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Once that would have been anathema to her. Harriet was right, Rachel knew; shehadbeen busting to get out of here for most of her childhood. She’d felt hemmed by her mother’s unhappiness, her father’s distance, the other schoolchildren who saw her as gawky and shy and strange. The smallness of Mathering, a community where people knew what you were doing before you knew yourself. Where no one would let you be anything than what they thought you were.
Oh yes, she’d been longing to escape it all. Exeter had felt like a breath of fresh air, a world where she wasn’t known, where she could be anyone she wanted to be. London had been the same, but by the time she’d been working awhile she had started to wonder, without actually articulating her thoughts, that maybe it could beniceto be known, for people to remember you from when you were small, and see you as more than a cog in a vast machine, one more anonymous soul in the sea of strangers that was a city.
Another deep breath to fill her lungs and then out again, as she surveyed this tiny and beautiful corner of Yorkshire—the rolling moors in a patchwork of brown and green, the Derwent winding its way gracefully through the hills, the rooftops and grey stone of Mathering in the distance, all underneath a pale blue sky.
For once, Rachel thought, she wasn’t hightailing it out of this place, running away from the people she was meant to love because she was too scared or too angry or too tired to deal with the messy complications relationships inevitably came with. For once, she was staying.
For how long, she didn’t know, but she let that open-ended idea settle inside her as she started back down the hill. Whatever happened, whatever came next, she promised herself, she was going to see it through.
Chapter Seventeen
“All right, you.”
Rachel gave the cow she was milking what she hoped was an encouraging look as its large, soft brown eyes blinked back at her. “This doesn’t hurt, I know it doesn’t, and Icando this, because Harriet showed me.” It was five o’clock in the morning the day after she and her father had returned from Middlesbrough, and just as she’d promised Harriet, she was doing the milking. Or she would be, as soon as she steeled herself to attach the suction cups to the cow’s swollen teats.
It had been a long time since she’d been this close to a cow.
In fact, despite what she’d told Harriet with such assurance, she couldn’t rememberwhenshe’d last been near a cow. Yes, she’d helped her dad with the milking,sort of, but the truth was he’d done most of the work and she’d simply sat and watched. When Harriet had shown her how to do it yesterday, seeming uncharacteristically, briskly capable about it all, Rachel had watched and nodded and said yes, of course she could do it. Part of her had even been thinking, shamefully, that she could do anything her sister did, only better.
Old habits died hard, it seemed, because already Rachel was pretty sure she couldn’t be better than Harriet at this.
“All right, let’s do this,” she told the cow, and leaned forward to attach the milk cup to a teat. She’d already released the rubber stop and turned the whole contraption, which looked something like an octopus made of metal and rubber, upside down, and now she just had to connect it to the cow…the cow which mooed and danced a few steps away.
“Now, don’tdothat,” Rachel implored the beast. “We’re friends, right? And you want to be milked. Think how good it will feel…” All right, maybe best not to go down that route. “Come on,” she said, and reached forward again. Once more the cow took a few prancing, alarmed steps away. Themooshe gave this time sounded like a warning.
Rachel sat back on the milking stool with a groan. Already her back was aching, and she hadn’t even started yet. She had sixty cows to deal with, so she really needed this cow to cooperate. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to have received the memo.
“Need help?” Rachel tensed and then turned to see Ben slipping through the barn doors and shedding his coat. He was wearing a flannel shirt and waterproof trousers, and the smile he gave her was both knowing and full of mischief.
“No-o,” Rachel replied, hearing the hesitation in her voice. Her instinct was never to ask for help, but she couldn’t deny she was glad to see Ben. “I’m just about to start.”
“They sense your nervousness,” he told her seriously, although he was smiling. “You’ve got to be firm but gentle with a cow.”
“That almost sounds dirty,” Rachel quipped, and he let out a laugh.
“None of those types of farmer jokes, please.” He started rolling up his sleeves over his powerful forearms as he reached for one of the ankle-length rubber milking aprons hanging on a hook by the door. “If we work together, it will go faster.”
“Don’t you have your own work to do?” Rachel asked. Ben didn’t keep dairy cows, but he had a lot of sheep.
“I’ve already been up for an hour.” He grabbed a milking stool and sat next to her, close enough so she could breathe him in, along with the scent of the barn—hay and animal, a sweetish, dusty scent that was not unpleasant, once you got used to it. “Here. Let me show you,” he said, and attached all four cups in about six seconds.
“Why are you so good at that?” she exclaimed with a laugh. “You’re not even a dairy farmer.”
“Well, it’s all of a piece, isn’t it,” Ben replied easily, and Rachel gave a little huff of sound, half amusement, half amicable annoyance. “And,” he added more quietly as he moved to the next cow, “I’ve been helping your dad a bit.”
“Yes, thank you for that. Harriet said you helped her with the milking yesterday, too—I have to admit, it didn’t even cross my mind.”
“I’m not sure why it would,” Ben replied as he kept moving down the line of cows while Rachel simply sat there and watched.
“You mean because I haven’t been around much,” she stated, not a question.
Ben lifted one shoulder in a shrug as he kept working. “Are you going to help me here,” he called, “or are you just going to stare at my backside?”
And a very nice backside it was, Rachel thought as she rose from her stool. “All right, show me how to do it,” she said, and he beckoned to her with one finger.
“Come here.”
She came with a small smile on her face, because there had been something almost intimate about his tone, and even though they’d parted rather tensely at the ceilidh, everything felt different now—or maybe it was just her who felt different, because she knew she did. She was no longer in self-protective mode, running away rather than engaging, blustering rather than being. She came towards him, and he shifted over on the stool so she could perch on the other half of it, and it was not a large space. Their thighs were pressed together from hip to knee, and her shoulder and breast brushed his body as she leaned forward, everything in her tingling from the contact.
