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“Tayberries.”

He murmurs a reply.

I tap his shoulder and he glances up, apology in his cinnamon eyes.

But he doesn’t voice it. Because he listens when I speak. “I do not know tayberries,” he says instead. “They are like raspberries?”

“And blackberries. It’s a hybrid crop. Try them.”

Oscar plucks a berry from beneath the heavy foliage. Pops it in his mouth with another entrancing slow smile. “That is good, my friend.”

“Have another.”

I feed it to him this time and the only reason I don’t slide my finger between his lips with the ripe berry is that after a long day in the fields, I need a shower.

Oscar eats the second fruit. Then I show him the cherries in the orchard and he leans against the trunk of the wild damson tree as I shin up the apple tree next door to check the fruit at the top. “Rubi Matherson warned me you were obsessed with apples.”

I catch that as I happen to be looking down when he says it. But I wait until I’m on the ground again to answer him. “You needed warning about me?”

Oscar is standing in the last dappled sunlight of the day. It makes his gaze impossibly warmer. “I asked what you were like—because I couldn’t let the first mention of you in a long time pass me by.”

“And that’s what they told you, eh?”

“That’s what Rubi told me. He is…”

“Rubi.” I understand without Oscar having to finish the sentence. “He thinks I’m more like Saint than Folk. Which is lucky, I suppose.”

“Why is that?”

“Saint owns a third of the farm. He’s my business partner.”

I’ve surprised Oscar, I can tell. His gaze strays to the fields beyond the orchard and something in him seems to relax.

I wait for him to speak again. When he doesn’t, my gaze drifts too, to the grain stores needing long overdue maintenance if I don’t want to replace them, and the barn roof I won’t have the money to fix if I don’t get the winter crops sown.

Oscar rubs my arm, a slow pass of his warm palm over my sore muscles. It doesn’t feel like he’s trying to get my attention. More that he’s checking in.

He’s taller than me by an inch or two and he’s standing on higher ground. I look up at him. At his eyes, at his mouth. I’ve never been this happy to be in someone else’s company, especially someone I want to have sex with. Eventually, if Oscar wants it too. And I wasn’t joking about dinner. I’ve wanted to eat with him again since the last time.

On cue, my stomach growls. I have no idea if Oscar hears or feels it.

Just that he smiles and the fondness in his gaze does something to me. “You are hungry. What shall we have for dinner?”

Chicken. Because Folk brought me some that I’d swapped for enough blueberries to keep his house stained lilac for a month. And greens Oscar picks from the poly-tunnel with enough enthusiasm to make me want to forgo dinner and hustle him into my newly habitable bedroom. Chard and white cabbage seem to put as big a smile on his face as I do, and…I don’t mind it.

I don’t mind it at all.

We cook together. Oscar builds a fire in the oil drum Dav dug out of a hedge yesterday. Suspends a cast iron grill over the embers to grill the chicken while I steam the vegetables with chilli and garlic from the stash I brought with me from Norfolk.

The air smells of the past and future.

Oscar peers into the pot I’ve set in the coals of the fire now the chicken is off and resting. “You don’t put water in?”

“No, it makes its own with the lid on.”

“I have never cooked it like that.”

“Neither had I until my parents had a Jamaican farm hand for the summer.”