Lost in Tennessee by Anita DeVito

clear that puddle better than you.”
    Butch snorted. “That’s not a puddle, it’s a pond.”
    “Chicken? Loser buys lunch.” Ten feet from the edge of the water, Kate made ready to run.
    “You’re on. You first.”
    Kate shook her head. “Together.”
    Butch matched her at the starting line. “On the count of three. One…two…three!”

Chapter Three
    F eet digging into the soft earth, they both bolted from the starting line. One step before the leap, Kate stopped. She saw that instant of confusion when he tried to stop, but he was too far committed, and the ground too soft. He slid into the puddle like a runner stealing second.
    Covered in mud from his toes to his chest, Butch punched at the fluid surface. “You cheat!”
    He looked spectacular. Raw and earthy and riled.
    “I don’t know what you’re pissed about. You won. I’m buying lunch.” She couldn’t keep up the innocent act and broke into laughter. She picked her way around the edge of the puddle, looking for high ground. “It’s supposed to be good for you. I hear spas charge a lot of money to wallow in mud.”
    Instead of looking for the high ground, she should have been looking for the hand that snaked over. “Then, why don’t you join me?”
    And just like that, she flew sideways into the puddle. The afternoon temperatures had reached a comfortable seventy degrees, but the water temperature crested closer to fifty.
    “Bastard!” The cold water shocked her warm skin. Instinct made her pop up, but gravity put her right back in the water. The harder she fought, the wetter she got and the harder she laughed.
    Butch sat at the edge of the puddle, his back to the winter wheat growing in the spring sun. Kate thought he looked a little too clean.
    “I know what you’re thinking. Don’t.”
    Kate put on the innocent face she’d perfected as a teen. “What?”
    “Kate. Katie. I’m serious.”
    Kate launched herself at Butch, wrapping her muddy arms around his shoulders. He rolled them into the wheat, alternating laughing and cursing her.
    “You muddy…little…brat.”
    Chubsy ran thought the wheat, hopping around their prone bodies, barking his head off.
    “Busted,” Kate said, filled with so much joy she couldn’t contain it.
    Butch stood first and offered her a hand. “I can’t believe you did that.”
    Their hands slipped, but Butch caught her wrist and pulled her to her feet. “I can’t believe you fell for that.”
    Butch swatted her behind. “I’m going to have to keep my eye on you.”
    B utch leaned against the counter, ankles and arms crossed, as he watched the dinner preparations. Kate handled farm equipment like a pro. She couldn’t skip a stone across the pond but had the arm of a left-handed relief pitcher. Put a tool or piece of equipment in her hands, and the woman moved with the air and confidence of a queen.
    Here in the kitchen, she was a fish out of water.
    “Is the chicken supposed to be that color? It is chicken, right?”
    She wrinkled her nose and glared at the skillet. “Of course it’s chicken. Haven’t you ever heard of blackened?”
    “Blackened is not the same as burned.”
    Kate covered the skillet with a lid and pointed at him with a wooden spoon. “Since when did you become the chef? This is my specialty. Don’t you have farmer work to do?”
    “Farmer work?”
    “Aren’t you a farmer?”
    Here it was, the perfect opportunity to tell the truth. But what would happen then? He liked this woman. The one he washed down with the hose. The one denying dinner was burning. He just needed a little more time with her, a little more time with the real her and the real him. “I’m a songwriter. I just help my father with the farm.”
    Kate shifted her focus from the skillet to the pot. She used the wooden spoon to stir the red glop he suspected of being a kind of sauce.
    “That’s a cool job. Have you written anything I would have heard?”
    “Maybe. Do you listen to country music?”
    Kate