Cream of the Crop Read Online Free PDF Page B

truth.
    â€œI wish I knew, Roxie. Somehow, everything I know about guys goes out the window when I see him. There’s just something about him.”
    â€œWell, what are you wearing this week?” she asked, the browbeating done and the girl-talk planning now beginning.
    Once off the phone, I wandered around in my apartment, restless. I folded some laundry, I spot-cleaned a few shoes, but mostly I paced. I’d circled the kitchen a few times, finally landing next to a cupboard that was almost hidden behind the trash can.
    Inside that cupboard was my secret little world, one that I rarely shared with anyone. This city girl . . . loved the country.
    Scratch that. Loved the idea of the country.
    I’d been collecting pictures out of magazines for years, always depicting small-town Americana at its best. Town squares complete with duck ponds and hitching posts. Hayrides, wash hanging on the line, kitchen gardens, and homemade cobbler.
    I had this idea that one day, far off into the future, I might leave it all behind and live in the country. Wild and free, wearing comfortable overalls and broken-in old work boots, picking blueberries by the side of a dirt road with a country dog by my side. I even knew the song that would be playing on this little blueberry adventure, “Dust Down a Country Road,” by John Hiatt.
    I really did have a soundtrack for everything.
    Even more specifically, I secretly dreamed about one day giving up my advertising career to chuck it all and start making cheese for a living. It’s true. I knew nothing at all about the actual process, but in my head it was very romantic and sweet, just me and my cows and rows of tidy little cheese rounds.
    I’d devoted an entire cupboard to this very 3-D version of a vision board, one that I’d visit when particularly daydreamy or when the city had been especially tough.
    Ten minutes spent gazing into my cupboard was worth an hour of therapy, even if officially I’d never acknowledge my love of never-actually-visited-but-often-imagined all things country.
    I looked at the clock, my heart jumping a bit when I saw it was almost time to go see my dairy god.

    Strutting, strutting. Just strutting along, not a care in the world. Here I go. In fact:
    Here I go again, on my own  . . .
    As Whitesnake’s classic song played in my head, I could see myself doing front walkovers across a car, or riding through a tunnel halfway hanging out of the passenger-side window while Oscar drove, reaching over with his long, tanned fingers to caress the inside of my black thigh-highs.
    I Tawny Kitaen’ed myself through the farmers’ market, stopping whenever I saw something interesting, just doing my normal Saturday shopping.
    Oh look, farm-fresh eggs. I’ll take a dozen. Speckled brown? Fabulous. Into the linen bag they go; it’ll be my contribution to the family brunch tomorrow.
    Mmm, my favorite flower stall. Look, beautiful deep-red dahlias. I’ll take a few bundles for some color in my living room.
    Just shopping, not noticing at all that there’s a stall now just twenty feet away that contains the most beautiful thing ever created on this earth.
    There he was.
    Come on, strut it out, girl.
    No use. Those gray-blue eyes laser locked on me across the pavement, and the entire world stopped. Usually I didn’t see him until I made it up to the counter. He said his line, I said my line, and that was it for the rest of the week. Sometimes, if I was lucky, the wind would blow a few wisps of that thick, wavy hair around his face. And then angels would sing . . .
    But today, something was different. He spotted me way before it was time, and he held my gaze. His eyes were piercing, cutting through the crisp autumn-morning air.
    And as the wind blew, I realized there was no tie in his hair today. The chestnut was mixed with mahogany and copper and all the other sexy brown crayons. It was thick and a