by Diana Palmer
“It’s the most beautiful thing you’ve done yet, and that’s saying something.” He looked down at her with an odd expression. “You really have the talent.”
She flushed. “Thanks, Cort.”
He put the sculpture down and bent, brushing his mouth tenderly over hers. “I have to be so careful with you,” he whispered at her lips. “It’s frustrating, in more ways than one.”
She caught her breath. She couldn’t resist him. But it was tearing her apart, to think that he might be caught in a web of deception laced by guilt. She looked up into his eyes with real pain.
He traced her lips with his forefinger. “When you’re back on your feet,” he whispered, “we have to talk.”
She managed a smile. “Okay.” Because she knew that, by then, she’d find a way to ease his guilt, and Odalie’s, and step out of the picture. She wasn’t going to let them sacrifice their happiness for her. That was far too much.
He kissed her again and stood up, smiling. “So when are you going to give it to her?”
“Tomorrow,” she decided.
“I’ll make sure she comes over.”
“Thanks.”
He shrugged and then smiled. “She’s going to be over the moon when she sees it.”
* * *
THAT WAS AN understatement. Odalie cried. She turned the little fairy around and around in her elegant hands, gasping at the level of detail in the features that were so exactly like her own.
“It’s the most beautiful gift I’ve ever been given.”
She put it down, very gently, and hugged Maddie as carefully as she could. “You sweetie!” she exclaimed. “I’ll never be able to thank you. It looks just like me!”
Maddie chuckled. “I’m glad you like it.”
“You have to let me talk to my friend at the art gallery,” Odalie said.
Maddie hesitated. “Maybe someday,” she faltered. “Maybe.”
“But you have so much talent, Maddie. It’s such a gift.”
Maddie flushed. “Thanks.”
Odalie kept trying, but she couldn’t move the other girl. Not at all.
“Okay,” she relented. “You know your own mind. Oh, goodness, what is that?” she exclaimed, indicating a cameo lying beside another fairy, a black-haired one sitting on a riverbank holding a book.
Maddie told her the story of the antique dealer and the cameo that had no family to inherit.
“What an incredible story,” Odalie said, impressed. “She’s quite beautiful. You can do that, from a picture?”
Maddie laughed. “I did yours from the one in our school yearbook,” she said, and this time she didn’t flinch remembering the past.
Odalie looked uncomfortable, but she didn’t refer to it. Perhaps in time she and Maddie could both let go of that terrible memory. “Maddie, could you do one of my great-grandmother if I brought you a picture of her? It’s a commission, now...”
Maddie held up a hand. “No. I’d love to do it. It’s just a hobby, you know, not a job. Just bring me a picture.”
Odalie’s eyes were unusually bright. “Okay. I’ll bring it tomorrow!”
Maddie laughed at her enthusiasm. “I’ll get started as soon as I have it.”
* * *
THE PICTURE WAS surprising. “This is your grandmother?” Maddie asked, because it didn’t look anything like Odalie. The subject of the painting had red hair and pale green eyes.
“My great-grandmother,” Odalie assured her, but she averted her eyes to another sculpture while she said it.
“Oh. That explains it. Yes, I can do it.”
“That’s so sweet of you, Maddie.”
“It’s nothing at all.”
* * *
IT TOOK TWO weeks. Maddie still had periods of discomfort that kept her in bed, but she made sure she walked and moved around, as the therapist and her doctor had told her to do. It was amazing that, considering the impact of the car, she hadn’t suffered a permanent disability. The swelling and inflammation had been pretty bad, as was the bruising, but she wasn’t going to lose the use of her legs. The doctor was still being cautious about that prognosis. But Maddie could tell from the way she was healing that she was going to be all right. She’d never been more certain of anything.
She finished the little fairy sculpture on a Friday. She was very pleased with the result. It looked just like the photograph, but with exquisite detail. This fairy was sitting on a tree stump, with a small green frog perched on her palm. She was laughing. Maddie loved the way it had turned out. But now it was going to be hard to part with it. She did put part of herself into her sculptures. It was like giving herself away with the art.
She’d promised Odalie, though, so she had to come to terms with it.
Odalie was overwhelmed with the result. She stared at it and just shook her head. “I can’t believe how skilled you are,” she said, smiling at Maddie. “This is so beautiful. She’ll, I mean my mother, will love it!”
“Oh, it’s her grandmother,” Maddie recalled.
“Yes.” Odalie still wouldn’t meet her eyes, but she laughed. “What a treat this is going to be! Can I take it with me?” she asked.
Maddie only hesitated for a second. She smiled. “Of course you can.”
“Wonderful!”
She bent and hugged Maddie gently. “Still doing okay?” she asked worriedly.
Maddie nodded. “Getting better all the time, thanks to a small pharmacy of meds on my bedside table,” she quipped.
“I’m so glad. I mean that,” she said solemnly. “The day you can walk to your car and drive it, I’ll dance in the yard.”
Maddie laughed. “Okay. I’ll hold you to that!”
Odalie just grinned.
* * *
CORT CAME OVER every day. Saturday morning he went to the barn to study the charts he and John Everett had made. John had just come over to bring Maddie flowers. She was sitting on the porch with Great-Aunt Sadie. As soon as John arrived, Cort came back from the barn and joined the group on the porch. The way Cort glared at him was surprising.
“They’ll give her allergies,” Cort muttered.
John gave him a stunned look, and waved around the yard at the blooming crepe myrtle and jasmine and sunflowers and sultanas and zinnias. “Are you nuts?” he asked, wide-eyed. “Look around you! Who do you think planted all these?”
Cort’s dark eyes narrowed. He jammed his hands into his jean pockets. “Well, they’re not in the house, are they?” he persisted.
John just laughed. He handed the pot of flowers to Great-Aunt Sadie, who was trying not to laugh. “Can you put those inside?” he asked her with a smile. “I want to check the board in the barn and see how the breeding program needs to go.”
“I sure can,” Sadie replied, and she went into the house.
Maddie was still staring at John with mixed feelings. “Uh, thanks for the flowers,” she said haltingly. Cort was looking irritated.
“You’re very welcome,” John said. He studied her for a long moment. “You look better.”
“I feel a lot better,” she said. “In fact, I think I might try to walk to the barn.”
“In your dreams, honey,” Cort said softly. He picked her up, tenderly, and cradled her against his chest. “But I’ll walk you there.”
John stared at him intently. “Should you be picking her up like that?” he asked.
Cort wasn’t listening. His dark eyes were probing Maddie’s gray ones with deep tenderness. Neither of them was looking at John, who suddenly seemed to understand what was going on around him.
“Darn, I left my notes in the car,” he said, hiding a smile. “I’ll be right back.”
He strode off. Cort bent his head. “I thought he’d never leave,” he whispered, and brought his mouth down, hard, on Maddie’s.
“Cort...”
“Shh,” he whispered against her lips. “Don’t fuss. Open your mouth...!”
The kiss grew hotter by the second. Maddie was clinging t
o his neck for dear life while he crushed her breasts into the softness of his blue-checked shirt and devoured her soft lips.
He groaned harshly, but suddenly he remembered where they were. He lifted his head, grateful that his back was to the house, and John’s car. He drew in a long breath.
“I wish you weren’t so fragile,” he whispered. He kissed her shocked eyes shut. “I’m starving.”
Her fingers teased the hair at the back of his head. “I could feed you a biscuit,” she whispered.
He smiled. “I don’t want biscuits.” He looked at her mouth. “I want you.”
Her face flamed with a combination of embarrassment and sheer delight.
“But we can talk about that later, after I’ve disposed of John’s body,” he added, turning to watch the other man approach, his eyes buried in a black notebook.
“Wh-h-hat?” she stammered, and burst out laughing at his expression.
He sighed. “I suppose no war is ever won without a few uncomfortable battles,” he said under his breath.
“I found them,” John said with a grin, waving the notebook. “Let’s have a look at the breeding strategy you’ve mapped out, then.”
“I put it all on the board,” Cort replied. He carried Maddie into the barn and set her on her feet very carefully, so as not to jar her spine. “It’s right there,” he told John, nodding toward the large board where he’d indicated which bulls were to be bred to which heifers and cows.
John studied it for a long moment. He turned and looked at Cort curiously. “This is remarkable,” he said. “I would have gone a different way, but yours is better.”
Cort seemed surprised. “You’ve got a four-year degree in animal husbandry,” he said. “Mine is only an associate’s degree.”
“Yes, but you’ve got a lifetime of watching your father do this.” He indicated the board. “I’ve been busy studying and traveling. I haven’t really spent that much time observing. It’s rather like an internship, and I don’t have the experience, even if I have the education.”
“Thanks,” Cort said. He was touchy about his two-year degree. He smiled. “Took courses in diplomacy, too, did you?” he teased.
John bumped shoulders with him. “You’re my best friend,” he murmured. “I’d never be the one to try to put you down.”
Cort punched his shoulder gently. “Same here.”
Maddie had both hands on her slender hips as she stared at the breeding chart. “Would either of you like to try to translate this for me?” She waved one hand at the blackboard. “Because it looks like Martian to me!”
Both men burst out laughing.
Cort had to go out of town. He was worried when he called Maddie to tell her, apologizing for his absence.
“Mom and Dad will look out for you while I’m gone,” he promised. “If you need anything, you call them. I’ll phone you when I get to Denver.”
Her heart raced. “Okay.”
“Will you miss me?” he teased.
She drew in a breath. “Of course,” she said.
There was a pause. “I’ll miss you more,” he said quietly. His deep voice was like velvet. “What do you want me to bring you from Denver?”
“Yourself.”
There was a soft chuckle. “That’s a deal. Talk to you later.”
“Have a safe trip.”
He sighed. “At least Dad isn’t flying me. He flies like he drives. But we’ll get there.”
The plural went right over her head. She laughed. She’d heard stories about King Brannt’s driving. “It’s safer than driving, everybody says so.”
“In my dad’s case, it’s actually true. He flies a lot better than he drives.”
“I heard that!” came a deep voice from beside him.
“Sorry, Dad,” Cort replied. “See you, Maddie.”
He hung up. She held the cell phone to her ear for an extra minute, just drinking in the sound of his voice promising to miss her.
* * *
WHILE CORT WAS away, Odalie didn’t come, either. But even though she called, Maddie missed her daily visits. She apologized over the phone. She was actually out of town, but her mother had volunteered to do any running-around that Maddie needed if Sadie couldn’t go.
Maddie thanked her warmly. But when she hung up she couldn’t help but wonder at the fact that Cort and Odalie were out of town at the same time. Had Odalie gone to Denver with Cort and they didn’t want to tell her? It was worrying.
She rode her wheelchair out to the hen enclosure. Ben was just coming out of it with the first of many egg baskets. There were a lot of hens, and her customer list for her fresh eggs was growing by the week.
“That’s a lot of eggs,” she ventured.
He chuckled. “Ya, and I still have to wash ’em and check ’em for cracks.”
“I like Percy,” she remarked.
“I love Percy,” Ben replied. “Never saw such a gentle rooster.”
“Thanks. For what you did for Pumpkin’s grave,” she said, averting her eyes. She still cried easily when she talked about him.
“It was no problem at all, Miss Maddie,” he said gently.
She looked over her hens with proud eyes. “My girls look good.”
“They do, don’t they?” he agreed, then added, “Well, I should get to work.”
“Ben, do you know where Odalie went?” she asked suddenly.
He bit his lip.
“Come on,” she prodded. “Tell me.”
He looked sad. “She went to Denver, Miss Maddie. Heard it from her dad when I went to pick up feed in town.”
Maddie’s heart fell to her feet. But she smiled. “She and Cort make a beautiful couple,” she remarked, and tried to hide the fact that she was dying inside.
“Guess they do,” he said. He tried to say something else, but he couldn’t get the words to come out right. “I’ll just go get these eggs cleaned.”
She nodded. The eyes he couldn’t see were wet with tears.
* * *
IT SEEMED THAT disaster followed disaster. While Cort and Odalie were away, bills flooded the mailbox. Maddie almost passed out when she saw the hospital bill. Even the minimum payment was more than she had in the bank.
“What are we going to do?” she wailed.
Sadie winced at her expression. “Well, we’ll just manage,” she said firmly. “There’s got to be something we can sell that will help pay those bills.” She didn’t add that Cort and Odalie had promised they were taking care of all that. But they were out of town, and Sadie knew that Maddie’s pride would stand in the way of asking them for money. She’d never do it.
“There is something,” Maddie said heavily. She looked up at Sadie.
“No,” Sadie said shortly. “No, you can’t!”
“Look at these bills, Sadie,” she replied, and spread them out on the table. “There’s nothing I can hock, nothing I can do that will make enough money fast enough to cover all this. There just isn’t anything else to do.”
“You aren’t going to talk to that developer fellow?”
“Heavens, no!” Maddie assured her. “I’ll call a real estate agent in town.”
“I think that’s...”
Just as she spoke, a car pulled up in the yard.
“Well, speak of the devil,” Maddie muttered.
The developer climbed out of his car, looked around and started for the front porch.
“Do you suppose we could lock the door and pretend to be gone?” Sadie wondered aloud.
“No. We’re not hiding. Let him in,” Maddie said firmly.
“Don’t you give in to his fancy talk,” Sadie advised.
“Never in a million years. Let him in.”
The developer, Arthur Lawson, came in the door with a smug look on his face. “Miss Lane,” he greeted. He smiled like a crocodile. “Bad news does travel fast. I heard you were in an accident and that your bills are piling up. I believe I can help you.”
Maddie looked at Sadie. Her expres
sion was eloquent.
Archie Lawson grinned like the barracuda he was.
“I heard that your neighbors have gone away together,” he said with mock sympathy. “Just left you with all those medical bills to pay, did they?”
Maddie felt terrible. She didn’t want to say anything unkind about Odalie and Cort. They’d done more than most people could have expected of them. But Maddie was left with the bills, and she had no money to pay them with. She’d read about people who didn’t pay their hospital bill on time and had to deal with collectors’ agencies. She was terrified.
“They don’t say I have to pay them at once,” Maddie began.
“Yes, but the longer you wait, the higher the interest they charge,” he pointed out.
“Interest?”
“It’s such and such a percent,” he continued. He sat down without being asked in her father’s old easy chair. “Let me spell it out for you. I can write you a check that will cover all those medical bills, the hospital bill, everything. All you have to do is sign over the property to me. I’ll even take care of the livestock. I’ll make sure they’re sold to people who will take good care of them.”
“I don’t know,” Maddie faltered. She was torn. It was so quick...
“Maddie, can I talk to you for a minute?” Sadie asked tersely. “It’s about supper,” she lied.
“Okay.”
She excused herself and followed Sadie into the kitchen.
Sadie closed the door. “Listen to me, don’t you do that until you talk to Mr. Brannt,” Sadie said firmly. “Don’t you dare!”
“But, Sadie,” she said in anguish, “we can’t pay the bills, and we can’t expect the Brannts and the Everetts to keep paying them forever!”
“Cort said he’d take care of the hospital bill, at least,” Sadie reminded her.
“Miss Lane?” Lawson called. “I have to leave soon!”
“Don’t let him push you into this,” Sadie cautioned. “Make him wait. Tell him you have to make sure the estate’s not entailed before you can sell, you’ll have to talk to your lawyer!”
Maddie bit her lower lip.
“Tell him!” Sadie said, gesturing her toward the porch.
Maddie took a deep breath and Sadie opened the door for her to motor through.
“Sadie was reminding me that we had a couple of outstanding liens on the property after Dad died,” Maddie lied. “I’ll have to talk to our attorney and make sure they’ve been lifted before I can legally sell it to you.”
