Vermont Valentine (Holiday Hearts #3)

by Kristin Hardy

  “You’ve got me. Jacob’s not exactly the type for long conversations on the topic. Anyway, it was only a kiss,” she said impatiently. “It’s not worth dwelling on.”

  “So why are you?”

  “Because. I hate not knowing, you know?”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “And I wouldn’t mind a little more.”

  Chapter Eight

  He’d never been a big fan of washing dishes. Jacob carried a stack of galvanized sap buckets across the snow-covered yard behind the sugarhouse. The idea of spending time cleaning them wasn’t even remotely appealing. Still, they needed to be ready to use for the year’s sap run, and that meant giving them at least a cursory scrub. All forty-five hundred of them.

  He set the stack next to the others sitting by the sugar-house’s back door and walked back to the utility cart. Food products were food products and it didn’t matter what was acceptable to the state: Molly Trask decreed that all the collecting buckets be washed before the start of each season. And that was what he’d spend the last half of his week doing.

  That, and thinking about Celie. Her daily visits to update him on the inoculations were almost enough to make him forget the frustration of being stuck at the sugarhouse instead of helping her. Something about not knowing when she’d appear made her present his whole day. And how pathetic was that?

  He reached for another stack of buckets. There were plenty more important things for him to be thinking about, like how much the nine acres they’d lost were going to impact their gross, whether this was the year to start tapping the maples on the northern slope and how the hell he was going to accomplish the work of two people during the sap run.

  Minor details like that.

  Somehow, though, he found himself thinking instead about a pair of laughing eyes, about the way conversations with Celie never stayed linear but went bounding off in unexpected directions. Somehow, he kept remembering the taste of a pair of cool, soft lips and the way she’d fitted against him.

  “Jacob?”

  He turned too quickly, and the stack of buckets in his hands knocked a cluster of others off the utility cart, sending them clattering everywhere.

  Cursing, Jacob bent to pick them up, turning to see a spare-looking man with a weathered face, hunched into his plaid wool coat. He straightened. “Hey, Deke.”

  “Sorry about that.” Deke leaned over to pick up a few buckets and put them on the cart. “I thought you heard me.”

  He would have if he hadn’t been preoccupied with things that shouldn’t have been bothering him. Jacob reached under the axle of the cart to pull out a couple more buckets. “Not a crisis.”

  “Can I talk with you for a minute?”

  Jacob eyed Deke, trying to gauge how much his hands were shaking, which would indicate the purpose of his visit. A loan, maybe, or a favor. Or maybe he was just in the neighborhood. You never knew with Deke. It depended on how much time he’d been spending lately at the tavern. “Sure. What’s up?”

  Deke shifted a bit and cleared his throat. “I was wondering if you need me to work the sugaring season for you this year.”

  Jacob wished he had an answer. The sugaring season was about the only time of year Deke worked steadily; the rest of the time he managed to get by with odd jobs and intervals of shiftlessness. Under supervision, the man worked and worked well. On his own, he was erratic at best. Jacob and his father had always traded off—one of them ran the evaporator and the other spent the day in the sugarbush, supervising the gathering crews, keeping Deke on the straight and narrow. This year?

  This year Jacob was on his own.

  They had storage for about four thousand gallons of sap at the best of times. On a good day, the sugarbush could produce five. That meant that someone had to be boiling sap like mad to make room for it all, or else they’d be letting the precious fluid flow onto the forest floor, and then he really would be in the unemployment line come fall. The problem was, once he fired up the evaporator of a day, he had to stay with it. And that meant leaving Deke and a crew of five or six other guys to roam the sugarbush on their own. If he was lucky, Deke would focus and get the job done. If he wasn’t…

  “Are you ready to stay dry?”

  “That ain’t fair, Jacob. I’ve done some good work for you.”

  “I know you have. And that’s what I need now—you, here, everyday, on time.”

  “I got it.”

  “You can’t just forget to show up,” Jacob said sharply.

  “I won’t.” Deke coughed. “You can trust me, Jacob. Your daddy always did. Floyd and Billy’ll work, too.”

  Floyd and Billy, Deke’s brother-in-law and nephew. They’d keep him a little more steady. “I could use all three of you guys, but you’re going to have to bust your behinds.”

  “Billy can only work in the mornings and after school.” Deke’s eyes flicked toward him. “He’s got a couple of buddies on the wrestling team who want to help out, too.”

  High-school kids. Not for the first time, Jacob wished he had brothers or cousins around to help, like Charlie Willoughby did. He understood that Gabe and Nick had their own lives. It was just that sometimes he wished thing things could be different.

  Sometimes, he wished it didn’t all come down to him. But if wishes were horses…

  Jacob rested his hands on his hips. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  Deke drew his head between his shoulders, looking a little like a skinny turtle. “You’re still gonna need more people on your crew,” he said obstinately.

  “That’s my worry,” Jacob snapped. The worrying part he had down; it was the answers that were harder.

  Celie pulled up against the post-and-rail fence in the parking lot and turned off her truck. It was break time.

  And she wanted to see Jacob.

  “Celie!” Molly Trask looked up from folding tea towels to beam at Celie as she walked into the gift shop.

  “How are you?”

  Molly set the stack aside. “I’m fine. How about you?”

  “Keeping busy.”

  “It looks like it. You look a little tired, if you don’t mind me saying. Why don’t you come into the café and have something to eat? You can sit down and relax for a bit.”

  It was nice to be mothered, even if her own was just a few hours away in Montreal. Celie smiled. “Thanks but I don’t have a lot of time. I actually need to see Jacob.”

  “He’s out back. You can talk to him in a minute. At least have a bite. How about a maple ice cream? It’s quick.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be offering me a sandwich or something nutritional?”

  “‘Life is uncertain, eat dessert first.’” Molly quoted, leading her into the café and walking behind the counter. “Sugar cone?” She raised her eyebrows.

  Celie surrendered. “No sense in doing things by halves.”

  “A woman after my own heart.” Molly pulled the lever on the machine to send out the pale tan curl of ice cream, whirling it expertly into a tower. “There you are.” She handed it over. “Now you can say you’ve tried our famous maple ice cream.”

  Celie took the cone from her and sampled. She let out a small moan, closed her eyes briefly and took another taste.

  “Well?” Molly raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m never eating anything else again.” Celie licked up a dollop of the rich, sweet cream and let the flavor spread through her mouth. “This is incredible. I’ve never had anything like it.” She took another taste.

  “It’s always here. Come on by any time.”

  “Watch out, I will. And you’ll be responsible when my pants don’t fit.” Celie glanced at her watch. “Jacob’s out back?”

  Molly nodded. “Take that door to your left just as you go inside the sugarhouse.”

  Celie stepped through the door that led from the gift shop to the chill of the unheated sugarhouse. Directly ahead of her stood the evaporator, with its pool-table-sized shallow boiling pans. In a few weeks, they’d be
full of bubbling sap; for now, the firebox below them was dark and cold, the door at the end of the room that led to the wood supply, closed.

  To her left, another door led to the little yard in back. It was partially ajar, sunlight gleaming through the cracks around the frame. Even as Celie put her hand on the handle, she heard voices.

  Deke stared down at his feet. “You got a hundred other sugar-makers in the county gonna be hiring people,” he said, scuffing his toes in the dirty snow. “You need to decide now. You oughta give Billy’s friends a chance.”

  “I don’t need to have a couple of kids looking for an easy buck running around my sugarbush,” Jacob responded. “It’s my problem and I’ll deal with it.”

  “You need Billy’s friends,” Deke protested with uncharacteristic force, his breath showing white in the cool air. “You can’t do it with just the three of us. Even with Billy’s friends we’re all gonna be busting our asses. And everyone’s gonna be hired by the time you realize it. Who are you going to get?”

  “I’ll find someone.”

  “Jacob?”

  He turned to see Celie by the door from the sugarhouse. And for just an instant, it seemed everything screamed to a halt. She stood there in her red parka, cheeks rosy against her dark hair, and it was like someone turned up the brightness on his entire world.

  “I’m interrupting. I’ll go back inside,” she said quickly. And licked the maple ice cream cone in her hand.

  Ice cream, he thought feverishly, trying not to stare at her mouth. Slick and sweet and way too tempting. “That’s okay,” he found himself saying. “We’re done here.”

  “Not quite.” She pointed at the buckets on the ground.

  “Close enough.”

  She gave one of those smiles that always stunned him. And then he realized that she was looking at Deke. “Oh, uh, Celie, this is Deke,” he said. “He works on the gathering crew. Deke, this is Celie Favreau.”

  “Nice to meet you, Deke.”

  Deke turned bright red and ducked his head more deeply into the collar of his coat. “’Meetcha,” he mumbled.

  “Looks like the sugaring season’s coming.” She gestured at the buckets. “Are you looking forward to it?”

  Deke sent Jacob a hunted look. “I gotta go,” he muttered and scuttled away. Faster than Jacob had ever seen him move before, now that he thought about it.

  “Wait. But…” Celie turned to Jacob. “I didn’t mean to run him off,” she said helplessly.

  A corner of Jacob’s mouth tugged up. “Deke’s not a big social guy.”

  “You two must make a great pair.” Celie popped the last bite of her cone in her mouth, to Jacob’s relief. She bent over to pick up some of the fallen buckets. “You can work together and never say a word. Although he was saying a few from what I overheard.”

  Jacob shot her a suspicious look and began stacking together buckets. “What did you overhear?”

  “That you’re going to be in trouble when the sap run starts.”

  “It’s not going to be a problem.”

  “Really? Working a hundred acres with a crew of four?”

  “It’s fine.” He thumped the buckets down on the cart with unnecessary force.

  “So, what, you do the work of three men gathering sap all day and spend the night boiling it down? That works. After all, sleep’s for losers, right?”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “There’s that word again.”

  “I’ll deal with it.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “You know, there are easier ways to do this.”

  “I like this way. It works.”

  “How do you know? The season hasn’t started yet. Even you have your limits, Jacob. Oh, I forgot, it’s probably fine.”

  “It will be.”

  “You know, if you’re so obsessed with doing things without help, why don’t you join the rest of the sugar-makers in the twenty-first century and link your trees together with tubing? Then you really could do everything yourself.”

  He spared her a glance. “I don’t believe in tubing.”

  “What is that, a religious conviction?”

  He carried a stack of buckets to the sugarhouse door. “Tapping with buckets was good enough for my grandfather and my great-grandfather, and his father before him. It’s good enough for me, too.”

  Celie followed him across the slush with her own stack. “Well, my grandmother and great-grandmother and her mother before her all probably used a washtub and wringer to clean their clothes. Me, I’m smart enough to look for an easier way.”

  He smiled faintly. “Maybe you’re just lazy.”

  “And you’re just stubborn. You can’t have it both ways. Either you need more help or you need to go to tubing. Religious convictions or no.”

  “I’ll get it done.” He headed back to the cart.

  “How?” she demanded, scampering after him. “There are only so many hours of daylight this time of year, in case you hadn’t noticed. And even you can’t be two places at once.”

  “So?”

  “So why not let modern technology simplify things? If you network your trees with tubing, you’ll cut your collection time by a good sixty or seventy percent.”

  “I’m not going to have my sap running through tubes and maybe picking up trace chemicals and toxins.” He slammed the last of the stray buckets together. “I don’t trust plastics. They leave a flavor. They might leach out toxins.”

  “They’ve tested for all that. It’s safe. They’ve worked out the bugs.” She looked out at the sugarbush with calculating eyes. “You could have a tubing system in here in time for this season, if you wanted to.”

  “Sure, and if we have a couple of bad seasons after I spend all that money, I’m broke. Things are going to be hard enough financially this year as it is.” He lifted a stack of buckets. “I don’t need any more challenges.”

  “So do it a piece at a time. It’s probably smarter anyway. Technology’s not your enemy, Jacob. We’re trying to help.”

  He scowled at her and set the buckets back down. “Do you ever give up? Listen to me, I don’t need your help.” What he needed was something different entirely.

  “But it’s the best way.” She fisted her hands on her hips. “You’d know that if you weren’t being so pigheaded.”

  “Pigheaded?” His eyes narrowed. “What do you know about it? Have you ever actually worked a maple-sugar farm? Do you have any idea what it’s about?”

  “Sure I know what it’s about. You pound taps into maples and hang buckets on them.”

  “But you’ve never actually taken sap from tree to jug.”

  “Of course not. My specialty is insects, not sugar-making.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He turned back to the cart. “That’s what you people always do, seize on stuff just because it’s new, without ever asking if it’s really better or just different.”

  Irritation flashed in her eyes. “‘You people’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Research types who haven’t been around long enough to know how things work.”

  “And you think that’s me?”

  “Admit it, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Fine,” she snapped, “then show me.”

  He frowned at her. “I don’t do tours.”

  “And I’m not talking about tours. Take me on your crew. Let me work for you.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “Don’t you go all superior and start telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about when you’re not willing to show me. Take me through it,” she demanded, “teach me how it’s done. I need to know and you obviously need help.”

  Jacob snorted. “The day I need help from a little bit like you is the day I’m really in trouble.”

  Celie took three steps forward until she was just inches from him. “Little bit?” she echoed, poking him in the chest in outrage. “Just who are you calling little? I can bench press a hundred p
ounds.”

  He took a step back. “Did you have too much coffee this morning?”

  “Don’t you patronize me.” She poked him again.

  “Hey.”

  “You talk so big, back it up.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” He moved to shift away and tripped on one of the deep ridges frozen into the slush and mud of the yard. One minute he was standing, the next he was backpedaling furiously. And tumbling on his back into the three-foot snowbank at the edge.

  He sprawled on the snow in his heavy buckskin coat, his feet barely touching the ground. Trying to get purchase and roll over was impossible; he felt like an overturned turtle. Helplessly, he began to laugh.

  Celie walked over to stand between his feet and stared down at him. “Want some help?” she asked, sticking out her hand. “Or do you want to do it yourself?”

  “This help, I’ll take.” But she wasn’t braced for his weight because when he reached for her hand, she landed on top of him with a surprised oof.

  Her sherry-colored eyes sparked with irritation, bright and furious on his. But it was her mouth that he couldn’t ignore. Full, tempting and he remembered how sweet. So close, so tantalizing, everything he’d been thinking about for days, now here in his arms.

  And before he could tell himself not to, he slid one hand around the nape of her neck and pulled her down to him.

  Her mouth was soft with surprise, her lips parted. Sweet and addictive as maple cream, warm against his. He could tell himself that he shouldn’t want. He could tell himself he had way too many things to worry about. He could tell himself it was the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong woman. It didn’t matter.

  He couldn’t stop.

  This wasn’t simple attraction, this razor-sharp need that sliced through him. It wasn’t just desire. It was something much more, something elemental, something that struck to the core of who he was. It was raw and heated and all the snow in the world wasn’t enough to quench it.

  He felt the annoyance fade from her, felt it when her mouth turned avid and questing. And he could taste the maple ice cream, still rich and cool on her tongue. He could taste the earthiness and something else, something that he remembered from the last time because a taste like that stayed with a man.