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He saw her eyes confused and vulnerable and, without a doubt, a man’s undoing.
He shifted on the step, his hand reaching to tug at the bill of his baseball cap before he remembered he’d taken it off in the truck. He liked to face a new situation bareheaded, barefaced, without his eyes shaded, signaling secrets. Not that he wasn’t like everyone else with one or two hidden truths. He couldn’t help wondering what mysteries the woman beside him concealed?
He shifted again. The woman stared at the dirt road as if waiting for an answer to come walking down its dusty length. The silence stretched out.
“The woman with your husband?” He broke the silence.
She turned to him, her expression sharp.
“Her name wasn’t Lulu, was it?”
Like a traitor, one corner of her mouth crept up, then the other followed. He knew she didn’t want to but she smiled, everything about her softening, and he knew her laughter would sound pretty to a man’s ears. Her eyes gentled again, as if grateful. She brushed her hand across her crown, although not one hair dared stray from the ponytail low on her neck. He had to leave. A vulnerable widow with shrimp-pink lips and gray-green eyes that turned warm when she smiled. Seven dollars an hour. He’d been wrong about those shutters or he would have heeded their warning as soon as he saw that neon yellow. CAUTION.
The smile and the softness left the woman as abruptly as they came. She once more was as brittle and thin as the limbs reaching in the fields. “It doesn’t much matter what her name was. What’s done is done.” The widow stood, brushing at nothing on the front of her sweatshirt. Her hand rested on her stomach. “Seven dollars an hour and room and board is what I’m offering.”
Julius leaned back, on his elbows, settling in to the stairs. He looked around, noting again the neglect. “You just bought this place?”
“My husband inherited it from his aunt. She never had any children, and he was the only son of her sister lost to cancer a few years back. My husband never knew his father. His aunt was all the family he had left, and it was her dying wish he have the farm. As soon as he heard the news, he hightailed it up from New Orleans, the handsomest man ever to set foot in Hope. Charming, too, with his Bourbon Street drawl and his sweet ‘ma chère.’ He was all ready to unload the land and reap the rewards until he learned the property was zoned farmland and couldn’t be sold to commercial developers. Kind of narrowed the field of prospective buyers to zero. He put the land up for sale anyway, and, in the meantime, married me for my family’s money and influence.”
It was the way she recited the words without expression that let Julius know she’d been wounded.
“Two days after his death, I took the farm off the market.”
“You’re a farmer, Mrs. O’Reilly?”
“Barely know the first thing about it.”
He chuckled. She just might be crazy.
“Until a short time ago, I never did anything except what was expected of me.”
He considered trying to make up his mind if she was nuts.
As if reading his thoughts, she said, “They all think I went around the bend from the shock of my husband’s death.” She looked out to the gray, sturdy trees that had first drawn his eye. “But this place is mine…my orchards, my fields, my land to dream on.”
He saw the same strength in her expression as he’d seen in those thick-trunked trees and he understood. The woman wasn’t crazy. She just wanted her own small square of the world where no one told you what to do or the right way to live your life. A place of your own. Home. He’d dreamed the same dream once, but in all his travels and in all this time, he’d never found it. Then he’d stopped looking. Just kept moving.
“There’ll be a bonus though.” Yes, she thought—a bonus, a perk. “At the year’s end, after the first harvest, when the place is up and running—a percentage of the profits.”
Julius looked around the run-down spread. “First, you have to produce profits. A percentage of nothing is nothing.”
“There’ll be profits, Mr. Holt.” Such a strong, determined set to those narrow shoulders.
He pushed at his forehead, remembered his cap back on the seat of his truck and missed it once more. “You never farmed?”
“No.” She didn’t even try to hedge the truth. He again admired that. “But I’m reading everything I can get my hands on.”
“Books?”
She straightened taller. “It’s a beginning, Mr. Holt.”
A beginning he thought, noting the house was built on a slight rise not too far from the road, giving a good view of the property all around. It was a pretty spot.
“So, you’re a farmer, Mr. Holt?”
“Among other things,” he said, appreciating the land’s rise and fall.
“What other things would that be?”
“Let’s see, I’ve been a sign painter, a laborer, an amusement park ride operator. I drove a truck up North, laid pipe in the South, worked the docks along the Mississippi.” His crazy-quilt life spread out before him like the land circling him. “But mainly I’ve worked fields on both coasts and many in between. Apples and cherries in Washington, cotton and corn in Arkansas, peaches and peanuts in Georgia, potatoes in Maine.”
“My, you do get around.”
He eyed her, looking for mockery, but found none.
She ignored his sharp study. “Myself, I’ve never been much farther than the county line…except for school and summers when my father let the Aunties take me to the sea.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Do I look like a kidder, Mr. Holt?” Her smile this time was slim and self-deprecating.
“Never been no place? Why not?”
“Never had the desire, I suppose.” She shrugged. “This is home.”
The way she said it made something inside Julius twist inside out.
“Thank you for coming by, Mr. Holt.”
He didn’t rise from his relaxed pose on the steps. “A percentage of the profits after the first harvest? Is that all you’re offering?”
She tipped her head up, a slight flare to her nostrils. “Exactly what do you mean, Mr. Holt?”
He looked around once more. “What about land?” The words surprised him.
She considered him. A broad, big-shouldered man who radiated power but moved with a surprising grace. His stare was too bold, his smile too easy, but his arms were strong and sturdy, and his wide, work-worn hands held a single blade of grass as delicately as if it were life itself.
“No offense, Mr. Holt, but you don’t seem like a man who would still be here at the year’s end.”
The smile moved into his eyes now. “No offense taken, Mrs. O’Reilly. In fact, you’re probably more right than wrong.”
“Then why would you want land?”
He looked around once more—the ramshackle buildings, the peeling paint. “There’s also a chance you could be wrong, Mrs. O’Reilly.”
Lorna flattened her hand against her abdomen. Beneath the bulky sweatshirt, her stomach curved in. But it wouldn’t be long before it swelled, stretched even beyond the loose fit of her sweatshirt. The ad had run five weeks. This was the first response she’d gotten. The men, even the untrained, unskilled ones, made more loading skids in her father’s mill than she could pay. Maybe she was as crazy as they all said. She remembered the medal hanging around the man’s neck, looked for it now. Saint Nicholas. Patron saint of travelers. Children. Old maids.
He touched the gold circle resting at the base of his throat. She stared at those fingers, that flesh, mesmerized, then snapped her gaze up. She should’ve been born a man.
“Do you want to see the workers’ quarters?”
His mouth lazily curled. Every misgiving rose within Lorna once more. “Are you offering me the job, Mrs. O’Reilly?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” She was hard and straight and stern all over again. “Do you want it?”
His gaze wandered the land, then came back to wrap around her, that easy smile turning into a low roll of laughter. His blue eyes sparkled like temptation itself.
“I haven’t decided yet, Mrs. O’Reilly.”
Chapter Two
“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.”