AllFreeNovel
Share Us
13
Kane
The folder full of changes and upgrades that Danica believed I needed to get the vineyard up to snuff was extensive to say the least. Not that I wasn’t excited to get to it or I disagreed with her suggestions. Not completely, anyway.
Some of what she had on the list were perfectly reasonable and things I had intended to do anyway. Some were things I thought we could look past for now, but if she insisted, I would get them done immediately.
One of those had taken me all morning, and as soon as I was finished with it, I found myself starting to feel a little grumpy. So, in an effort to not let the tedious and annoying work get me down, I moved on to doing something I highly enjoyed: getting on my hands and knees and playing in the dirt.
Ever since I was little, I had forever been at my happiest when I was out in the vineyard fields, covered in the soil of the earth. Now it was quite literally my job, and it was my favorite part of it, even eclipsing the intellectual excitement of experimentation in the lab. There was just something satisfyingly wholesome about digging in the dirt.
This time around, I was adding supplements to the soil under the vines. The frequency of the soil supplements had been doubled per Danica’s suggestion, and I was in the midst of a round of them when I realized I had company. Someone was standing beside me, casting a bit of shadow over my back, for which I was grateful. It was warm out, and the sun was baking my skin, heating me up and making me go through a ton of water from the refilled bottles I kept in the cooler I brought with me.
The shadow moved and feet came into view on one side. I recognized them as Cameron and continued doing what I was doing. My twin brother knelt beside me but didn’t speak. That usually meant he was thinking about something and didn’t know how to approach it. Considering I was busy, I had no interest in asking him what he wanted. He’d get around to it.
“She’s real pretty, man,” Cam said, as if the rest of the conversation had already been going on inside his head. I was used to that from him. People often said twins had a psychic connection, and maybe that was true, but somehow, I got left out. Cameron seemed to think we had one, though, and often began sentences somewhere in the middle and on occasion left off the end bit too.
I nodded and continued with my work. He would get to what was on his mind eventually.
I stood up, not bothering to brush the dirt off my pants, and moved to the next row. Cameron followed me, grabbing the cooler and carrying it over with me, then sitting on it when I dropped to my knees again.
I glanced over at him briefly, but he was looking around the vineyard, as if he was noticing some of it for the first time. For all I knew, he might have been. He was usually so cooped up in the office going over numbers I wasn’t sure if he knew just how big the property was. He might know the square footage, sure, but had he ever walked from one end to the other? That was doubtful.
Cameron sighed and watched for a while, and when I stood up to move another row down, he stood and grabbed the cooler, following me again. Three rows later, I held out my hand back toward him, not bothering to tell him what it was I was reaching for. I heard him stand up, open the cooler, and shuffle through its contents for a moment. Finally, a nice, cold water entered my hand, and I brought it down with me, sitting on my knees and cracking it open to take a deep gulp.
“You know, I don’t care what you’re doing with the inspector girl. I’m sure you wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize this place. You love it as much as anyone. Maybe more,” he said.
I nodded, using the strap of fabric over my arm from my T-shirt to wipe my eyes from the sweat. I took another deep gulp and stared out into the fields, waiting for him to continue. When he didn’t, I thought maybe he had done so inside his head and figured I should jolt him to life.
“Thanks,” I said, shaking the water.
“Oh,” he said, seeming startled back to reality. “Yeah, you’re welcome.” He took a second to sigh again and then looked at me seriously. “I mean, you and the inspector, it’s not serious, but even if it was, that would be fine. That’s not what’s worrying me.”
“Then what is?”
