A Temporary Courtship. Jenna Mindel

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      He took a knee and waited for the rest of the class to gather round. “This is exactly what we’re looking for. Morels. Take care where you step and look around. Where there’s one, there are bound to be more. Pinch off the stem so the roots stay in the ground. Like this.”

      He offered the mushroom to Bree.

      “I get the first one?” Her fingertips grazed his palm as she scooped it up and dropped it into her plastic bag.

      “You found it.”

      She grinned at him. Proud of herself.

      Another sucker punch. The jaws of attraction snapped around him like a rusty old trap digging in deep. He couldn’t let it poison his blood. Or his brain by giving it room to grow.

      “Here are some!” one of the women announced, not far away.

      Darren stopped staring at Bree and jogged over to inspect the finding. Sure enough, his class was on a roll as another morel was found, then another. “Good job. I think everyone’s got it.”

      He pulled a small red onion bag from his pocket and joined the hunt.

      “Why that kind of bag?” Bree came up from behind him. She had several mushrooms bulging from the bottom of her plastic grocery store variety.

      “It lets the spores fall and reseed.”

      “Oh.” She didn’t wander far from his side.

      Why’d she stick with him? He’d hoped she would have joined Stella’s group of three ladies. He heard laughter and shouts as more found mushrooms, and Darren silently thanked the Lord for small favors. They hadn’t been skunked on his first class.

      “Should I pick these little ones?” Bree asked.

      He stepped closer. They were small white morels yet to mature. “Go ahead. They’ll get picked by somebody else if you leave ’em.”

      “So, people come way out here?”

      He nodded. “A lot of people. I’ve run into campers from downstate, Ohio, even Indiana, up here picking on state land. Gather as much as they can to enjoy or sell.”

      “I’ve had morels before at a golf club dinner but never gave much thought to where they came from.”

      Local ingredients were desirable, and some of the finer restaurants in town paid top dollar to serve local morels. Darren didn’t frequent those places anymore. The places Raleigh had dragged him to. Give him plain cooking at Dean’s Hometown Grille in town any day. But his breakup had chased him from going there. Too many sympathy glances and gossip.

      After Raleigh left him, Darren didn’t go anywhere he might run into her. He’d stayed away from downtown Maple Springs, where she lived with his best friend, Tony. He’d stayed away from Bay Willows and the memories there, too. In fact, he pretty much stayed away from women in general. Too often they tried to turn him into someone he wasn’t, like Raleigh had. She’d told him that he’d never change and was stuck in a rut doing the same thing all the time.

      Maybe that was true, but Darren loved what he did. He’d grown up here, where the summer residents and tourists bloated the population from a mere two thousand to ten times that number, crowding out those who lived here year-round. Some of his friends had tried to emulate them in manner and dress. Tony had been one of them. Never content to embrace where he came from, Tony wanted more. Tony wanted too much and took more than he should have.

      Darren glanced at Bree and spotted a mushroom at her feet. He bent to pluck it. If she wanted to know where morels came from, today’s outing answered it. A person couldn’t put a price tag on finding these. “They come from right here.”

      “I almost stepped on that one.” She laughed and kept walking forward, slow and hunched over. Her hair fell like a curtain, draping her face from view. Her gray slip-ons were dirty at the toes, and her pants had streaks of dirt on them, too. She wore a gold-colored windbreaker that made her easy to spot. That color also made her eyes glow. Like a cat’s eyes.

      Darren wasn’t real fond of cats. Even his parents’ cat drove him nuts with all its hollering for attention, only to run away if he tried to pet it. Women were like cats in that way. He preferred dogs. Dogs didn’t tease.

      “Ooh, here’s another couple.” She picked them properly and foraged on, poking her fingers under dead leaves and raking through the clumps of grass here and there.

      Well, she wasn’t prissy. He’d give her that. He found a few more as well and checked his watch. Twenty minutes to go. He stood and glanced around the woods. Stella was out of sight, as were several others, but he heard lots of chatter. No one lost. That was good. Real good.

      “So, what does a DNR officer do besides take a bunch of us resorters out in the woods to look for food?”

      Resorters. Even that sounded pretentious.

      “As a conservation officer,” he corrected her, “my job is to provide natural resources protection and ensure recreational safety, as well as provide general law enforcement duties.”

      “That sounds like it came right out of a textbook.”

      “It did.” Straight out of his employee handbook.

      She smiled, causing those delectable dimples to reappear. “Do you like what you do?”

      Here we go. The usual female digging. At first, Raleigh had liked the idea of what he did for a living—the whole man-in-uniform-with-a-gun thing. But then the limitations of his pay coupled with his desire to stay put in Northern Michigan had bothered her. Obviously too much. He should have believed her when she’d said she wanted to travel and eventually move away to a more urban area.

      “I love my job.” Darren didn’t want to do anything else but grow within this region and climb the short ladder right here.

      Bree nodded. “That’s good.”

      Curious, he asked her the same. “What about you?”

      “I play the cello.”

      The cello. That was the instrument whose name he couldn’t remember. He stopped walking. “Hey, so that was you practicing before class.”

      Bree grinned. “It was. Along with a woman who plays the violin in a string quartet here. There are practice rooms above the community room. Bay Willows is hoping to start a summer music school. They’ve bought up a couple of vacant cottages near the community building, but I suppose you know that.”

      “I didn’t.” Something like that would only bring more people here. “You’re good.”

      “I know.” There was no bragging in her voice. She’d stated a simple fact. Like any professional acknowledging a skill level.

      “Do you give lessons, then?”

      She spotted another morel and picked it. “Not really. I’m not into teaching little kids how to play, you know? I play with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra—well, I used to.”

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