Читать книгу Help Wanted: Husband? - Darlene Scalera - Страница 11

“What about land, Mrs. O’Reilly?”

She walked ahead of him, her steps smart as a soldier on dress parade. But her shadow stretched long and lean as pulled taffy. He watched the dark ramble of his own silhouette come up behind her.

“Land, Mr. Holt?” She didn’t break stride nor turn her head.

“Land, Mrs. O’Reilly,” he said to that stiff spine, its knobbiness visible even beneath the baggy sweatshirt. He’d bet her butt was clenched tighter than a miser’s fist. He dropped his gaze, saw the twitch of round curves beneath the soft fabric and couldn’t help but allow a man’s natural admiration for a rear end riper than a California peach in mid-July. He forced his attention back up, let it rest on the jutting bone at the base of her long neck. He put a deliberate saunter into his words. “Seeing as you don’t plan on paying much more than an insult and promising profits that might never exist, land seems to be the one and only sure thing you can afford to be generous with.”

Her clipped steps stopped. Several seconds passed before she turned. He could almost feel her clamping her teeth. He glanced at her clenched butt. God, she was fun.

She faced him, her nose raised and her gaze cooler than a January gale off the Canadian border. “And what would you do with land, Mr. Holt?”

He bent down and plucked a piece of grass as if needing to always touch the ground around him. He didn’t stick it in his mouth to chew on its new end as most would, but held it as before, between his thumb and forefinger, feeling its length. “You can call me Julius, ma’am.”

She stared at those generous lips. His tongue, just the tip of it, flicked against their fullness, took a taste and then was gone. No, I can’t, Mr. Holt. She waited silently for his answer, too aware of his size and strength and heavy, lazy sensuality.

He looked to the orchards leading to the lower fallow fields, the horizon uncluttered by the housing developments springing up outside the town quicker than goosegrass. His heavy gaze came back to her. His lips puckered and parted as if kissing the new spring air. “I’d till it. Turn it until it was soft and moist and ready.” He thought of the home he’d never found. He stared at the straight-backed woman, let his voice become thick with pleasure. “Then I’d take off my clothes and roll across its width just to feel its sweet yield.” He leaned in. “Its sweet yield.”

A shiver moved up her spine, the sensation distressing in its pleasantness. She braced her shoulders, held herself even more erect. “Like a hog, Mr. Holt?” Her words were precise and pointed.

His full, finely shaped lips curved into a luring smile. His voice was languid. “Like a man in love, Mrs. O’Reilly.”

Oh, those black gypsy curls. Those blue eyes where the devil lived. The wonder of that tender touch as his fingers met a common blade of grass. She remembered her late husband—and her vow never to be fooled again by false charm and faithless promises. Now a new moon had barely shone and already temptation had come in the form of Julius Holt. She studied the man before her, the muscled limbs, the powerful, dark sensuality of his face, the ease of his stance that spoke of a man secure in his ability to find and give pleasure. Physically he was twice the man as her deceased husband, and she didn’t doubt twice the lover, for all her dead husband’s pride in his prowess.

Oh yes, Julius Holt, with his leisurely smiles and comfortable sexuality, was the epitome of the type of man she’d vowed never to let get the best of her again—a rambling smooth-talker who made a woman go soft just meeting his smile. Could she have asked for a more perfect reminder of her own past foolishness? Her lips lifted in a tight curl. She could have laughed out loud. She’d never let him know it, but Julius Holt was exactly what she needed.

“I’ll give you a stake of land, Mr. Holt—” she saw the surprise in his eyes “—if you’re here at the harvest’s end.”

The surprise turned to amusement. “Is that a challenge, Mrs. O’Reilly?”

Her gaze was as steady as his. “I imagine it will be for you, Mr. Holt.” Folding her hands at her waist, she spun and marched toward the barns. His low, pleased chuckle followed her. She tensed every muscle. He reached to pull the brim of his cap low in a satisfying tug and settled for another low roll of amusement, instead, as he took three strides and was beside the woman.

“Breakfast will be at five.”

Damn, he hated farmers’ hours.

“Lunch at noon. Dinner at five-fifteen.” She kept her eyes straight ahead, her steps crisp.

“Not five-sixteen?” His tone was innocent. Her gaze cut to him. He gave her a wink. She snapped her head forward.

“You are to keep your quarters clean—including the bathroom.”

“What time’s inspection?”

She didn’t even bother to look at him this time.

“You may use the washer and dryer on Sundays.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier if I just threw my skivvies in with your delicates?”

The woman halted, expressed a breath as she turned to him. “Do you hope to last here until the harvest’s end, Mr. Holt?”

Hope. There it was again. The call that’d brought him here. He looked at the woman before him. Pure foolishness.

“This isn’t going to work,” Lorna decided before he answered. He was about to agree when a flash of soft defeat brought a humanness to her features.

Behind him, a woman’s voice deep and hard as a man’s called, “Lorna?”

Another voice, a high treble but equally adamant, blended with the first. “Lorna, dear?”

Lorna. Julius looked at the woman who’d fired him faster than she’d hired him. Her brow puckered as she expressed another long breath through her fine-cut nostrils. So that was her given name. Lorna. It fit her—the sound of it hard and soft like the woman herself.

“I told you she’d be here,” the deeper voice flatly pronounced.

“Why, of course, she’d be here. Where else would she be on a glorious day like today but outside in the fine air?” the treble retorted.

“You said she’d probably gone to town.”

“And you said she was in need of company. However—” the light voice raised on a speculative note “—it seems we were both wrong.”

Julius turned to see two elderly ladies crossing the grass. The smaller one wore a crocheted cape over a lace-collared dress and took dainty steps in low heels. The other woman wore a trench coat. Knit pants and flat loafers were revealed beneath the coat’s hem.

“Aunt Eve. Aunt Birdy.” Lorna welcomed the women. Julius heard the strain in her voice. “What a surprise.”

The women drew near. The taller one in the trench coat with a helmet of steel-gray hair stared at Julius with open disapproval. “I can’t even imagine.”

The smaller woman, her features crinkling with good nature, stepped forward and extended her hand. “How do you do, young man?”

He shook her hand. “How do you do, ma’am.”

Tipping her head back, the woman took in the length of him, her eyes the same gray-green as Lorna’s but sparkling. “I’m so glad our Lorna is already receiving gentlemen callers. The early bird gets the worm, you know.” Her smile went sly.

Julius gave her a wink.

“Aunt Birdy,” Lorna protested.

“Don’t be a ninny, Bernadette,” the other woman said. “Lorna’s louse of a husband hasn’t even been in the ground for a full season.”

The tiny woman smiled at Julius, holding his hand in both of hers, but she spoke to the one Lorna called Aunt Eve. “It’s been over a month, sister.”

“A rat’s ass. The date was—”

“Aunties.” Lorna stepped forward, disentangling Birdy’s hands from Julius. “Mr. Holt is no gentleman—”

“Indeed,” Eve intoned.

“He’s…” She glanced at him and straightened her shoulders. “He’s my new foreman.”

Julius looked at her with as much surprise as the aunts.

“He ran his family’s farm in Oklahoma,” Lorna continued, “and has also worked at establishments along both coasts as well as several in between. He has a wealth of experience.”

Birdy beamed up at him. Eve glared. He smiled, gave her a wink, too.

“I was just showing Mr. Holt his quarters.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lorna,” Eve snapped. “Your husband already threw away enough of your money—”

“God save his soul,” Birdy interjected.

Eve snorted. “Too late for that. It’s bad enough your husband squandered as much of your trust fund as possible. Now you’re trying to finish the job by throwing the rest away on this sinking ship—”

“You should hear what they’re saying in town, dear.” Birdy’s expression softened with sympathy. “It’s quite upsetting.”

“I know what they’re saying in town. That I’ve gone off the deep end. ‘Loony Lorna.’ ‘Lorna the Loon.”’

Birdy glanced at her sister, then back at her niece, the distress in her eyes confirming Lorna’s claims. Julius saw Lorna’s smile stiffen. Up until that moment, he might even have agreed with the town’s assessment. But, until that moment, he’d never seen above that tense smile, pain so deep in those vulnerable gray-green eyes. Until that moment, he’d also never been a foreman before. Foreman. Even at seven an hour, he liked the sound of it.

“Actually, ladies,” he said, “Mrs. O’Reilly’s—”

“Lord, not that name.” Eve turned to Lorna. “I thought you were going to go back to using the family name?”

Lorna said nothing. She was watching Julius, waiting to see what he was about to say.

“Mrs. O’Reilly’s decision,” Julius began again, “to run this farm was a wise investment.”

Eve snorted. Birdy looked at Julius with her bright eyes. He squatted down to the new grass, pressed it to the ground. “Springs back up.” He looked at the women. “Rich, moist, class-one soil. Fed first by the waters that left us that creek that splits the land, that pond in the lower field. Good irrigation sources. A little time, hard work and innovative planting…” He straightened to his remarkable height and released his killer smile. “In five years, our yields will be the envy of every other farmer around.”

“Humph,” Eve huffed. “The way farmers around here are trying to sell out to contractors, there won’t be any left in five years.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’ll be here. Now, if it’s all right with you, Mrs. O’Reilly, and if you ladies will excuse me—” Julius tipped his absent cap “—I’ll get started inspecting the equipment.”

The women watched him as he headed to the buildings.

“I bet you could play tiddlywinks on that chassis,” Birdy observed.

“Bernadette,” Eve scolded as Lorna genuinely grinned for the first time in what seemed a long spell.

Eve turned to her niece. “Lorna, don’t you pay no mind what the gossips say in town. The entire incident was more excitement than most of these chattering fools around here will see in a lifetime.”

“I’m glad I’ve done the community a service then.”

“Now, there’s no need for a sharp tongue. And not everyone thinks you’re off your trolley, but how can others even express their concern when you’re hiding out here?”

“I’m not hiding out here.”

“Of course you are,” Eve insisted. “I don’t care how many gaudy outfits you wear as if spitting at any offers of sympathy. And land almighty, child, what were you thinking with those shutters?”

“I don’t want sympathy,” Lorna said quietly.

Eve eyed her niece. “‘The meek shall inherit the earth,’ Lorna. And you should make an appointment with Doc Stevenson, have him check you for color blindness if we can get you back into town.”

“I have no intention of staying out of town. In fact, I’m driving in tomorrow for groceries and a few other things.”

“Thatta girl,” Birdy urged. “You walk down Main Street, head high, strutting your stuff. Who cares what they say? What happened wasn’t your fault.”

Lorna’s grin was long gone. “Yes, it was, Aunt Birdy.”

“Nonsense. You were the victim in this entire debacle.”

Lorna cringed. “I let myself be a victim.”

“Enough babbling.” Eve waved her hand. “The bottom line is this has gone far enough. It’s time for you to come home.”

Lorna turned to her aunt. Past Eve rose the white house, once so plain and unadorned, but now distinct. Not far were the sturdy trees that would hang heavy with fruit at summer’s end. She had land. She rested her hand on her abdomen. She had life.

And, now thanks to her impulsive announcement, she also had an employee—an irritating, provoking, wisecracking charmer who probably wouldn’t stay any longer than to earn enough for a night of tall drinks and easy women. Yet, as of three minutes ago, she’d had someone on her side for the first time since she decided to live her life by her rules—not her family’s.

She stretched her arms out as if to embrace all around her. “I am home, Aunties.” For the first time, the words were real.

Eve threw up her hands. “Headstrong. Just like your father.”

Lorna laid a hand on her aunt’s arm. “Just like my father’s sister.”

Birdy agreed with an appreciative laugh. Eve scowled at both of them.

“Come.” Lorna linked her arms through theirs. “Let me fix you a cup of tea and you can tell me what other news there is besides my mental instability.”

Eve tsked with disapproval, but she watched her niece with worry.

Lorna squeezed her arm. “Don’t fret, Aunt Eve. I’m fine.”

“We can’t help ourselves, Lorna. You’re our little girl,” Birdy appealed. “We’re scared for you.”

She pulled her other aunt close. “I’m scared too, Aunt Birdy. But for the first time in a long time, I feel…” Lorna tipped her head back, inhaled. “I feel like I’m breathing. Breathing deep.”

Birdy looked at Lorna with bright eyes.

Aunt Eve snorted. “Foolishness. Farming. You’re not a farmer.”

“Truth is, Aunt Eve, I’m not sure who or what I am.” Lorna held on tight to her aunts’ arms. “Until about six months ago, I spent my whole life doing what one man said, hoping to please him. The next six months I spent trying to please another. And I never had an ounce of luck with either. You know why?” She stopped. Her aunts looked at each other, then warily at their niece. Lorna smiled, understanding even though no one else did. “I finally realized I can’t please anyone else if I’m not pleased with myself.”

“This?” Eve gestured impatiently. “This makes you happy?”

Lorna surveyed the land she was already in love with. She nodded, smiling. “Yes. This.”

“Your father loves you, Lorna,” Birdy put forth. “It’s just that your mother…” Sadness dimmed her eyes.

“I know.” Lorna squeezed her aunt’s arm. “I know he loves me in his way, but I also know he’s never gotten over losing his wife. And hard as I’ve tried, there’s nothing I can seem to do to make it up to him.”

“Well, for starters, you could’ve listened to him when he told you your late husband was after your money,” Eve suggested. “Would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

“I know my marriage was a mistake.”

“Hell’s bells, the whole county knows that.”

“But I don’t regret it. It was that mistake that got me here.”

“Welcome to Paradise,” Eve pronounced.

“Hush. Let the child be.” Birdy’s tone was so uncustomarily stern even Lorna looked at her with surprise.

Birdy smiled at her niece. “Let’s go have tea. I’ll tell you all about the garden club’s election. Myrtle Griffin declared it a coup.”

“Myrtle Griffin wouldn’t know a coup if it jumped up and bit her in her girdled rear end,” Eve declared.

“She called it a ‘coup.”’ Birdy stood her ground. “And Pauline Van Horn said it was an abomination, an affront to the very principles on which the club was founded.”

“Oh no. Sounds like she’s throwing her hat in the ring for town clerk again next year. If the woman spent less time posturing and more time tending her dahlias, she wouldn’t have to blame the failure of her garden on everything from the European earwig to the ozone layer.”

“Dianthus,” Birdy corrected. “She has trouble each season with her dianthus.”

“Dahlias,” Eve insisted.

Lorna smiled, the sound of the Aunties’ incessant quarrels as familiar and comforting as a mother’s kiss.

It was heading toward the day’s darkening hour when the aunts said their goodbyes, Eve adding admonishments and Birdy shiny eyed, looking at Lorna with silent entreaty. Lorna kissed them both, promising to see them soon, and hurried back to the house. She’d find her new employee after she figured out what she would do about supper. Foreman. What had possessed her? He’d want a raise now before he did a day’s work. Well, he’d just have to be satisfied with the title.

She opened the yellowed refrigerator. Maybe if she cooked him a great meal, he’d forget about wages. But what could she cook him? She’d taken nothing out, not expecting to have to feed anyone except herself and her appetite tending toward the odd lately. She looked in the small freezer. There was a steak—not T-bone but not chuck either. She could add some fried onions, perhaps a potato or two if they hadn’t gone and sprouted in the pantry closet bin. And there was that bread-making machine she’d bought on sale right after her elopement. Six weeks later she’d been a widow. Never even had time to get the machine out of the box.

She bent down to the bottom cupboard and found the bread maker behind the stacked bowls and glass casserole dishes. She slid it out, took it from the box and set it on the speckled counter. It was so white in this old kitchen. She stepped back. She should rough up those cupboards, paint them cantaloupe. She could already picture the faux wood doors gone, their dark surfaces replaced with an orange good enough to eat. She lay her palms soft to her stomach. Her late husband had been a cad, and she’d most definitely been an even bigger fool, so starved to hear the words “I love you,” she believed the first man who’d uttered them. Yet, as she’d told her aunts, her mistakes had brought her here. Now she just had to remember the lessons she’d learned, the vows she’d made. She moved back to the counter to start supper. One glance at Julius Holt with his cocksure grin and easy laughter in his eyes and she’d remember just fine.

THE BACK OF THE HOUSE SAGGED and wood showed bare where a piece of siding had ripped off and never been replaced. Julius stomped up the stairs, noting with disgust the second and third ones were loose. Enough work around this sorry place for ten men. But as he reached the back door, he smelled a bakery. Through the door’s window, he saw Lorna standing at the stove, her stern gaze turned to the sound of his heavy steps. Still surprise flashed in her eyes, as if she hadn’t expected him. He understood. He was just as surprised to find himself still here. With a queenly wave, she motioned him to come in.

He opened the door into a kitchen that smelled of sweet heaven, the aroma of baking bread as thick as hay ready for cutting. He stood at the entrance on a brightly woven square of rug that he knew had to be Lorna’s touch.

“Your company’s gone?” He noted the linoleum was lifting in one corner.

She nodded and glanced at the clock over the refrigerator. “Supper’s at five-fifteen. You’re early.” There was no surprise in her eyes this time. Only a scolding in her voice that made him smile. She turned her narrow back to his grin. She was a prickly one, all right. Man could hurt himself on all those sharp bones and hard lengths.

“So you meant it when you said I was the new foreman?”

“I always say what I mean, Mr. Holt,” she told him without turning around.

“So that’s the secret of your charm?”

She moved briskly from the stove to the sink, her profile unsmiling. “Might be a good time to bring your things into where you’ll be staying. Did you see the trailer not far from the barns? It’s open, been aired out. The water’s turned on—”

“Hold up there. I don’t remember exactly taking the job.” His investigation had revealed the farm was in a sorrier state than he’d thought—broken equipment, a rusting tractor, roofs that looked like they leaked, apple boxes so old the pine was splintering away from the nails. It’d be backbreaking hard work getting this place up and running again with no help except for a woman with a hard spine and soft gray-green eyes who thought she could become a farmer by sitting in her front parlor reading.

Lorna turned on the water. “It was my impression we came to an agreement, Mr. Holt.”

“It was my impression you hired me, then fired me faster than rabbits reproduce.”

“Then I hired you again.” Her voice was calm as a country morning, but she was scrubbing her hands too hard, too long.

“This place is in pretty sad shape.”

She turned off the water, shook out a towel, swiped at the water splatters on the sink’s edge. “Are you afraid of hard work, Mr. Holt?”

“No, ma’am. Work hard, play hard. That’s my belief. Keeps life interesting.” It also kept a person from thinking far into the night, remembering things better off buried.

She twisted the towel. “All right, seven thirty-five an hour.”

“Ten dollars.”

She wrung the towel. “Seven-fifty.”

“Eight.”

“Seventy seventy-five but not a cent more, and be sure you’ll earn every penny of it.”

“Plus the bonus at the season’s end,” he reminded.

She slapped the towel onto the counter. He smiled.

“Plus the bonus at the season’s end. That’s my final offer, Mr. Holt.” She flung up the lid of a bulky-shaped, bright white appliance. “If you prefer to pursue opportunities elsewhere, that, of course, is your prerogative.” She lifted out a loaf of perfect bread, brown, smooth crowned, the smell alone enough to make a man give thanks. She set it on a wire rack. “I wish you good luck and Godspeed.”

That loaf of bread. His grandmother had made bread like that. And pies. Oh Lord, his grandma’s pies. He could still see her, standing in a kitchen as old and dingy as this, her hard-knuckled hands cutting the lard into the flour, giving the bowl a quarter turn, cutting straight in again until the dough formed into soft crumbs. In late spring, there’d be rhubarb. Blueberry and peach would follow in the summer; apple and squash in the fall. His mother had been warned early in her marriage to stay out of her mother-in-law’s kitchen, which suited her just fine since she had never been one much for cooking anyway. When they moved out West, whenever his father had mentioned pies, his mother had always declared she’d go to her grave without ever making a pie. She had, too. After his father had died, she’d pretty much stopped cooking altogether.

“Do you make pies?”

“This isn’t a diner, Mr. Holt.”

He smiled, the smell of the fresh bread sweet as a woman. He looked at Lorna, drawn up tight beneath her loose clothes. Even her high-and-mighty gaze couldn’t take away the pleasure of that fresh bread. He breathed in deeply.

She paused a moment before turning back to the counter. “I’ll get you clean sheets after supper…if you’re staying.”

Out the window the sun was making its way home. He smelled the bread, could feel those clean, fresh sheets. He would stay tonight. What he would do tomorrow, he’d decide, as always, when tomorrow came. “I’ll stay.” He turned to go.

“Did you mean what you said earlier?”

He looked at her over his shoulder.

“About the soil being rich, and our yields being the envy of other farmers? Or were you just saying that for the Aunties’ benefit?”

Her expression stayed neutral, but beneath the careful tone of her voice, he heard the low leavening of hope. He remembered the hurt in her eyes earlier when she talked of the gossip about her. Yes, he’d said those things then for her aunts’ benefit, but for her benefit also. Now he saw she needed to believe. And maybe, just maybe, he needed to believe a little, too. For both their benefits—hers and his—he said, “Seeds are no more than possibilities, Mrs. O’Reilly. Plant them, and anything is possible.”

He opened the door. She cleared her throat. He glanced back once more.

“Thank you.” The gratitude was so quiet and right in her voice, she turned away to the counter.

“You’re welcome,” he replied, his voice without overtones. He was still shaking his head when he reached his truck. A raise and a thank-you. Beneath that buttoned-up, tight-lipped exterior, the widow wasn’t going soft around the edges on him, was she?

“Naw,” he told the listening land. It’d take a lot more than an extra seventy-five cents an hour and a weak moment to prove the widow wasn’t wound tighter than a fisherman’s favorite reel. He gave a chuckle as he gathered his duffel bag. He left his sleeping bag stored in the narrow space behind the front seat. Tonight he’d have clean sheets, the thought alone bringing him enjoyment.

He started back across the yard. He couldn’t say what tomorrow would bring, never could, but tonight he’d have a roof over his head, smooth sheets, a belly full of warm, fresh bread…and a promise of land. He looked at the fields’ gentle curves, the trees waiting for new growth, the light coloring the sky. All was possibility.

No, he couldn’t say what tomorrow would bring but, for tonight, he was here in Hope.