caught. “Why are you making this so hard?”
“You have to convince your dad of what?” he pressed.
“I don’t know!” I finally yelled. “I don’t know what my dad thinks, and I’m too scared to even think about it, much less talk to him about it.” Tears spilled onto my cheeks. “Daddy was always the one who understood. He saw my passion and channeled it into the farm. He trained me up to love this place like he did. And then he took it away from me. And the pain of that cuts so deep that I can hardly breathe whenever I’m around him. So yes. I have to focus. I have to figure out what he needs from me, so I don’t have to give up my dream of this place.”
Tyler’s arms were around me in seconds and I collapsed into them, the comfort he offered immediately leeching the tension from my shoulders and neck. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
I allowed myself to breathe him in a beat longer, and then I pulled away and wiped my eyes before pushing further down the path.
At the edge of the field, it cut into the forest and wound through the trees to the brook. We followed it in silence to the stream’s edge, where the water bubbled and tumbled over moss-covered rocks. “This is why Dad named the place Stonebrook,” I said. “It’s spring-fed. About a hundred yards up that way.” I motioned up the hillside. “It runs across the entire farm and then meets the French Broad River on the other side of the strawberry fields.” I crouched down and let the water trickle over my hand. Even in the heat of the summer, the water stayed a cool fifty-five degrees.
I flicked the water off my hand and turned to face Tyler.
He watched me closely, his face, for once, completely unreadable.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said.
I wanted to say no. Tyler knew how to ask the questions that made me think. That made me find truths faster than my stubbornness sometimes allowed. “Okay.”
“Have you actuallytalkedto your dad about the restaurant?”
