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She nodded. “Plus room and board.”
“Seven dollars an hour?” He was incredulous. He didn’t think it was possible, but her mouth pinched even tighter. He was enjoying himself now.
“It’s a reasonable wage.”
He let out a laugh. “It’s an allowance, sister.”
She squared her shoulders. His gaze dropped as her nicely shaped breasts thrust up.
“I am not your—” Her lean, long frame weaved as if to fold up on itself once more.
“Whoa.” He caught her elbow, moved beside her and supported her lower back with his other hand. “No law says we can’t sit while we negotiate, is there now?”
Her body tensed beneath his touch. She shook him off, easing herself onto the steps without his help. He saw the fine flush of sweat across that high, proud brow. He patted his pants pocket, hoping for a tissue. One pocket was empty except for a worn wallet with no pictures and little money. In the other pocket, he found a cocktail napkin with a name and telephone number that he’d never call scrawled across it. He shoved the napkin at the woman.
She glanced down at the wrinkled square he thrust at her.
“The Fat Dog Grille” was imprinted in a curve across its top. Beneath it, the name and number were written in a feminine flourish. The woman looked up at Julius. “Lulu? You actually know someone named Lulu?”
He smiled slowly. “And she’s not even the first Lulu I’ve known…nor the last, God willing.”
She snatched the napkin from him, her gaze stern even as she tucked her lip as if biting back a smile. She paled and pressed the square to cheek. She flattened her hand against her stomach.
“You gonna be sick?” His alarm was real.
The woman took a deep breath and sat up yet straighter, which until then, Julius hadn’t thought possible. Her spine stiff and her expression inflexible, she handed him back the napkin. “There is no negotiation, Mr. Holt. The pay is, as stated, seven dollars an hour with room and board.”
Pursing his lips in imitation of the woman, he studied the acreage as if actually considering her offer.
“You put up those shutters?” He glanced away from the bright rectangles quickly, catching her off guard, her expression unschooled. He didn’t want to see what he saw. He knew she didn’t want him to see it either—the flash of desperation. His impulsive smile disappeared. Those gray-green eyes were going to be her undoing. His, too.
He was about to say goodbye when he saw a keen challenge in her gaze.
“Don’t change the subject, Mr. Holt.”
He sat on the steps, spread his knees so his body took up more space. He plucked a piece of grass. “Are you offering me the job, Mrs. O’Reilly?”
She inched to the opposite side of the steps. “No.”
“So, negotiations are still open?”
“No, Mr. Holt. There are no negotiations.” She stood too quickly, grasped the rail. He reached for her arm but she twisted away from him, steadied herself on the rail.
“Liver,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” She swiveled her head toward him; her eyes gradually refocused to find him.
“Eat some liver. It’s full of iron.” He took in her slim frame. Her legs were long as a restless night. “You take a multivitamin?”
She folded her hands at her waist. “Thank you for your concern, Mr. Holt, but I’ll be fine. Thank you for coming by.”
He’d been dismissed, but only his gaze moved to his pickup on the shoulder of the dirt road, then back at the woman with her neon-green sweatshirt and her crazy yellow shutters and her colorless face. “Had a lot of others apply for the job?”
“You’re the first.”
He liked her for not lying. He smiled. She sank onto the steps as if even her slight weight was suddenly too much.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I painted those shutters.”
He kept smiling at her. “It’s a fine yellow.”
Her expression stayed tense except those betraying gray-green eyes softened. “Soon as I get a chance, the door’s going to be bright blue.”
He studied the weathered door, nodding as if he could already see it painted. “You like bright colors?”
“Never much thought about it until I wore chartreuse to my husband’s funeral last month.” She shrugged, looked tired. “Now I can’t seem to get enough of them.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked at him as if she didn’t understand. “About your husband,” he clarified.
“Oh.” She looked out to the road.
Her reaction intrigued him. “You’re not?” Instinctively he knew she wouldn’t lie.
She looked at him. “I wasn’t happy about it, mind you.”
He was silent but not in judgment. He’d also known men who had deserved to die. He didn’t ask what happened. He had no right. Still, if she decided to tell him, he would listen. Everyone deserved that much. He plucked a piece of grass, traced its length and gave her silence should she want to speak.
She watched him from the corner of her eyes, liking the quiet, thoughtful way he touched the grass as if it were priceless.
“He was in bed with another man’s wife,” she said flatly. “The husband found them. They called it a crime of passion. Passion.” She repeated the word and shook her head.
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
