She wouldn’t be able to relax a minute as long as he was around. But he’d made a spot-on observation—she was in a jam. She looked at the paint, then at him, then at the building. She didn’t hide the sigh of grim resignation in her voice. “When do you want to start?”
He gestured at the paint. “This looks like a good time.”
Cade turned his sister’s truck down the side street that ran next to Bickham’s on a cool, gray morning. It looked like it might rain, but he knew better. The overcast would burn off by ten o’clock to reveal the hot blue sky above it. He spotted an old root-beer–brown Skylark parked next to Julianne’s pickup. He’d never seen it around here before, and none of the people she’d had dealings with on the farm would drive something like this. He pulled up behind it and reached around the steering wheel to put the shift lever in park. He’d been trapped at home for three days, and life there had ground his nerves down to a pulp. He was a grown man; it was way past time for him to be out on his own. If only his parents didn’t cling to him like burrs—
He got out and walked around to the back door, noticing the pale gray-brown splotch of spilled paint Julianne had told him about. She said she’d gotten the hardware store to make it right—huh. He wouldn’t have wanted to be Mike Carver when she was finished with him. It made him smile just to imagine it.
Even though he’d checked in with her, she didn’t know he would be here today. The idea of seeing her again also made him smile. He’d win her over yet. He just needed to make her realize how great they would be together. There was a powerful connection between them. He felt it as surely as he would feel that sun once the clouds melted away.
When he got to the top of the stairs, he picked up the scent of fresh paint and regretted not being able to help with it because of this stupid cast he was still wearing. But a wrong-armed painter would be as useless as a three-year-old with a brush, and she’d already had enough trouble with this chore. He turned the doorknob and walked through the back stockroom that also served as the office, then into the store. There was Julianne in a pair of white painter’s coveralls and a baseball cap, taping off the last unpainted wall. He wouldn’t have expected her to look cute dressed like that, but she did.
With all the shelving dismantled and moved out, the place looked and sounded cavernous. Plastic sheeting covered the floors. Then Cade saw a man, dressed the same way as she was, wielding a paint roller on an extension pole.
“Cade,” Julianne said, looking up. “I wasn’t expecting you today.”
He tore his gaze away from the stranger. “Uh, yeah, I managed to get Carol’s truck.”
She walked over to him where he stood near the back curtains. “Be careful where you step. We’ve got wet paint in some places and on the drop cloths.”
“It looks nice,” he said, “really good.” The man glanced at him but kept on with his job. “Did you hire a painter?”
She put the roll of blue tape on her wrist like a bracelet. “No, but you know I mentioned I’d have to hire someone to help with the heavy lifting since you’re still out of commission.” She gestured at his cast. “I do need you for that bookkeeping thing. I hope you can make more sense of it than I could.”
Cade dropped his voice. “Who is this guy?”
She fidgeted with the tape roll and brushed off her T-shirt sleeves. “He’s someone I used to know. He needed the work so . . .”
“Yeah, so?” he prodded.
She smiled. “So far, so good.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What’s his name? Maybe I should call him something besides ‘hey you.’”
Julianne groaned inside and had to stop herself from wringing her hands. It was silly, but she’d worried about how Cade would take this. The only way to avoid conflict would be to send him home, and that wasn’t an option. “It’s Mitchell.”
His eyes opened so wide she expected them to pop out of his head like cold duck corks. “Mitchell Tucker—the man who made you a widow?”
“Shhhh!” She dragged him into the back room. “Yes!” she whispered.
“Why bother shushing me? He knows what he did. Isn’t he the same one who’s been giving you trouble since he came back to town? At least that’s what you told me. Have you taken leave of your senses, woman?”
She straightened her back, something she tended to do when pushed far enough. Everyone at Carver Hardware had seen her rigid posture when she’d gone in to settle the paint problem. “He said he isn’t responsible for the vandalism.”
“And you trust him.”
“No, I don’t.” But she’d allowed desperation to draw a filmy veil over every screaming objection her rational mind tossed at her. She knew she might have made an extremely foolish decision. If she was wrong about Mitchell, she’d find out. She’d kept her distance from him as they worked on the painting, and there had been no easy chitchat between them.
Cade gave her a brief look that suggested she might be the dumbest person on the planet. “If he’s not behind the harassment, who is it?”
Julianne frowned. She resented his badgering. “I don’t know. Cade, this is really more my business than yours. I can understand your curiosity, but I don’t owe you a detailed explanation for my actions.”
Color filled Cade’s face, and he looked at the floor. “I just worry about you is all.”
“I appreciate that, but it’s not your job. Trust me, I worry enough about me for both of us. And my chief concern is getting this place ready to open for business as fast as possible. It has to look better and completely different than plain old Bickham’s did. I need display shelves rebuilt and furniture moved around. And I needed someone who could help with that since you can’t. I have loan payments to make.” She knew it sounded as if she were blaming Cade for breaking his arm, but he couldn’t help with the labor. And she couldn’t wait until the cast came off and he shuffled through physical therapy.
At that moment, Mitchell appeared in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt your whispering about me back here, but, Julianne, I have a question.”
She winced before facing him, embarrassed over being caught. “Yes, Mitchell, what is it?”
“The trim around the doors and windows—do you want it painted white or the gray?”
“It’s taupe.”
“Yeah, okay, taupe. Which do you want?”
Cade looked away, and Julianne felt herself flush. She sidestepped the obvious and said, “Mitchell, this is Cade Lindgren. He used to work for me out at the farm.” There were muttered acknowledgments between the two men. Mitchell glanced at Cade’s cast and gave him a dismissive once-over. The tension among them felt so tangible, so volatile, that if any of them had lit a match there might have been an explosion. “Let’s go with white for the trim,” she continued.
He nodded. “I think I can finish up here by tomorrow if you do the taping.”
“That would be great. I need to get this business going.”
Mitchell ducked out again, and she turned to Cade. “I really could use your help with the accounting. You did offer that.”
“Right,” he said with an uncomfortable chuckle. “Show me what you’re working with.”
Julianne got him set up in the back room on her computer, along with Uncle Joe’s cryptic record books, and gave him a cream soda from the apartment-size beer refrigerator she’d brought with her from the house. “Are you familiar with this software?” she asked, gesturing at the monitor. “I’ve used it for a while and I didn’t see a reason to buy something else right now. I think it will work for us, if we can just get Joe’s stuff unraveled.”
He looked at the monitor and moved the mouse to the left side of the keyboard. “Yeah, this looks pretty straightforward. But when you want to make a switch a year or two down the road, I’ll be fine with that, too.”
Plainly, he was thinking of this as a permanent arrangement. She tapped the stack of ledgers and said, “Let’s just get through the next week or two.
”
“Pull up a chair so we can go over these, then.” He pushed aside the soda can and made room for her.
Exasperation threatened to make her snappy. “No, you just do the best you can. I’ll be out front taping off the trim if you need anything,” she said, relieved to get away from him.
She found Mitchell where he should be, rolling paint on the walls. It helped that he’d convinced her to buy a power-pump system. It attached directly to the paint can, so he was able to get a lot more done without having to refill trays—which always got dumped over, in her experience—or reload the roller.
They were all making real progress, it seemed to her, until Cade started interrupting her for every little dot and dash he came across. Initially, she believed he was having as much trouble as she’d had, which wasn’t very comforting. But then she began to suspect he was only looking for reasons to drag her into the office and away from Mitchell. At first he didn’t bother to get up—he just called loudly enough for her to hear him. When she began to ignore him, he came out to survey the redecorating process and to ask other questions.
After nearly ten such episodes, she tossed the roll of tape on the floor and went to the back, motioning for him to follow. “What’s the problem, Cade?” She had trouble keeping the exasperation out of her voice.
He pointed at an item that straddled both the deposit and deduction columns of a check register he held. “Oh—what do you suppose he meant by this?”
“It looks like a phone number to me. Uncle Joe was kind of bad about making notes on whatever was handy.” She pointed to Uncle Joe’s doodle-covered wall.
“Right. I see that now.”
She heard Mitchell’s footsteps. “Julianne, I guess I’ll take off for the day. I’ve gotten as far as I can until you finish your part. I left the overalls hanging on the hook in the bathroom over there again, if that’s okay.” He’d changed back into his jeans and T-shirt.
“All right, thanks. It’ll be done before you get here tomorrow.”
“See you later, Lindgren.”
Cade turned. “Uh, yeah. Later.”
After Mitchell’s footsteps died away on the gravel and they heard his car door slam, Cade said, “He’s coming back tomorrow?”
Julianne heaved a sigh and leaned a hip against a case of paper towels. “I don’t like this, Cade. I don’t like the way you’re acting. If this arrangement is going to be a problem for you, or”—she nodded at the computer—“if you’re not comfortable with doing the work you offered to do, you’d better tell me now.”
His eyes widened briefly. “No, no, I’m fine with everything.” He rubbed his free hand across his hair. “Well, I admit that finding Tucker here was a ripe surprise. After all, you’ve been pretty outspoken about what you think of him.”
“Yes, I know. I never expected this myself. In fact, it’s the last thing I would have imagined doing.”
“He looks pretty low-end, especially with those scars covering his arms. Who knows what trouble he got into in prison to earn those?”
She stiffened again. “They’re burn scars. He got them when he carried Wes out of the barn the night of the fire.”
“Oh . . . well . . .” He took her hand in his and interlaced their fingers loosely. “Look, I know you’re a little shy about your feelings for me, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. We’d be so great together, you and me.”
“No, really, Cade—”
“Just hear me out, Julianne.”
She looked at his earnest eyes and waited.
“You’ve been alone for a long time. I have, too. I haven’t come right out and said so, but I’ve imagined you as my wife so many times, I can even see you waiting at the altar for me with our friends lining both sides of the aisle. I believe you care about me, and I’m crazy about you.”
She tried to pull her hand out of his, but he tightened his grip on her fingers. “Cade—”
“Now, now, don’t get nervous . . . please, just listen for a minute. You can’t make me believe you’re happy with your lot, facing the world by yourself, struggling with burdens that would be easier to bear with another set of shoulders. And kids? What about having kids?”
Julianne sighed. Everything Cade said was true. She was lonely; she missed knowing that someone would care whether she came home or not, missed the sound of familiar footsteps, of sharing a life. The true intimacy of body and spirit—well, that was something she hadn’t known, even with Wes. Maybe it was just a happy fantasy poets and songwriters talked about, moonlight and champagne, the tooth fairy and rose petals. Once, a long time ago, it had seemed real . . .
“Julianne, marry me. I can give you all that.”
Startled out of her ruminations, she said, “Marriage! Oh, Cade, no, no. I’m not the woman you want for that.”
“Yes, you are. I promise if you’re my wife, I’ll do my very best to make you happy and give you everything you’ve been missing. Don’t say no. Just think about it. Please?”
He kissed her then, as if to emphasize his promise. It felt weird. He smelled of cream soda and some cologne she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t the sort of experience that kept a woman awake at night, with her imagination running free and her lips still swollen from kisses that were all the sweeter and more exciting because they were so forbidden. She hadn’t liked it much the first time, and this kiss was no different. If anything, it was just strange.
She pulled back. “Cade, I think you’re a great guy and we’re friends—”
“Being friends is important—of course we’re friends.”
She couldn’t argue with that, exactly. “Don’t go around assuming that we’re engaged, because we are not.”
He grinned. “Right.”
Yanking her hand of out his, she stressed, “I mean it, Cade! We’re friends, but I won’t let you push me or try to tell me what to do. If you do, I’ll manage to figure out the books myself, you can go back to working at your parents’ place, and even our friendship will be over.”
His smile dimmed by a few hundred watts. “Okay.”
CHAPTER SIX
“Boy, where are you off to these days? Did you find another job after that Boyce female got you fired from Benavente’s?” Mitchell was headed out the door with Knucklehead fast on his heels when Earl stopped him.
The Tucker patriarch surveyed his kingdom and his son from the seventies-era plaid, Herculon-covered recliner. He’d varied his dark-blue Dickies wardrobe with an old T-shirt that read MUSTACHE RIDES 25¢.
Mitchell had known his absence would come up sooner or later. Later would have been better. “I’m just out doing this and that.”
The old man frowned. “Sounds like Darcy. ‘This and that’ usually amounts to a whole lotta nothing. You can’t expect James to pick up all the bills around here. That air conditioner”—he nodded at the one in the living room window—“is gasping for breath like a rented mule. I want to see a new one in its place.”
Mitchell’s irritation began to grow. “You talk to the other boys about that. I pitch in, and you know it. I brought home seventy-five bucks’ worth of groceries the other day. All Darcy buys is beer.”
“If you aren’t working, where’s the money coming from?”
“I didn’t say I’m not working; you did.” He had cash that he’d stowed away to see himself through this, but his new job in Alpine helped, too. “Anyway, aren’t you still getting money from your disability scam?”
“Yeah, but it’s not my job to take care of y’all anymore.”
Mitch resisted the great temptation to remind Earl that he never had taken care of them, mostly because he didn’t have the time or energy for the old man’s argument that would follow. Besides, it wouldn’t change anything. If he was going to live here for a while, he knew it would be best to keep friction to a minimum. That didn’t change history, though.
After their mother had left, Mitchell had to do some fast talking to keep them out of state custody. That and having a fra
zzled, overburdened caseworker had done the trick. He’d convinced her that he’d be responsible for all of them, but a little financial assistance would be ever so helpful, ma’am. They hadn’t had much, but it seemed to Mitch that keeping them together would be better for them in the long run than letting the system split them up and send them off to one foster home after another. Earl had come back just often enough to prove that he was around now and then.
“Are you wanting for anything?” A sharp glare and the edge in his voice managed to shut off further complaint, Mitch hoped.
“You taking the dog with you?”
“Yeah. Any objections?”
Earl waved off the idea and made a big show of searching for the TV remote control. “Hell no. I don’t need that flea bag around here eating us out of house and home all day. You go on. I got Andy Griffith to watch.”
Mitch clenched his back teeth and reached down to pull Knucklehead against his knee. “I feed him, Earl. I buy his food and his flea stuff. We’ll see you later.”
He had to get out before his resentment got a good fire burning under it. He slammed the door behind him and put Knucklehead in the Skylark. The dog immediately bounced into the driver’s seat. “Move over. It’s not your turn to drive.” The A/C worked only when it felt like it—not today—so he powered down the windows, and his companion was happy to ride shotgun with his head hanging out in the breeze, even if he liked to see out both sides of the car. Mitchell was pleased to see that with some decent food and care, the dog was filling out. His ribs were far less noticeable, and his ratty coat, after falling out in big tufts like a shedding buffalo’s, was now growing in thick and shiny.
Inheriting Knucklehead was just a lucky break. Mitch felt closer to him than to any of his family. The animal was always glad to see him. This was the first time he was taking him along to Julianne’s. She was jumpy around him, and it was plain that she talked to him only when she had to. He hoped Knucklehead would settle her down a bit.
After You Were Gone Page 9
