Chapter 1
Eli
The serpentine belt on my 2009 Silverado’s been singing to me for three days now. It’s a high whine every time I turn over the engine, and this morning I finally told it to shut the hell up and meant it.
So here I am, with her hood up against the soft gold of a mid-afternoon June sky, elbow-deep in the guts of an engine with two hundred and twelve thousand miles.
Working the new belt around the tensioner pulley, I listen to the bees buzzing as they do their work behind me. It’s a steady hum that washes over everything on this farm, pure music if you love these pollinators the way I do. I’ve got almost one hundred and eighty colonies, but only about forty live on my property. The rest are distributed to other farms for pollination or dwell under scratch-my-back-type leases. And by that, I mean a friend will let me place hives on their property, then I give them honey in return. I have to do this because at peak season with a hundred and eighty hives, that’s close to ten million bees, and my fifteen acres can’t sustain them all in such close quarters. There simply isn’t enough pollen and food to keep them healthy.
It’s a lot of work, a lot of logistical management, but it’s my life and I love it. The hum of bees is the sound of my childhood and I’ve often thought it’s the only company I’ll ever need in my life.
I get the belt seated and give it a tug to check the tension. It holds.
“You got that backward,” Colt says.
I don’t look up. “I have it perfect.”
“Pretty sure the ribbed side goes against the pulleys.”
“Pretty sure you don’t know what you’re talking about,” I retort dryly.
“Huh.” He leans in a little farther over the fender, casting a shadow across the engine bay like he’s helping. “Looked backward.”
Colt Mancinkus knows as much about a serpentine belt as he does about quantum physics, but he’s leaning on my truck like a man who’s run a garage for thirty years.
I tolerate him affectionately because one thing I’ve learned growing up here in Whynot, North Carolina, is that God didn’t give any of those Mancinkus kids a quiet opinion.
Colt’s the youngest of the brood, twenty-seven and built like somebody stretched a normal man on a rack. He’s all elbows and shoulders and a head that nearly clears the open hood.
He’s the foreman over at Mainer Farms, the three hundred acres his family’s owned and worked for eight generations. While they grow a variety of vegetables, their newest project is a vineyard planted on the western slope of their acreage that he won’t stop talking about. But I’m a farmer, same as him, so I don’t mind listening.
“Leave him be,” Lowe says, walking into my field of view, and I straighten from the engine. “Man’s been fixing his own trucks since before you could drive.”
“I’m supervising,” Cole says to his older brother.
I pull a rag out of my back pocket and wipe the grease from my hands. “You’re loitering.”
Colt snorts, Lowe laughs and I grin.
This, right here, is about as social as I get, but there’s nothing better than a little ribbing between friends. Lowe Mancinkus is the second eldest of the Mancinkus kids and my absolute best friend. He leans against the fender, a glass bottle of Dr. Pepper that’s sweating in the June heat in his hand.
Lowe’s the kind of man who runs on emotion and feels things out loud. He’s one of the best custom carpenters in a five-county radius and serves the type of clientele who can afford to commission handcrafted dining tables. But he came up on a farm, same as his brother, same as me, and it’s a bond that others can’t understand.
“What’s wrong with the truck?” Lowe asks.
I lower the hood, forcing Colt to push off the fender. It latches into place. “Not a damn thing. It’s fixed.”
“Look at that,” Lowe muses with a dimpled smile. “Didn’t even need Colt.”
“Never do.”
Colt flips me off without heat and wanders toward the bee yard, keeping the respectful ten yards back that everyone in this county has learned to keep if you come to visit me.
“What are you two up to today?” I ask, eyes cutting over to Lowe.
“I’ve got to head to Raleigh for some specialty wood and Colt’s tagging along. Saw you out here working on the truck and thought we’d stop for a few minutes.”
“Mama wants to know when you’re bringing the girls over,” Colt calls out over his shoulder.
The girls.
He means the hives.
“Melons coming on?” I ask him.
“Squash and melons both. Cukes behind that. Mama says the blossoms are opening up and she’s not seeing the traffic she wants.”
“It’s still a bit early.” I squint west, toward where Mainer Farms sits a couple miles off, and do the math I’ve done a thousand times. Bloom timing, hive strength, how many frames of brood I can spare without robbing the orchard run I just finished. “I can have eight colonies out there by Thursday. Put ’em on the south edge of the cucurbit field, close to the tree line. You leave the wildflower strip alone like I told you?”
“Left it. Darby said the same thing you did, so I figured a woman with a PhD—”
I chuckle because, yeah… Colt’s wife is smart as hell. “Darby’s got the PhD. I just got bees.”
“You know more than the textbooks, and everybody knows it.” Colt crouches, watching the bees pour in and out of the entrance of one of the hives. They’re heavy-legged with pollen, nature’s own miracle. “How’d the peaches set this year at Farrington?”
Colt rises and glances back at me. I see a little flush of pride as he heads our way. Darby oversees the orchards at Farrington Farms. “Set so heavy, branches damn near touched the ground. Don’t know what we’d do without your bees to ensure good pollination.”
That right there.
That’s one of my favorite things that Hart Apiaries does: helping farmers with pollination. Most people don’t understand it, so I’ve stopped explaining. The honey production is only part of the business of bees. There’s also beeswax, queen breeding and raising nuc colonies to sell to hobbyists.
But there’s also using the girls—because it’s the female bees who really do the work—to do the heavy lifting for the farmers. I load them up in the dark and drive them to wherever something’s blooming. It might be peaches in March or cucurbits in June, and I let them do the oldest work there is—pollination. Half the fruit in this county sets because of hives I trucked in at four in the morning. Nobody sees it and the bees don’t care if anybody sees it.
Unsung heroes and all that.
My folks built this farm thirty years ago when I was just a toddler. Hank and Brenda Hart, two Whynot dreamers who bought four hives and tended them with a stubbornness that bordered on a medical affliction. They put in the work year after year and turned four hives into twenty, then a hundred, and by the time they turned it over to me last spring, almost two hundred in total. Hart Apiaries is a name that is recognized at every farm stand from here to Raleigh, and I couldn’t be prouder of my parents’ legacy handed down to me.
Of course, they’re out of the bee business now. They turned the keys over to me, moved out of the big farmhouse and I moved in. They bought a place down in Wilmington on the coast and their most stressful day revolves around them not catching anything while surf fishing.
“Mely’s heading to Nashville next week for an interior design symposium,” Lowe says. “She’s going to get up with Lila for dinner.”
“That’s awesome,” I reply with a grin. “She’d love that.”
“Mely’s going to drive so if you want to send anything with her, just let her know.”
“Will do,” I say, thinking of putting together a care basket of some of my sister’s favorite Whynot things. Hart honey, Muriel’s biscuits and a few packages of Farrington goat cheese.
“How’s she doing?” Colt asks.
I smile, shaking my head in half amusement, half frustration. My younger sister, Lila, is a pistol, bound and determined to make it on her own. She’s been in Nashville for four years now, trying to make a career out of singing. She’s got the voice of an angel but quickly learned, like all the others chasing their star power, that it’s hard to get noticed. “She’s mostly waiting tables and singing in a few honky-tonks.”
“She’ll get discovered one day,” Colt says with absolute certainty. He’s a musician himself—not professionally, but good enough he should be—and he knows talent.
“No doubt of that,” I agree because I have faith in Lila. But I hate seeing her hopes continually dashed.
Lowe takes a pull off his Dr. Pepper and gets that look, the one he wears when he’s about to be soft, and I brace for it.
“So, I kind of got news,” he says, eyes locking onto mine.
“What’s that?” I ask, cutting a glance over to Colt. His head is tilted in interest so that tells me whatever Lowe’s about to say, it’s news to his brother as well.
He glances away, down to the ground, over to the bees and then back to me. “Well… Mely and I are… uh… we’re trying.”
I frown and Colt scratches his head.
“Trying what?” I ask.
Lowe rolls his eyes. “Trying, Eli. We’re trying.”
It takes me a second and when it lands, my smile goes from normal to split wide open. “No way! That’s fantastic.”
Lowe smiles and ducks his head. “Yeah… it feels right.”
“Trying,” Colt hollers as he joins us at the truck, grinning like a fool. “He can’t even say it. My brother’s gonna be a daddy and he turns the color of a tomato when he talks about it.”
“I’m not… we’re not yet… it’s just—” Lowe scrubs a hand down his face, and he’s laughing now too, helpless and happy. “Y’all are the worst. I tell you one nice thing.”
“It’s a real nice thing,” I say, and I mean it. I clap him on the shoulder and squeeze. “You know what you signed up for? Little girl Mancinkuses running around painting things pink?”
“God help us all,” Colt mutters.
“Who are you kidding,” Lowe says with a laugh. “Her Uncle Colt will be the first to volunteer his fingernails to get painted.”
“That’s probably true,” he concedes.
Lowe turns to me. “You too, Uncle Eli.”
I shake my head, holding up my hands. “No nail painting for me, but I’ll gladly teach her how to handle bees as soon as she’s old enough.”
“Fair.” Lowe chuckles.
I tilt my head. “Is that what you want… a girl?”
My best friend rubs his jaw and considers the question. “I know I should say I just want a baby that’s healthy and happy, but yeah… I think my preference would be a girl and hope to hell she turns out just like Mely.”
That makes me smile, and a small tug of fondness hits. Lowe and Mely really are the perfect couple, but outside of a genuine respect for what they have, I also have no desire to find it for myself. I glance around at my slice of heaven here, with the bees providing music and the almost-summer breeze cooling my heated skin.
This is all I want or need.
“Oh… heads up,” Colt says, and now there’s mischief in it. “Morri D.’s in town.”
Lowe groans like he’s been shot and Colt shoves his brother playfully. “Your wife is over the moon to have her bestie back, so suck it up.”
Lowe shakes his head, but he’s fighting a smile and losing badly. He stares at me pointedly. “The man flew in two days ago with six suitcases, one of ’em just for what he calls his ‘evening looks.’”
I’ve met Morris Dwight exactly four times and every single time the man was wearing an ensemble that cost more than my truck. When he sees me, he squeals and says, “Oh, there’s the bee whisperer” in a voice that carries across the whole of Courthouse Square. I’m always greeted with air kisses and subjected to his god-awful flirting.
Morri D. is Mely’s best friend from New York, gay as the day is long in summertime and an accomplished drag queen. He’s weirdly ingratiated himself here into the conservative Southern town of Whynot and visits often. No matter how outrageous he is, at the end of the day, he’s always had the Mancinkus family’s, as well as some of my closest friends’, best interests at heart, and is now my friend too.
“I’m sure I’ll see him around town then,” I say, noting it will probably be at Chesty’s when I stop by for a beer and he’ll be sipping on a crisp white wine.
I hear the crunch of tires on gravel and our heads swivel. Out past the gate, coming up the long dirt drive that runs a quarter mile from the road to my place, a gray sedan kicks up a tail of red dust as it approaches.
“You expecting somebody?” Colt asks.
I glance at my watch and see she’s right on time. “Rental tenant. Some lady checking in.”
The sedan reaches a fork in the dirt drive and should bear left, as the check-in instructions indicated. Instead, the car keeps right, leading her up my driveway and straight for me, Lowe and Colt. I find myself growing irritated at the imminent intrusion.
A handful of years ago, my mama got the bright idea to fix up the old tenant cottage and list it for rent. It’s a beautiful little home, no more than nine hundred square feet and sits among lush gardens beside a pond.
My dad was dubious, but she’d said, “Hank… it can give us a good steady income, and you’ll barely know anyone’s there.”
She wasn’t wrong about that, but it didn’t quite happen the way she thought it would. Mama was looking for a long-term tenant, someone who would commit to at least a year’s lease so that she could count on the monthly income. Turns out, it seems to be better suited as a short-term rental on platforms like Airbnb and VRBO, where you can charge a premium rate for a cute cottage on a bee farm in the country.
Yeah, it’s good money, but it means opening my property to strangers who ask stupid things like, “Can we pet the bees?”
“Thought you killed that,” Lowe says.
“Keep meaning to.” I don’t know why I haven’t. Inertia, maybe. Or maybe I just understand the income’s worth the intrusion. Either way, the bookings keep coming and I keep saying yes only to later stand in my own yard resenting it.
It’s a special kind of stupid, to be honest.
The car rolls to a stop under the large oak tree that’s shading us. It removes the glare of the sun from the windows, and I see a woman wearing big sunglasses and a head of blond hair so wild and curly it looks like a lion’s mane.
She’s talking to someone, her hands waving. I see her mouth moving and assume she’s on her Bluetooth phone or maybe she’s talking to herself.
Colt lets out a low whistle. “Well now.”
The woman shoves open the door and one sandaled foot hits the gravel. She steps out and pushes the sunglasses on top of her head, revealing the biggest, bluest eyes I’ve ever seen on a woman. She’s got a heart-shaped face, golden skin and that wild blond hair is something to behold. I take in the V-neck T-shirt stretched tight over an ample chest and the curves for days underneath a pair of denim shorts.
We’re offered a big, flirtatious smile framed by full lips and one slightly crooked tooth in the front that makes her beauty all the more believable. “Hi. I’m looking for Eli Hart.”
Yeah… she’s hot all right and I wasn’t expecting that. Hadn’t even given two thoughts as to who the tenant might be, as I rarely ever run into them.
Her eyes land on Lowe first, then slide briefly over Cole before coming to rest on me. She tilts her head when none of us say anything and I find it terribly awkward that she seems to have dumbfounded three grown-ass men.
“You look like an Eli Hart,” she says, and I jolt out of my haze.
“Yeah… that would be me,” I say, remembering my manners. “And you must be Reese—”
And then it hits me.
I’ve seen this woman before.
About three weeks ago at Central Café. I was leaving and she was walking in, and I remember thinking how gorgeous she was as I held the door open.
It was a brief passing but one I didn’t think about again because I had more important things to do.
She seems to remember me at the same time and lifts a finger to point. “Wait… have we met before?”
“I think I held the door for you at Central Café a few weeks ago.”
“That’s right,” she says, snapping her fingers. “Small world.”
Indeed.
“Hi,” Lowe says, stepping forward and offering his hand. “I’m Lowe Mancinkus and this,” he says, throwing his thumb over his shoulder, “is my brother, Colt. Welcome to Whynot.”
That’s what I should have done as the proprietor of the rental cottage, but it never occurred to me.
“Pleased to meet you all,” she says after shaking his hand, giving Colt a wink and then turning back to me. “Looks like I’m in the right place. I’m Reese Cartier and I believe I’m renting your cottage for the next few weeks.”
“You’re in the right place.” I point down the dirt road. “It’s down the lane there. Just follow it back and you’ll run into the cottage. You should have the code to get in.”
“Yes, I do,” she says with another blindingly huge smile. “Appreciate it.”
She turns toward her car.
“Let me know if you need anything,” I find myself saying and then almost curse because I really don’t want to be bothered.
She merely throws her hand up in a wave and hops back into the sedan. We watch as she drives off and disappears around a bend in the road.
“Dude,” Lowe says, giving me a playful punch on the shoulder. “You’ve got a woman like that staying on your property. Good luck getting any work done.”
“Shut up,” I mutter.
