Pamela Morsi by Love Overdue Page A

would-be thieves.
    Inside he began peeling off his clothes immediately. He’d installed his washer and dryer in the mudroom. And living alone he found little need for the frills of domestic life like hampers and baskets. He put his laundry directly in the washer and when it filled up, he did the wash.
    Naked, he made his way to the front bedroom. The eighty-year-old one-story farmhouse retained much of the dated, retro appearance enjoyed by the former occupants. Scott had updated the kitchen and painted the exterior, but the bedroom still sported wallpaper with the faded pastel pressed-petals design. It was girly. Undoubtedly decorated for the daughter of the house. But he preferred the morning sun shining through the windows. And a few pink-and-yellow flowers didn’t threaten his masculinity.
    In fact, a little less masculinity might be helpful. As he pulled on his jeans, he glanced toward his rumpled bed as if it were an enemy. The last few nights he had been plagued by dreams. He couldn’t quite recall the erotic events involved, but he awakened achy and aching, hard as a rock.
    “You need a girlfriend,” he told his image in the mirror.
    Immediately he thought of Jeannie Brown. She was lonely and she liked him. That had him halfway into her bed already. He doubted she was any great shakes in the sack, but someone was better than no one, right?
    “Wrong,” he answered his own premise. “Someone is not better than no one. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.”
    The rhetorical tee was exactly the soft and nearly ragged one he pulled out of his chest-of-drawers, a reminder of some long-ago rock concert that he could barely recall. He dragged it over his head and tucked it in, more to get it out of his way than any need for neatness.
    At least all those early-morning, sexually frustrated runs freed up his afternoon for less strenuous exercise.
    On his way back through the house, he stopped at the fridge and drank a big slug of orange juice directly from the bottle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Both behaviors would have horrified his mother and disgusted his ex-wife. But if there was to be any consolation for the unplanned single life, it was that a man could be as uncivilized as he pleased.
    At the back door he pulled on his muck boots and a broad-brimmed straw hat. He stepped outside and made his way across the bare patches and buffalo grass that he euphemistically described as his lawn. On the north side was the drain field for the septic system. The grass was far greener there, but somehow the source of that lushness did not encourage him to linger.
    The south end of his acreage had been transformed into a garden.
    He’d bought the property, still known around town as “the old Paske place” along with the surrounding three acres between the house and the creek bank. At the time, he’d had no real plans for the land. If he’d considered it at all, it was as a buffer between the privacy he needed and those friends, family and neighbors who lived nearby.
    But it was more than that to him now. Scott gazed lovingly down the long rows of plants stalwartly growing out of the soil. The carrot tops looked pretty enough to put in a flower vase. The potato plants were already hardy and the peas appeared vividly green against the grayish-brown color of the Kansas soil.
    From childhood, his parents had pressed him into service in the family garden. And like every rural teenager, he’d done his share of backbreaking farm labor. But he’d never really considered plants or cultivation as a hobby he’d ever care to pursue. Yet from the moment Scott had moved in, the need to plant something, to grow something, had been so strong in him he was unable to resist it.
    He could only imagine that the genes of generations of dirt farmers were finally showing themselves. Scott had surprised himself. His parents had merely shrugged.
    “What else would you do with all this good ground,” his father had