Beneath These Fields

by Ward Maia

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  By Ward Maia

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Beneath These Fields

  By Ward Maia

  Sometimes true worth is well hidden.

  Ellis Campos is a successful divorce lawyer with little to no time for a personal life. His predictable routine is disrupted when he inherits a coffee farm from an estranged aunt. There’s no room in his life for all the complications that come with managing a farm in another state. But his plans to quickly sell it and go back to the big city fall apart when he’s manipulated into spending a week on the estate.

  Adding to the unexpected surprises, he meets Rudá, a native Brazilian who works on the farm, and while teaching him about his aunt’s home and family, also tempts Ellis like no one ever has.

  He doesn’t expect his life to change in such a short time, but as he finds value and comfort in the farm’s routine, Ellis quickly realizes that, like the land itself, Rudá has secrets that could send him running back to Rio.

  World of Love: Stories of romance that span every corner of the globe.

  Chapter 1

  THE FEW people gathered in front of the arrivals gate could hardly qualify as a crowd. But after seemingly endless hours stuck inside a plane and more connections than Ellis would care to count, the bodies between him and his goal might as well be an angry mob closing in on him. He sighed and looked out to the back of the crowd to make sure the man was still standing there.

  Yep. He was. All the way at the back, holding a piece of paper that read “Ellis Campos.”

  Not that he had expected an ostentatious greeting, but maybe he could make an effort to help Ellis?

  He raised his hand and waved tentatively at the man, who in return just lifted his head—probably to get a better look at him—but stayed rooted to the spot.

  Well, okay then.

  Pulling his suitcase and muttering what seemed to be an ungodly amount of “excuse me” and “sorry,” he managed to make his way to the wall the stranger was currently helping keep up and extended his hand to greet him.

  “Hi, I’m Ellis,” he said, hoping that this was the man who he had exchanged emails with to discuss his flight information and pickup.

  The man—who Ellis was sure sported the world’s thickest mustache—looked him up and down and shook his hand, nodding once. Then he reached around for Ellis’s suitcase and unceremoniously pulled it toward the double glass doors leading to the outside world.

  “Um….” Ellis stared after the middle-aged man, momentarily struck speechless. As the glass doors parted for his suitcase to exit—without him—Ellis recovered and hurried after the man. “Excuse me. Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  The man/mustache halted just outside the door, blocking it, muttering something unintelligible before he resumed his walk. Ellis sighed.

  The sound barrier created by his mustache kept him from hearing what the man said, making it seem as if he were speaking in a foreign language.

  Well, damn.

  He pulled out his phone and sent a quick message to his assistant to let him know Ellis had arrived and was still alive.

  After walking all of three steps out of the air-conditioned airport, his entire shirt felt like it was drenched in sweat. The air was hot and humid, making the damp fabric cling to his body. He brushed the strands of hair hanging over his forehead impatiently aside. He hadn’t had the time to get a haircut before jumping on the plane.

  A decision he was quickly regretting.

  Mr. Mustache led him to a small parking lot, zigzagged unnecessarily through cars until he reached a black pickup and unlocked it, then loaded Ellis’s suitcase in the back.

  Ellis tapped Mr. Mustache on the shoulder before he could get in the car. The man turned and stared at him impassively. His face was blank and gave nothing away. Ellis cleared his throat nervously and opened his mouth to speak.

  The glaring sun reflecting off his phone screen briefly blinded Ellis, and he fumbled with it, nearly dropping it. Unnerved by the unwavering attention Mr. Mustache was giving him, Ellis cursed under his breath and made a clumsy grabbing motion to keep his phone from shattering on the ground.

  “Um, sorry. It was a long flight.” He looked up at the man who was still standing there, just looking at him. “So, um, I didn’t catch your name.”

  Mr. Mustache just stood there, silently blinking at Ellis.

  “It’s because I’m not from around here, isn’t it?” Ellis asked, the long day of traveling catching up to him and making him feel every single one of his thirty-one years of age.

  God, he needed a smoke. Maybe a huge fruity cocktail. Actually, considering the past few days, a bottle might be more appropriate. Did they even make cocktail bottles?

  Mr. Mustache clapped him on the shoulder twice firmly, squeezing gently before releasing and nodding toward the car, saying something Ellis had no hope of understanding. Mostly because of the very effective sound barrier created by the ’80s-inspired facial hair, which also impeded lip reading. Also because exhaustion made his brain fuzzy.

  Not that being proficient in lip reading would’ve made a difference.

  “Just… if you’re taking me somewhere remote where no one will hear me scream to eviscerate me, just please, make it painless,” Ellis mumbled, collapsing onto the car seat and letting his head fall back.

  Mr. Mustache ignored him and started the car, then pulled out of the parking lot smoothly. He turned on the car’s air conditioner, and a cloud of dust and dead insect wings exploded in Ellis’s face, making him cough and gag. And swallow said insect wings.

  He turned, glaring at Mr. Mustache, who just kept on driving without a care in the world. But Ellis swore he saw the left corner of his mustache quirk up in amusement.

  As the cloud of dust and insect limbs settled around them, the stuffy air inside the car started to cool, and Ellis settled back in his seat with a sigh.

  So maybe the man-shaped mustache wasn’t that bad. He held on to that thought for all of five seconds, until Mr. Mustache turned on the radio.

  It spewed a god-awful music that seemed to be a cross between country and pop Ellis used to hear back in university.

  The result was less than appealing, and he wasn’t a fan.

  Ignoring what apparently passed for music in this place, Ellis turned his face away from the driver.

  The parking lot turned into a semibusy street as they exited the airport, and Ellis looked out the window, barely registering the buildings or the people walking about.

  He thought back to two days ago, when he’d received the call that threw a wrench in his perfectly ordered life.

  Surprises were not an everyday occurrence for him. As such, he’d come to dislike them.

  There were the expected surprises, like the meeting he was in when he got the phone call, where Mr. da Silva—with the pen poised to sign his divorce papers—demanded his soon-to-be ex-wife include her vintage salt and pepper shakers in the settlement, claiming they held sentimental value.

  Mrs. da Silva—Ellis’s client, twenty years her soon-to-be ex-husband’s senior and the owner of a short fuse—had unsurprisingly screec
hed that the salt and pepper shakers in question were given to her by her grandmother. Then promptly launched herself on Mr. da Silva, landing on the other side of the conference table in a tangle of limbs and cursing the day she laid eyes on him.

  To his credit, Mr. da Silva just covered his head and took the blows, yelling that he was going to sue her for all she was worth.

  Including the damn shakers.

  Because of their less than amicable seven-month-long divorce—due to Mrs. da Silva having walked in on her husband in a very compromising position with their next-door neighbor’s sister—surprises like that, Ellis could anticipate.

  The one he got when his assistant told him he had an out-of-state call on line two—as Mr. da Silva’s attorney tried to pull Ellis’s client off hers—was not of the expected kind.

  After making sure no murders were going to be committed in conference room three, Ellis extricated himself from the meeting and made his way to his office, followed closely by his overly curious assistant.

  He pressed the blinking light on his phone and listened to the heavily accented voice on the other side tell him his aunt, Meredith Campos, was dead.

  Ellis had never met his aunt. She left when he was four years old and never contacted him or any other family members.

  He knew she went to live somewhere else in order to escape her responsibilities. At least that’s what he’d been told on the one occasion the topic of Meredith Campos came up, more than a decade ago.

  Learning that she passed away didn’t make him exactly sad. She was a distant family member who he couldn’t even recall.

  Learning, however, that she left him her coffee farm in her will did stir up feelings.

  Unwanted and confused feelings.

  He sat there, stunned speechless as her lawyer rattled off detailed descriptions of the farm, where it was located and its size. Then he said Ellis had to come down to oversee the transfer of the estate and get up to date with everything coffee-farm related.

  “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” Ellis said, having been stunned out of his silence.

  “You will have to come down here, Mr. Campos, so you can sign the deed and so that the Blue Feathers Coffee Farm can be fully transferred to your name,” the man on the other side, Fran-something, said with a thick accent.

  “‘Down here’? Where is ‘down here’?” Ellis’s brain tried to catch up with the conversation.

  There was a beat of silence where all Ellis could hear was his own blood pumping through his ears. He was sure the man mentioned where said coffee farm was; he just hadn’t really paid attention to anything after he heard the words “left you her farm in her will.”

  “Minas Gerais, Mr. Campos. The Blue Feathers Coffee Farm is in the southeast of Brazil,” Mr. Fran-something said in a slow and measured voice.

  Minas Gerais wasn’t that far away. But it was still away. So that was where his aunt escaped to. The same state his grandmother’s side of the family was from.

  And so it was that two days, five connections, and too many hours on a plane later—because his assistant apparently had a twisted sense of humor and was obviously trying to teach him humility by making him suffer through endless and unnecessary connections—Ellis was on his way, alongside a man-shaped mustache, to the strangely named coffee farm that was now, for some unknown reason, all his.

  Buildings and people turned into green fields of something Ellis was too tired to identify, and the monotony of the world passing outside the car’s window lulled him to sleep.

  Chapter 2

  ELLIS WOKE up with the world shaking. “Wha—” he started to say, but a muffled sound cut him off.

  He turned his head, looking for what had woken him, and saw Mr. Mustache climbing out of the car. Ellis rubbed his face and was relieved to find he hadn’t drooled all over himself.

  That’s one thing, at least.

  Falling asleep wasn’t part of the plan, but his overtired mind that somehow squeezed a week’s worth of work into two days had obviously thought otherwise.

  He fumbled with the door handle and managed to not fall flat on his face when jumping the ridiculous distance between the car’s footrest and the ground. Mr. Mustache mumbled something and pointed to somewhere in front of the car while circling around to grab Ellis’s suitcase from the back seat.

  Ellis turned his attention to where Mr. Mustache had pointed and frowned. They were now standing at the foot of a small hill, with a path of cobbled stones that led forward. And all he could see at the top of the hill were trees and maybe a hint of white walls.

  When Mr. Mustache passed him, carrying his suitcase, Ellis took the few steps that separated them and tried to take it back. The stones were uneven, and Ellis brought a lot of things, not really sure what to pack when coming to claim an inheritance left by an estranged aunt in the land of one’s forefathers—well, foregrandmother, in his case.

  “That’s not necessary. I’ll carry it.” He tried to be polite and firm at the same time, reaching out for the handle, offering a strained smile. Mr. Mustache shook his head and mumbled a string of unintelligible words, pointed toward the path, and resumed his walk.

  Not really sure what else to do and still trying to wake up from his unplanned nap, Ellis followed him, ready to relieve him of his suitcase if the need arose. But his noble intentions for hurrying after the man were quickly forgotten as he caught a glimpse of what could only be the farmhouse.

  Ellis blinked. Then blinked some more. He didn’t know what he was expecting, not having been a person who spent a lot of time around farms or even knew people who spent time around farms. Wasn’t there supposed to be a barn and some horses somewhere? Was he just stereotyping?

  Whatever his big-city brain thought farms would look like, it wasn’t anything like the house slowly coming into view as they went farther up the hill. House might have been stretching it a bit. How many bedrooms did a place have to have to be classified as a mansion? Because the—colonial? plantation-style?—house in front of him was unexpected. And huge.

  He turned his head left and right, even craned it back to get a good look at it. His tired brain registered the building had two stories and a rectangular shape. There were also stairs that led from the ground floor straight to the second floor in front of a blue arched wooden double door. The windows were also arched and the details also done in blue. Rocks and flower beds were scattered on the grass on either side of the path leading up to the stairs. He couldn’t help but admire the house/mansion.

  The late-afternoon sun streamed through the trees and cast a soft, warm glow on the white walls. It was beautiful.

  He heard Mr. Mustache utter his particular dialect and turned his head, only to find that he had climbed the steps, stopped in front of the blue double doors, and was beckoning him to follow. Right. He shouldn’t just stand there and gawk, no matter how beautiful or surprising the house was.

  Ellis took a step toward Mr. Mustache, but a sound drew his attention and he swiveled his head in its direction.

  A figure walked up the path they had just come from. The rays of the setting sun at their back made it difficult to make out any features. Ellis shielded his eyes and squinted, trying to see it clearer.

  The figure stopped a few feet away from him. The closeness allowed Ellis to see more clearly. There stood a man, hat in hand and a polite smile in place.

  Then the man closed the distance between them and came to stand in front of Ellis, his hand stretched out in greeting and the polite smile transformed into a dazzling one.

  “Mr. Campos? I’m Rudá Acatauassú. We spoke via email a few times,” the man—with a name Ellis had absolutely no hope of ever pronouncing properly—said.

  Ellis was a little stunned. The man—Rudá—was… well, handsome. He had high cheekbones, a sharp jaw, and laugh lines around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes. He was handsome in a real way, with his almond-shaped brown eyes and dark brown skin. A stray dimple on his left cheek topped it all
off, made more pronounced by his smile.

  As he studied him unabashedly, Ellis saw his smile falter a bit and his eyes drift away from him and then back. The momentary loss of connection made him realize he had just stood there, staring at him while his hand was outstretched, waiting to greet him. Ellis reached out and shook his hand, not meeting his eyes. The man’s smile returned full force, and he nodded.

  “Yes.” Ellis cleared his throat. “Call me Ellis, please.”

  “Ellis,” Rudá said, smiling and still holding his hand. “Welcome to the Blue Feathers Coffee Farm. I hope your trip was okay. Seu Jorge will show you to your room, and I’ll be right in. Just have to finish up a couple of things.”

  “Yes, of course.” Ellis nodded jerkily. He pulled his hand away from Rudá and turned toward the house.

  Rudá said something to Mr. Mustache, who mumbled an answer Rudá must’ve understood, because Ellis heard the retreating sound of footsteps as he made his way inside the house, following Mr. Mustache and his suitcase.

  He barely noticed the inside of the house as he was led forward with his gaze trained on his shoes, not wanting to draw more attention to himself. He almost ran into Mr. Mustache as he stopped in front of a door, and Ellis apologized. He gestured to the door and handed Ellis’s suitcase to him. Before leaving, he clapped his hand on Ellis’s shoulder twice, the same way he had back at the airport, and then turned around and left.

  Ellis took a deep breath and turned to what he assumed was his bedroom door. It was ajar, and since everything seemed quiet inside, he pushed it open the rest of the way. The door squeaked a little, probably the result of humidity and too many years, but no other sound reached his ears.

  Like the outside of the house, the room was bigger than he expected with a four-poster bed in the middle. There were plush carpets on the floor and beautifully made wooden furniture. Ellis rolled his suitcase into the room and set it on top of a sofa resting against one of the walls.

  It felt as if he’d stumbled onto the set of a colonial-era movie. Even if historical movies weren’t really his thing, he couldn’t deny that the house was gorgeous and seemed to have been well kept. The thought that it was now his responsibility to keep it that way made his stomach knot and bile rise to his mouth.