Free The Beekeeper's Daughter (Harlequin Super Romance) by Janice Carter Page B

tried not to imagine how he looked. Annie was averting her eyes.
    “Here,” she said, handing him a large pair of long, woolly socks. “Pull them up over your jeans and the cuffs of the suit. Dad’s boots will probably fit. He has big feet.”
    “Will I be able to run in these?” he asked, once he’d squeezed his feet into the tall rubber boots.
    “Run?” Annie stopped to look at him, her own bee suit halfway up her legs.
    “In case the bees attack.”
    To her credit, she continued pulling up her suit before replying, “Running won’t do you much good, Will. The idea is to prevent anything from happening that would make you want to run.”
    Sweat trickled down his armpits. “Such as?”
    “You’re going to stay behind me and do everything I tell you, for one thing. The bees aren’t dangerous, but they will be angry when we start disturbing their hives. That’s why I have the smoker. Some of them will buzz around you, but as long as there are no gaps in your suit, you’ll be fine.”
    She zipped up her own and shoved her feet into her boots. Then she handed him a pair of gloves before grabbing hers. “You won’t need to put these on until we’re at the beeyard. Don’t forget your hat,” she said as he turned to leave without it.
    Will glanced at the pith helmet-style hat with its curtain of fine mesh. Somehow the outfit didn’t look as glamorous as he remembered. He eyed the metal smoker with its accordion-like bellows. It looked pretty damn small. “Does that produce enough smoke?”
    “Yep. Besides, it’s a sunny day. Most of the worker bees will be out of the hives searching for nectar. The smoke will make any still inside think their hive is on fire. They’ll fill up with honey and fly down to the lower supers. When I give the word, you place this bee excluder on top of the second super from the bottom.” She held up a flat metal grid with a cross-hatched pattern that resembled something that might fit on a barbecue.
    Will couldn’t resist a skeptical look.
    She smiled. “It’ll stop them from coming back up into the top part of the hive to get at the honey.”
    “What about the queen? What’s she doing while all this is going on?”
    “The queen and her brood are in the bottom two supers.”
    He wondered how many bees would decide to stay behind to guard the honey instead of joining the queen. When he glanced at Annie, she was grinning. “Do I look that funny?”
    She shook her head. “Not at all. You look like a real beekeeper. Well,” she added, “a real nervous beekeeper.”
    Exactly, Will was thinking, as they got in the truck and drove out to the colony at the back of the property. Although it was a mere fifteen-minute walk, they’d need the truck to bring back the supers full of honey.
    “I’ve never seen or tasted buckwheat honey, but I read somewhere that it’s very dark,” he said as they drove by the buckwheat field.
    “Dark and bitter. It’s an acquired taste. Most of our customers prefer the pale clover honey, but surprisingly there’s still a good market for the buckwheat.”
    “So the honey we’re collecting today, is that from the buckwheat or what?”
    When she didn’t answer right away, he turned her way. She looked amused.
    “No. This is the spring honey,” she said.
    “Yeah…I get that part.”
    “The buckwheat doesn’t bloom until summer. This honey’s from spring clover or fruit blossoms.”
    “Oh.” His eyes flicked back to the tall green plants for a second. “Right. Should have thought of that. Must be the city boy in me.”
    “Newark can’t be all asphalt and concrete.”
    “The section of the city where I grew up only had a few green areas. I remember some people turned an empty lot into one of those community gardening projects. I spent a lot of time in it. It was a place I could relax in, feel at peace. It got me through a lot of bad times.”
    Her face sobered and Will instantly regretted the comment, realizing that it opened the