“Oh, I’ll help. I’m stronger than I look,” Penelope said.
Brandon nodded. “I remember that tae-kwon-whatever-it-was on the highway. You damn near had me on the ground. You bet you’ll invest sweat equity in this project. You’ll discover muscles you never knew you had.”
Her eyes fell on his biceps, bunched up under the cotton of his T-shirt. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to see him break a sweat himself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BRANDON STOOD by the tarp-covered stack of materials for Penelope’s pole barn and wished he didn’t feel so damn conflicted.
If he played his cards right, he could give this land back to Uncle Jake tied up in a bow. For now, with the rental agreement he’d worked out with Penelope, he and Uncle Jake had the right to treat the land like it was theirs again.
So why did he feel as though he was a conniving jerk?
It was his land—well, Uncle Jake’s. And Murphy had stolen it. He’d most likely roped Penelope into buying it, and while Brandon hated that Penelope would be a loser in all this, she would, ultimately, lose.
Brandon wasn’t diddling Penelope out of anything, because the land hadn’t ever been Murphy’s to sell. If she hadn’t come to Georgia with her high-priced lawyers bidding up the auction price, that land would have been back in the Wilkes’s hands.
But no, she had. And because of that…Brandon looked out over the property and saw the ugly, hateful fence running through the middle of it, like a surgeon’s scar. It didn’t need to be there. It shouldn’t have ever been put there. And if Brandon had anything to do with it, it was coming down.
The ends justified the means, right? And that’s why he was here doing something supremely stupid, putting something fairly permanent on land that the good Lord had designed for growing things. A barn? On prime cropland? And for a sculpture she didn’t even have a buyer for?
The day of the barn raising had dawned crisp and clear, blue skies dotted with the white clouds only early October in Georgia could give you. No more aluminum-gray skies obscured with haze from the summer heat. Autumn in Georgia—if you could call eighty degrees fall weather—had arrived.
So had Penelope. She bounced from the house toward the barn site, looking more like the girl he’d first met than the suspicious specimen he’d recently been tangling with.
“Where are they? I thought they’d be here by now!”
“Relax,” he told her. “It’s only eight o’clock.”
“You really think we can get this done today?”
“The big part of it, hopefully. I’ll have to come back with some friends of mine and put the roof on. It’s too much of a liability to put schoolkids up that high.”
Before she could ask the next question he knew was coming, a beat-up truck, more body filler and primer than paint on its fenders, pulled up beside Brandon’s. His heart sank.
“Aw, shoot. What’s Uncle Jake doing here?”
“Your uncle?”
“Yeah. Hold on. I hope those hogs of his aren’t out again.”
Uncle Jake’s easy steps out of the truck and around to the back of it signaled no urgency, though. He reached over and fished for something. Brandon couldn’t tell what it was.
“Uncle Jake?” Brandon called. “What’s wrong?”
“Can’t find my hammer, blast it. No, wait, there she is.” Uncle Jake stuck the hammer in his belt loop with a satisfied pat. “A man can’t show up at a barn raising without his best hammer.”
“You’re here to help?”
“You betcha. I told Geraldine she was in charge of the hogs and not to be lettin’ ’em pull any Houdini tricks until I could get back. Fat lot of good that’ll do.”
He looked past Brandon, raised a hand in a wave and started walking toward Penelope. “How-do. Jake Wilkes. I’m this’un’s uncle, practically raised him, so if he gets fresh with you, you tell me about it. I’ll put a kink in his tail, for sure.”
Another truck pulled up, this one in better shape. Out clambered Ryan MacIntosh, along with Becca and Mee-Maw. Before they could even shout a hello, Brandon saw more trucks making the turn into the driveway.
He felt his small amount of control of the day slipping away. “Uncle Jake, you didn’t…”
“Oh, I told a few people. Neighborly thing to do, wasn’t it? Since you are being so neighborly.” Uncle Jake raised his eyebrows, daring Brandon to challenge him. “Besides, we haven’t had a proper barn raisin’ since I was…hmm—” he winked at Penelope “—still young enough to cut the muster.”
Brandon tried to squelch the groan working its way out of him. No telling what Uncle Jake had told everyone to get them to pitch in. He’d probably said that Brandon had a new girlfriend who was in dire need of rescuing. This many people, along with a full crew of FFA students, would be a circus.
And that was the least of his objections. This was his plan, but he didn’t feel right about dragging his uncle into it. Or anybody else, for that matter.
Penelope, however, showed nothing short of delight. She clapped her hands and shouted, “Wait! I’ve got to get my camera! I want to get a picture of this for my Web site!”
He rolled his eyes. Just the sort of thing he should have expected.
But Uncle Jake nodded approvingly and shooed her on toward the house. “Yes sirree, gotta save this day for posterity. One day your grandkids’ll be looking at it and you can say, ‘This is where it all started.’”
In the hubbub of greetings, Brandon whispered to his uncle, “What are you up to?”
“Up to?” Uncle Jake inspected the head of his hammer. “What makes you think I’m up to anything? Maybe I’m just here to make sure you aren’t up to anything. Don’t sell your soul, Brandon. Nothing’s worth that. If you’re doing this for the wrong reasons, you just pack up and go on home to that dinky apartment of yours.”
Brandon forced himself not to squirm as he looked his uncle in the eye and lied. “You said it yourself, Uncle Jake. It was nobody’s fault but ours that we couldn’t produce that receipt. I’m just being neighborly.”
“Same here, same here.”
“But, are you, um, sure you’re up to it?”
“Course I’m up to it. Fit as a fiddle. That doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about, telling me to watch out for my ol’ ticker. What’s those pills he gives me for if they don’t fix me up?”
Becca and Mee-Maw came bearing big covered casserole dishes, with Ryan trailing behind, a mountain of something covered in tinfoil in his hands.
“What is all this?” Brandon asked as he jogged ahead of the women to get the door.
“Thank you kindly, Brandon,” Mee-Maw said as she negotiated the porch steps—new from the look of them, to match the equally new back stoop added on in the week or so since Brandon had agreed to arrange the construction of the pole barn. “Pshew, when is it gonna get any cooler?” Mee-Maw asked. “This is just a little something to tide us over, so you menfolk won’t have to stop for dinner.”
“A little something? Mee-Maw, that—”
He was interrupted by Penelope, who’d stepped to the back door with her camera. “Oh! For me? A housewarming?”
“A barn raisin’. This here is some squash I put up this summer, and Becca there has some butter beans. Ryan’s got the ham I baked last night after it cooled off.”
“Come in, come in!” Penelope moved aside to allow the women to pass by her. “Thank you so much! Kitchen’s right in here. Put it in the fridge. Let me get that for you…”
Brandon exchanged a wry look with Ryan. “Did Uncle Jake rope you into this?”
“I think this was something Mee-Maw and Uncle Jake worked out.” Ryan shrugged. “Hey, I just show up where Becca and Mee-Maw tell me. Works out better that way, I’ve found. Besides, no way you’re going to get that barn raised in a day with just kids. And it’s supposed to start raining tomorrow.” He moved across the threshold to be relieved of his tin-foil-covered mountain of ham.
Brandon cast a
backward glance off the back porch at the sky and steadily rising sun. If they didn’t get to work, they wouldn’t get anything accomplished.
Ryan must have thought the same thing. “Ready?” he asked.
“Yup. Let’s hit it.”
Brandon loped down the porch steps, Ryan behind him, and headed toward the men knotted around the materials. “I sure appreciate you guys coming out to give us a hand.”
A rumble of tires on gravel and someone’s hiss of disgust made him stop. Brandon turned to see another pickup trundle up the driveway.
It was the last person he wanted to see.
Richard Murphy.
PENELOPE STOPPED in the midst of getting-to-know-you conversation with Mrs. MacIntosh—Mee-Maw, she said to call her—and Becca. Voices loud with anger filtered through the bungalow’s walls.
Mee-Maw peered with her through the window over the kitchen sink and compressed her lips. “Murphy,” she muttered.
Penelope took a half step back at the old woman’s vehemence. She recalled what Brandon had warned her about reaction to her grandfather. At the time she’d thought he was exaggerating.
“I’d better get out there and pull Ryan back.” Becca started for the door. “No telling what he’ll do. Doesn’t Murphy have any better sense—”
“No. Let me.” Penelope walked to the door. “I don’t know what you think my grandfather has done to you. But he is my grandfather, and he’s always welcome here.”
Becca started to speak, but Mee-Maw held up a hand. “She’s right, Becca. This is her house, and we have insulted her hospitality. Penelope, I do apologize. It’s just that this is the first time I’ve seen him…since…” Again her eyes clouded over. “We’ll get Ryan to run us on home.”
“No. Why does it have to be this way?” Penelope protested. “Why is it that the man I know and love can create such a violent reaction? He’s not the monster you think he is.”
Mee-Maw treated her to intense scrutiny. Apparently, by the harrumphing noise she made in her throat, she was satisfied with what she saw. “Can’t help who you’re kin to, I reckon, but you’d best get out there. Brandon and Ryan are looking for all the world like they’re gonna bodily remove him.”
Penelope nodded, sucked in another lungful of air and pushed open the back door.
“…not welcome here! Why don’t you go back to the posse of high-dollar defense lawyers you’ve got working for you and see if you can wiggle out of that federal indictment?” Brandon was saying.
“You and MacIntosh here put such store by family, well, this is my family’s land. I’m welcome any damn time I choose to come.”
“Grandpa.”
The crowd of onlookers switched its focus to Penelope.
“Penny-girl. You tell that boy to back off!”
She hated the skewering looks from the men who’d come to help her almost as much as she hated the position her grandfather had put her in.
Penelope wondered how her mother might handle this situation and came up at a loss. Marlene Murphy Langston had always been closemouthed about her Georgia roots and her dad, as though she were somehow ashamed of them.
Right now, with her grandfather and Brandon standing toe-to-toe, insight would have been supremely useful.
Penelope said a silent prayer.
She closed her hand over her grandfather’s meaty arm and led him closer to his truck.
“Grandpa, you’re, um, not the most popular guy at the party here, are you?” she said lightly.
“Maybe you’re not hanging around the best quality of people, Penny. I told you to stay away from Brandon Wilkes and Ryan MacIntosh, and you got both of ’em here.”
“They’re helping me build a pole barn.”
“I’m a trifle disappointed in you, Penny-girl. Why are you accepting charity from the likes of them? They’re using you, Penny, using you to get to me.”
“Grandpa Murphy, I can’t build this barn on my own. And they’re helping. You might as well know—I’ve told Brandon he can use the land in exchange for helping me with the barn.”
She steeled herself for an explosion. His expression darkened and his eyes grew cold and hard.
But then her grandfather relaxed. He nodded in a thoughtful way. “You’re just doing what you have to do, hmm?”
Before she could answer, he seemed to have made up his mind. “Well, I’m in the way here. You go ahead, let them help you. If it had been three months ago, I would have had a crew that could have thrown up that pole barn in a day’s time. But I lost all that. I lost all of it because of those two men standing right there.” He jutted his chin toward Brandon and Ryan. “So I guess it’s fitting they help you. Sort of makes up for me not being able to. Just…Penny-girl, don’t forget. You can’t trust him. Don’t get sweet on that big lug of a deputy, you hear?”
He bent and planted a big kiss on her cheek, squeezed her in a hug.
“Well, I’ll be on my way, now, Penny-girl!” he said in a voice that rang out over the open field. “Let me know when they’re all done, and I’ll come back.”
He slammed the truck door shut behind him, started the engine and backed out. In his wake, he left Penelope feeling as though she hadn’t stood up for her grandfather…and Brandon glaring at her with deep suspicion.
CHAPTER NINE
AN AWKWARD SILENCE stretched out as the rumble of Grandpa Murphy’s truck faded in the distance. Brandon wasn’t the only suspicious one in the group.
Penelope’s feet felt heavy and the optimism snuffed out inside her as she crossed the dewy ground to the men.
“That’s your grandpa?” someone asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Yes, he is.” She thought about all the times her mother had compressed her lips and shaken her head when the subject of Penelope’s grandfather had come up. Penelope, until this moment, had always thought it was because her mom was ashamed of her South Georgia roots.
Some of the men standing in the semicircle facing her shuffled their feet and stared at the ground. One of them suddenly straightened, removed his baseball cap and wiped at his face in the early morning mugginess.
“Well, I reckon I’d better get on out of y’all’s way,” he said. “Just came by to wish you well on that pole barn. Got a heap of my own work to get to.”
Penelope saw Brandon’s and Uncle Jake’s surprise and realized the man was making excuses he hadn’t felt the need to make earlier.
She forced a polite smile. “Thank you so much. I appreciate you coming by this morning. It means a lot to me.”
The man replaced his cap, tipped it at her and strode off to his truck. A moment of silence stretched thin, followed by another defector making the walk to his truck.
When the third man started to speak, Brandon interrupted him.
“Jarvis, I know you don’t have a bit of lost love for Murphy, but you were saying not five minutes ago how you were here to help. Now, I think you should hear Penelope out at least, give her that courtesy.”
Penelope caught her breath at Brandon’s defense of her. Her wonderment grew when Uncle Jake spoke up.
“Out of everybody standin’ here, I reckon I got done as dirty by Richard Murphy as any of us, ’cept maybe Ryan and his grandma. Pardon me, Miss Penelope, if I don’t mince my words about your kinfolk, but the truth’s the truth. The rat-bastard stole my land, this land we’re standin’ on right here. And he did even worse to Ryan’s grandma than just run her out of the house she’d lived in for sixty years or more.” Uncle Jake paused, stared at Penelope.
Again, she was so shocked at the vitriol her grandfather could engender that she was rendered speechless.
Uncle Jake pushed on. “But a girl has to be loyal to her family. If she’s not, well, then, she won’t be loyal to anybody. Now I say—” he tapped his finger on the bib of his overalls “—this stops here. We don’t take out our anger on a man’s children or his children’s children, not unless they’re picking a fight with us. Miss Penelope, you can settle this once an
d for all. Why’d you come here?”
“I just wanted…dirt and a house. It seemed like a good opportunity.”
“And it is,” Uncle Jake declared. “Ain’t no better place on earth than Brazelton County to call home. Now, time’s a-wasting, and I got to go feed the hogs this evening. Brandon, what do you need me to do?”
The other men seemed mollified by Uncle Jake’s pronouncement and his offer to help. As talk once again dissolved into the nuts and bolts of the job before them, a yellow school bus jounced up the driveway.
Penelope felt a touch on her arm. She glanced away from the boys now bursting off the bus and saw Brandon smiling. “We’ll get it done,” he promised.
TEN HOURS LATER, twilight gathering and the heat of the day cooling off, Penelope offered a tired farewell wave to Uncle Jake and Jarvis and the other farmers who’d come to help. The schoolboys had left hours ago.
Now only Brandon remained. But where was he? She glanced up at the shiny metal roof on her new barn, amazed at how much work they’d accomplished in a day’s time. The pole barn had, with all the labor available, been almost a shazam-now-you-see-it feat.
Sure, the doors still weren’t hung, the water supply and electricity weren’t hooked up, and the inside shelves she’d planned weren’t installed, but it was shelter. A place to work. A place to make her dreams come true.
She walked around the corner of the house to see Brandon, shirtless, standing at an outside spigot, water rushing into his open hands. He didn’t hear her at first as he splashed the water on his face, arms and chest.
The twilight revealed his well-built body, not an ounce of spare fat anywhere. She didn’t see the gym-sculpted, steroid-assisted six-pack. No, this was the real thing, the result of hours of physical labor, form beautifully following function.
An urge to sculpt such a body overtook Penelope. The urge to explore those planes and angles with her hands.
The splashing halted abruptly as Brandon caught her staring at him. She pulled herself together and said, “You, um, could have come in the house. I have hot water inside, you know.”
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