So, out of the nest we go and into who knows what!
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE TRUCK OF building materials arrived as she was unpacking her laptop on the small dining table after she’d cleaned up her tuna salad lunch. Without being told, they unloaded the wire and wood beside the big water oak and left the tools and bags of concrete on the front porch. She went out and signed for everything. They smiled, but didn’t say a word. Just unloaded and drove off.
She forced herself to finish setting up her laptop, printer, modem and all the other stuff she’d brought in her Technology box. Then she sat and stared at the screen without a single idea about how to create her résumé or whom to send it to.
For example, that lovely interview question—“Why did you leave your previous employment?” Got my ass fired for not covering it well enough.
“Can we contact your previous employer?”
Not just no, but hell no.
“What are your strengths?’”
I am a great dancer. I speak passable French and can read the first chapter of Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin or English. I plan wonderful meetings and am an expert at setting up h’ors d’oeuvres buffets. I do fabulous flow charts, and I make a mean margarita and a superb dirty martini. I can build a website and create an internet presence. If I’m working for a charity, I know how to raise funds. I can write brochures and prospectuses for clients. In other words, I can help clients work out their goals, figure out what it’ll take to accomplish them, write a budget and a marketing plan that include a hefty profit for us, and assemble a creative team to fit the pieces together. Jill of all trades. That’s what PR’s about.
“What are your weaknesses?”
How do I count the ways! I get impatient. I expect people to do what they agree to do on time, and I can be tactless when they don’t. I’m working on that.
“Are you a people person?”
I certainly hope not.
“What do you want out of your career?”
Excitement. New challenges with creative people I like. Control where I have responsibility. And lots of lovely money.
Boy, if they don’t make me CEO of a small country with these credentials, they aren’t paying attention.
Eventually after she deleted the four lines of k’s she’d strung across her screen, Emma gave up. Tomorrow she had to knuckle down and stop the nonsense. She did have skills. She was wicked smart and moderately attractive. Who cared whether she could drive a nail?
Seth did, probably.
She played with the babies on the pantry floor after she’d fed them. They climbed all over her, even got in her hair. Their baby coats were incredibly soft. Their baby claws and teeth, however, were sharp. She could practically see them grow. She sat cross-legged on the pantry floor with all three of them in her lap, thought about how soon she’d lose them and burst into tears.
Seth came in so quietly that she didn’t even realize he was in the house until he called out to her. She scrambled to put the babies back in their playpen and wipe her eyes. She’d never mastered the feminine art of crying prettily. Even with no mirror handy, she knew her face and nose and eyes were red and swollen.
The moment she turned to Seth, he stopped dead and said, “Whoa. You look awful. You having an allergy attack?”
“Never tell a woman she looks awful, even when she does,” Emma snapped. She ran her fingers across her cheeks and under her eyes. “Actually, I’m feeling depressed and generally worthless. Sort of an I’m-gonna-go-out-in-the-garden-and-eat-worms feeling.”
“No time for that. We’ve got a cage to build.”
“I need my fingernails.”
“You can use a shovel, can’t you?”
“Why would I need that?”
“Have you felt those baby claws lately? They’ll be able to dig under that new fence we haven’t built yet. I said we’d need a metal barrier that goes about six inches below the bottom of the fence. If we’re lucky, they’ll stop digging down at five. Come on, Little Mother of All the Skunks, time to get your gloves on.” He offered her a hand, but she ignored it and scrambled up by herself.
“I don’t have any gloves.”
“Yeah, you do.” Seth slapped a pair of heavy leather gardening gloves into her palm. “I’ve already marked the footprint of the cage with chalk lines on the grass…”
“How long have you been out in my yard? How come I didn’t hear you?”
“I figured you were taking a nap, and I didn’t want to disturb you. I don’t generally make noise out of doors. Noise scares the deer.”
“The better to shoot them?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t hunted anything with a heartbeat since I was ten years old, and I didn’t like it then. I’m not against hunting per se as long as the rules are obeyed, but it’s not for me.”
The ground was still damp enough that the sharp square-ended shovels sliced through the sod and into the ground. By late June, the same job would require a bulldozer to dig six inches down. The dirt would be as hard as concrete. Even now the job was no picnic for Emma. She started digging down the short side, while Seth dug across the long side. He moved like a robotic Ditch Witch. After the first couple of shovelfuls, Emma’s arms and shoulders reminded her that she wasn’t used to this. She watched Seth and tried to emulate his efficient movements. Watching him was a pleasure. The muscles of his arms and shoulders were so cut that he seemed like a mobile anatomy figure shining with sweat.
He wasn’t pretty-handsome like Trip, but he practically trumpeted “male” like a bull elk she’d seen monitoring his harem at Land Between the Lakes. Which had its good and bad points. Right this moment, he was apparently keeping his distance. They were simply two casual acquaintances doing a dirty job. She assumed that, in his mind, their kiss hadn’t happened.
In hers it certainly had.
Even when she paid close attention to her job and not the man, her shovel kept landing off the chalk line. Checking behind her, she saw that the path of her trench was more like the wriggly trail of one of those king snakes Seth waxed poetic about. His trench was perfectly straight and at a uniform depth.
Once she nearly drove the shovel into the toe of her boot. She didn’t want to lose toes any more than she wanted to lose fingers, but the way she was going, she might.
Shouldn’t Seth ask how she was getting along? But no. He didn’t even glance at her. Despite the chilly evening, sweat rolled down her forehead, dripped into her eyes and stung. She dropped the shovel and dug in her jeans pocket for a tissue.
Seth peered at her from under his arm. “Something wrong?”
He seemed ungainly all bent over. Kinda cute.
She leaned down to grasp her shovel, caught it on the toe of her Wellington boot, flipped up the handle and narrowly avoided bonking herself on the head. Suddenly the entire operation seemed ridiculous. At the rate she was digging, the babies would be grown and spraying everything in sight before she finished her side of the trench.
She leaned on the handle of her shovel. “I am useless. I can’t even dig a straight trench.”
“Hey! Careful with that shovel.”
“At least Trip never made me dig ditches,” she muttered.
He leaned down and picked up something from the ground. “Here,” he said. “Bon appétit.” The earthworm he held out to her was a good six inches long and extremely annoyed at being kidnapped.
Obviously, Seth was expecting her to scream and run. Forget that! She pulled off her gloves and carefully transferred the worm from his fingers to hers. “My daddy taught me to bait my own hook before I was five,” she said and put the worm back on the lawn, where it wriggled away as fast as it could. “Besides, it’s not my flavor.”
This time he actually looked at her instead of avoiding her eyes, as he had since he’d come into the house earlier. “Come on. Yo
u could use a break,” he said, then took her shovel and laid it carefully on the ground facedown so she couldn’t stomp the handle up again.
Boy, did she need a break, but she wasn’t about to admit it. “If you need a minute, I have water in the refrigerator. I’ll bring us a couple of bottles.” She went into the house, got the water and came back looking as relaxed as possible, although she already had blisters on her hands, despite the gloves. No doubt Seth’s hands were as tanned as old leather.
But still so gentle, even with an earthworm.
Or a woman? Would she ever find out? Did she want to?
Damn straight.
He sat on the porch steps with his back against the column. She handed him his water, then sat out of touching distance with her back against the column on the other side of the front door. On sober reflection, Seth was undoubtedly regretting last night’s kiss. The message seemed to be that he wasn’t interested in a repetition.
Fine. No more Mr. Grabby Hands. As if she cared. Wasn’t she off men?
She glanced over at Seth, the way he fit into those jeans, the muscles across his shoulders, those lazy gray eyes…
How long did she plan to give up men? Every time she looked at him, the span grew shorter. Do not, she reminded herself, forget that he is a danger to my babies. He could declare they are ready to go back into the woods. He’d darned well have a fight on his hands if he tried. Yeah, right.
He could pick her up one-handed and toss her into the branches of the water oak.
She’d never had the nerve to make the first move toward a man she was attracted to. Her stepmother said she should always let the man do the chasing. Wait for him to call you. How many hours had she sat staring at the phone?
How did men handle rejection? Did they put themselves out there and take the chance that women wouldn’t shut them down? They must school themselves to ignore rejection. Either that or women were so interchangeable for a man that it didn’t matter which woman he got and which he didn’t.
Emma had never been able to be that casual. Every time her father missed a play at school or a soccer game for a fishing trip he’d taken her brother on, she’d gotten better at hiding her hurt. She knew she wasn’t being fair. He had three children. He had to keep up with all their extracurricular activities. But it took Andrea to convince him to cut back on his caseload to spend more time with them. Still, hiding her hurt and not feeling it were two different things. Even Trip’s wandering eye hadn’t exactly been a rejection. He didn’t want to lose her. He’d just wanted to add more members to his harem. And that was not happening. Ever.
“What?” Seth asked. “Have I got more earthworms on my head?”
“Sorry. I’m woolgathering.” More like staring at his nice, craggy face. “This isn’t getting the trench done.” She got up, leaning against the porch column for support. “Come on, tiger. Time’s a-wasting.” She was going to offer him a hand up, but he was already standing by the time she’d covered the distance between them. He nodded and stepped off the porch to get his shovel.
She’d covered her blisters with plaster strips while she was in the kitchen, but the minute she put on her gloves and picked up the shovel, she realized they wouldn’t keep her hands from burning.
She swore she’d have to be dripping blood before she stopped digging.
Eventually she did discover a manageable rhythm after a few more near misses with the shovel. She might not be able to get out of bed in the morning, but she was pulling her weight. Sort of.
She’d been on some peculiar dates, but if this counted as a date, it was weirder than when that guy took her to the wrestling match. She’d almost got them thrown out when she whispered a snide comment and the lady behind them heard her.
That, as she recalled, was the last time he’d ever called her. Just as well, since she would never have gone out with him again.
Trip liked to take her to fancy parties, where they’d get their picture on the society page. She had to admit that kind of publicity had been good for her career, but she really would’ve enjoyed the occasional picnic.
“Not bad,” Seth said.
She jumped. She’d been woolgathering again. It hit her that a picnic on the front porch with Seth held more appeal than strolling to a fancy restaurant in four-inch heels with Trip. Five-inch heels were not possible. She kept having to grab on to tables as she walked by. “What do we do next, oh, great construction engineer?”
“We dig three-foot holes to concrete the corner posts in.”
“More digging! You have got to be kidding.”
“It’s okay. We only have one posthole digger, so I’ll do it. You wouldn’t by any chance have sandwich makings, would you?” The look he gave her he’d borrowed from a six-week-old puppy. Oh, Lord, he had the softest eyes! Even the bad guy from Oliver Twist wouldn’t have been able to hold out.
“Better than that. I made spaghetti sauce this afternoon while I should’ve been updating my résumé. I’ve got salad makings and garlic bread. I figured we’d be hungry if we did any digging. Do you drink wine? I mean, you don’t have to worry about driving home.” She pointed across the street.
“I may not make it home if I have a couple of glasses of wine.”
“Okay. Iced tea.”
“I didn’t actually say no to the wine. I just wanted you to weigh the possible outcomes.” He looked down at her, and their eyes met. Uh-oh. They held each other’s gaze a little too long. In an instant her skin felt tight and the hair on her arms stood up.
She broke away and fled to the bathroom to scrub the dirt away. When she was clean, she checked the sleeping skunks, then went into the kitchen. He handed her a goblet of red wine. Not iced tea, then.
This was not happening. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong man.
Any man is the wrong man right now.
* * *
HE DIDN’T FOLLOW her immediately. For one thing, at the moment he wasn’t all that ambulatory. He needed to relax at least one portion of his body. Emma wasn’t anything like the grandmother at the DQ, but he shouldn’t react quite so fulsomely only at The Look. He’d never had what the French called the coup de foudre—that glance across a crowded room that knocked the world out of kilter. He had a suspicion this was what it felt like.
He watched her in the kitchen as she bent over the oven to put the bread in to warm. Those tight jeans pulled even tighter.
He wasn’t about to experience that madness now if it killed him.
It just might.
She might be a city slicker and a poor little rich girl, but she could definitely cook. He liked truffles and caviar as well as the next man when and if he could get them, but he’d rather have spaghetti with Emma than truffles from a fancy chef in New Orleans.
“You can’t possibly dig those postholes tonight. It’ll be dark in thirty minutes,” Emma said as she handed him more garlic bread. “Eat hearty. I don’t have any dessert except leftover ice cream from last night.”
“I doubt I could stuff in another bite. I now owe you two dinners. We’ll have to drive into Somerville for anything fancier than the café.”
“I like the café, even if Velma thinks I’m some sort of vampire. So I take it you don’t cook?”
“My momma cooks. Clare preferred take-out pizza to cooking. Take-out anything, actually. I usually came home too late and too tired to care.”
“Clare?”
“Ex-wife. I figured Barbara told you.”
“I didn’t remember her name. And you didn’t have any children, right?”
“Putting it off to be able to buy a house in town. Clare hated living out here.”
“But you own all that land. Don’t you have a barn?”
“It’s falling down. Earl and I work on it some when we have the time. I no longer even bushhog the pasture. You have a barn, too. It’s in pretty rotten shape.
”
“I do not have a barn.”
“Sure you do. And a pond,” Seth said.
“Listen, I spent five summers up here when I was a child. I’d know if Aunt Martha had a barn and a pond.”
“Granted, it’s a small barn in poor shape. I heard Martha’s daddy used to run a few beef cattle back there when she was growing up. The walls are concrete block and still standing, but the roof’s fallen in. She wouldn’t have wanted a kid going back there.”
“I know there’s no pond. I begged Aunt Martha for one of those aboveground pools. She always said she couldn’t afford one for the couple of months I spent up here in the summer. She was right, of course, but kids don’t think that way.”
Seth grinned at her. “How do you suppose those cows got water? Sure as heck no water lines back there.”
“Buckets, I suppose.”
This time he actually laughed. She wanted to hit him. “You have any idea how much even one cow drinks per day?” he asked.
“Then they used rain barrels.”
“Very good,” he said as though he were rewarding a truly backward student who’d made an intellectual breakthrough. “And when the water froze in the winter or we went without rain for six weeks every summer? Sorry, there is a pond. Man-made and fairly shallow, but it’s spring fed and never goes dry. If she didn’t want you messing around in that old barn, think how she would’ve felt if she thought you were wandering around alone where you could drown. She was right to ride herd on you.” He stared out the front window as though he’d forgotten she was there. “I wish all guardians were that careful.”
Emma said, “She told me she didn’t own that piece of land, and I had to stay away from it because the farmer was mean and might shoot me. I was forbidden to go through the barbed wire at the edge of the backyard.”
“So you didn’t. According to my mother, that’s a secondary characteristic of little boys versus girls. I’d have been through that fence the first night I could sneak out my window.”
“I thought you were the big obey-the-rules guy.”
Harlequin Superromance May 2018 Box Set Page 35
