Tennessee Rescue

by Carolyn McSparren

  She was still on the wrong side of the fence.

  She put her knife away, ready for her next disaster, and tossed her walking stick across the fence and past the azaleas onto the lawn. She tugged on her gloves again, separated the strands of wire, then slid her good foot through and forced it to take her weight. She bent as close to double as she could manage, climbing through the wire with only a few rips on the back of her shirt, then pulled her bad foot through.

  And fell onto the azaleas. She’d never be able to stand on her bad foot without that walking stick as a crutch. It had landed a good eight feet away. She’d have to crawl on hands and knees to reach it.

  She’d hardly ever felt this tired in her life, or this dispirited. And so thirsty. She longed for that bottle of water she’d left on the kitchen counter. She couldn’t do this. She was done, done with this place, the animals, Barbara, Seth—mostly Seth.

  He’d laugh at her, then he’d yell at her. She felt diminished.

  And stupid.

  And hurt. She yelled out her frustration.

  “Emma?” Seth’s voice. She heard two sets of footsteps thudding toward her out of the twilight. He wasn’t alone! Bad enough for Seth to see her like this, but a stranger?

  The final indignity.

  “Emma, where are you?”

  He loomed up out of the twilight. Linebacker, superhero, Prince Charming. But she sure wasn’t any fairy princess, and he was more like the dragon than the prince.

  “Go away. I’m fine.”

  He stopped in front of her. “Then why are you spread-eagled on the azaleas? Doesn’t seem comfortable. What’s with your hair?”

  “My new look. Witch of Endor.”

  “Damn, you’re bleeding!”

  He reached for her, caught her under the arms and lifted her up and across the plants.

  “Ow!”

  He set her down, but she crashed to the ground again.

  He dropped beside her. “You’re hurt.”

  “I twisted my ankle. At least I think that’s all it is.” She looked up at the man standing behind Seth, and offered him her muddy hand the way she’d been taught at tea parties when she was ten. “How do you do? I’m Emma French, and you are?”

  The man took her hand. Emma watched for any sign of a snicker, but he managed to act perfectly serious. Emma suspected it cost him major control points.

  “I’m Earl Matthews, ma’am. I work with Seth.”

  “Oh, yes, he’s told me nice things about you.”

  Seth made a growling sound, stood and started to sweep her into his arms.

  “Don’t do that! I’m too heavy!”

  “You are not.”

  “I know how heavy I am. Help me up. Earl, please get me that stick. Seth, please just help me into the house.” Ha. Back in control. Now that it was over and he was here, she felt herself tearing up and thought, No way. I will not cry. She leaned against him, however, as he supported her into the house and to the sofa.

  He knelt in front of her. “Give me your foot.”

  “I can do it.”

  “Shut up and give me your foot. This is the kind of thing I do for a living. Folks are always getting bunged up in the woods.”

  Earl had disappeared, but the refrigerator was making ice cube noises. Good.

  She figured Seth might try to cut her boot off and prepared to fight him. They were expensive boots. But he eased it off so gently that she only caught her breath and whimpered once. He did cut her sock off with one of the blades of his big woodsman’s knife. After five agonizing minutes in which he manipulated her foot and ankle, he pronounced, “Sprain. Not a bad one.”

  “I do not want to go to the doctor.”

  “Fine.”

  “We’ll ice it and wrap it,” Earl said. He held a basin filled with ice cubes and one of the clean towels from the counter. “You should be able to walk on it tomorrow.”

  Seth didn’t lift his head to look at her as he said, “Tell me.”

  She fell back against the sofa, felt a surge of fury. “I did something stupid. Big surprise.”

  “Earl, mind bringing my first aid kit from the truck?” He turned back to Emma. “We need to rinse the blood out of your hair and assess the damage. Did you hit your head? Were you unconscious even for a second?”

  “No. The barbed wire saved me, much as I hate to admit it.”

  So far he was taking this seriously. But of course he was. He was used to this. Dumb human tricks. Dumb city-girl tricks. If she’d really been hurt, he could get in trouble if someone found out about the skunks and building the cage. She’d done nothing since she got here except screw up his life. He’d done everything for her, and she repaid him by getting hurt in the woods.

  What was she thinking? Selfish and spoiled. Need to get back to where I know who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EMMA KNEW HOW to set up for parties. Her mother had begun her lessons when she was hardly old enough to learn which side of the place setting the knife went on and how to fold the towels. She’d polished silver for Christmas dinner when she could barely climb onto the kitchen stool. She was skilled at organizing, so she usually wound up doing it.

  She was going to make her first country party as perfect as she could.

  She started by hunting through Aunt Martha’s attic to see what kind of linens remained without holes or mildew. The Mulligans had been good tenants, thanks to Aunt Martha’s lawyer, and had apparently never touched the boxes in the attic. Emma knew which ones they were. She’d helped pack and label them after Aunt Martha died. She’d also spent hours ironing linen napkins and tablecloths before they were put away. Aunt Martha did not approve of anything but plain white linen on her table.

  She dragged two heavy plastic boxes down the attic stairs and opened them on the living room floor after having sprayed around and over them for brown recluse spiders. Although Aunt Martha had been dead for almost five years, the bags the table linens were stored in had kept them clean, not moth-eaten, and without a speck of mold or mildew.

  The two folding tables on her back porch would do for serving, so spent several hours scrubbing them so her guests wouldn’t die of cholera if they used them.

  She found enough matching linen napkins to feed Aunt Martha’s entire church circle. Unfortunately, all the bags were of the kind that you stuffed, closed, then vacuumed until you sucked all the air out, leaving a tight rectangle about a quarter the depth of whatever you started with. They worked really well to conserve space, except that every crease and wrinkle was smushed into them as the air was smushed out.

  Emma would have to iron creased napkins and tablecloths while spraying them with starch and air freshener to remove even the slightest odor. She didn’t have any dowels long enough to roll the cloths on, so she’d have to lay them on the bed in the guest room to keep them from getting wrinkled again.

  She’d learned at least half a dozen ways to fold dinner napkins from the waiters she knew. For a picnic, swans seemed appropriate. Easy and kind of country. Not quite ducks, but close.

  Next she went back to the attic to hunt for serving dishes. Emma came across another heavy box that contained Aunt Martha’s second-best silver-plated flatware. Emma had the antique sterling at her apartment.

  She didn’t need the silver candlesticks—not for a picnic—but she did need some of the enameled bowls and a couple of platters. Nothing fancy, although one of the bowls was Waterford crystal.

  She could use the famille rose divided plate for mayonnaise and mustard—two kinds of mustard, since the kids would probably want ballpark and the adults might prefer Dijon. Two kinds of pickles and pickle relish, of course. And sliced onions and tomatoes and lettuce. Add sliced lemon and fresh mint that grew in abundance outside her back door for the iced tea.

  All the
dishes would need to be scrubbed by hand, but the alternative was plastic bowls. Aunt Martha would whirl in her grave if Emma served a meal in plastic bowls. Earl’s wife, Janeen, would probably bring the potato salad in plastic, but that was fine.

  She’d have to spring for plastic goblets for the iced tea and soft drinks, and plastic wineglasses. With kids around, it would be crazy to serve drinks in crystal. The yard would wind up full of shards. Not safe.

  For the same reason, she decided to invest in really fancy paper plates. It was tacky, but better a little tacky than broken glass and cut fingers. Since she couldn’t fit everyone around her dining room table, she’d have to provide quilts for people to sit on under the trees.

  Finally, she found a lovely shallow majolica vase that would be perfect for flowers in the center of the serving table. Very country.

  She’d pick up a bouquet of spring flowers at the supermarket when she went to get the food Friday.

  She sat on the floor in the living room and went over her finds. Getting everything ready before the first guest—well, worker—showed up would be challenging, especially when she had to clean and straighten the house, as well. Good thing she’d agreed to start working for Barbara on Monday and not before.

  Although the party was supposed to be outside, people would wander in and out of the house. She might call it The Hovel, but she didn’t want anyone else to feel free to do so.

  She set up the ironing board in the kitchen where she could watch daytime television and iron. After ten minutes of that, she put some Mozart on her CD. Aunt Martha had taught her that Mozart was absolutely the best accompaniment to any sort of household chore. Chalk up another one for Aunt Martha. “I wish you were here,” she said with a sniff. “But thanks to you, I can do this at a walk.”

  She’d always enjoyed getting ready for parties, big or small.

  Nathan had given her an internship and then hired her fresh out of college not only for her marketing degree, but because he trusted her to handle any function that required food and drink, from a sit-down breakfast for prospective clients in the boardroom to cocktail parties for three hundred people at The Peabody. He said she could feed ’em as well as schmooze ’em into signing large checks to the agency. Lately she’d helped create whole marketing presentations, ad campaigns, websites, once even a proprietary comic book, but she’d never been allowed to let go of the entertainment end of her job.

  She managed to fit in serving on committees for the symphony ball and the ballet ball and the opera garden party every June. She called banquet captains at the big hotels and country clubs by their first names and had the reputation of being able to pull triumphs out of impending disasters. She spoke fluent “caterer” and “florist” and occasionally “limousine.”

  She could do everything to make a party a success—except cook for it. Other people, mostly caterers, handled that. She made certain the hors d’oeuvres that were supposed to be hot were hot, and those supposed to be cold were properly chilled. Hot coffee was piping, chilled white wine was cold enough, but never too cold. She expected perfection and usually she got it.

  Seth thought she could cook. In fact, she could manage chili, spaghetti Bolognese, salad and a couple of other simple dishes. Period.

  She liked dressing up. She enjoyed meeting strangers. She liked snatching success from the jaws of disaster. She loved being a fixer. It was only a small part or her job, but it was fun to spend other people’s money on things she would never be able to afford.

  She had met Trip at a particularly fancy cocktail buffet over glasses of imported champagne and blinis made with fresh beluga caviar. She’d impressed him by going into the kitchen and calming a hysterical chef who decided his beef tenderloins were overcooked and tried to throw them in the garbage. They weren’t, thank heaven. She hadn’t the foggiest notion how to rescue them if they were.

  Trip asked her out for drinks the following night. And from there... She realized now that he wasn’t looking for a wife—a helpmate—as much as he was looking for a hostess who gave him privileges.

  After they’d been dating for a while, Trip had suggested she take a course at the local French cooking school before they married. It was important to entertain important clients at home. She replied that she had a dozen caterers on speed dial. Who had time to go to cooking school? Anybody ought to be able to read a cookbook, right? Except that for her, the average cookbook seemed to be written in ancient Sumerian.

  For this first small country weekend thing, Seth had promised to do the grilling. The ancient charcoal grill on the far corner of her front porch wasn’t anything fancy, but according to Seth, it would work just fine. He’d brought over a big bag of briquettes, starter fluid and cooking spray the day before, then spent an hour scouring the grill.

  Earl’s wife, Janeen, had offered to bring homemade potato salad. Emma ordered the big chocolate cake and bought already “pattied” hamburger patties, hot dogs long enough for their buns, drinks and everything else she’d need.

  She figured even she was capable of slicing onions and tomatoes and washing lettuce without opening a vein.

  The skunks would be carefully locked in their pantry with food and water. No one who didn’t already know would find out she had them.

  When she collapsed with an iced tea on her porch steps Friday afternoon as she waited for Seth, bringing the cake, she couldn’t click off the big checklist in her mind. It still held too many unchecked squares.

  I have run banquets for five hundred people, complete with flaming baked Alaskas. Why on earth am I as terrified as if I were serving the queen of England and all the court? She swallowed a cube of ice, choked and coughed as hard as though she’d inhaled phosgene gas.

  Because they’re Seth’s friends and colleagues, dummy, she thought as she wiped the tears from her eyes and coughed a final time. I want him to see me as competent. So far I haven’t managed competence in any way, shape or form.

  She chose to ignore the great barbed-wire debacle and hoped Seth would do the same. She no longer limped on her twisted ankle, and she’d washed the dried blood out of her hair. Plenty of hair spray kept the little spiky bits lying flat. Occasionally they popped up so she looked like Buckwheat in the old Our Gang comedies, but she couldn’t help that.

  She was worn out from ironing and scrubbing, but she hadn’t cut the grass or pruned the azaleas. Too late now.

  At the rate she was sending out résumés looking for another job, she’d be working for Barbara as a part-time clerk when she filed for Social Security.

  Would that be so bad? It was more fun than being charming to corporate executives who thought she appreciated being hit on by drunken, middle-aged men who considered her a perk of whatever deal Nathan pursued with them.

  If Nathan offered her job back, would she take it? If she didn’t, she should be locked up in the local home for the seriously deranged. But it no longer sounded as much fun as it once had.

  And scrubbing rust off tables was?

  She saw Seth’s SUV roll into her driveway, and her heart did that thing it did whenever she saw him. It was extremely annoying that she felt her ears turn red and the pulse in her throat begin to thrum so loudly that she worried he could hear it from the road. That sort of reaction was supposed to happen when you had a crush on the paperboy when you were thirteen!

  * * *

  SHE WAS SITTING on the top step of her porch drinking a big glass of iced tea. He hoped she was waiting for him. Her chopped hair shone in the afternoon sun like a bucket of doubloons from a Spanish treasure shipwreck. How had he thought when he first met her that she wasn’t beautiful? Granted, she’d looked like a drowned, angry bobcat, but he should’ve been able to see through that. His hormones certainly had.

  It would seem that he preferred streaky-haired blondes with eyes as gray as thunderclouds to brunettes with hazel eyes like Clare.

 
Emma’s eyes met his head-on. No sideways, flirty glances. He got those a lot. Must be the uniform.

  As he walked across the road to bring her the cake, he wished she’d jump up from the porch stairs and fling herself into his arms. If she did, he wouldn’t let her go.

  Except it would smash the cake.

  Cake or no cake, that wasn’t going to happen. She might not admit it even to herself, but she was wounded. He saw the wounds in her psyche from the way she moved toward him one minute and backed away the next.

  Okay, he recognized her wounds because he was wounded, too. Nobody plans to get divorced, and nobody comes out of a divorce unscathed.

  Either losing her job or dumping her fiancé would’ve been enough to crush most women, but combining the two gave Emma a big load of history to fight through.

  Seth could be as big a jerk as the next man when it came to beautiful, sexy women, but he didn’t want to carry the guilt that taking advantage of her vulnerability would entail. He refused to be the rebound guy. When and if they came together, he wanted her to come to him with a whole heart.

  On the other hand, he was sick of being the good guy. He wondered how long he could avoid grabbing her and tossing her on the nearest bed.

  Something in the way she looked at him, when she didn’t think he could see her, made him believe she’d stay on that bed...

  He couldn’t take the chance she’d stay there for the wrong reason. To prove she was over Trip.

  “Cake delivery,” he said, and almost stumbled when she flashed that smile at him. “Velma swears if you put it in the refrigerator overnight, it’ll be perfect for the picnic.”

  She put her glass down and walked over to him, but not to throw herself in his arms. She seemed more concerned with the cake.

  “Thank you so much for picking it up on your way home,” she said. “It’s beautiful. I had no idea the folks at the café could do a cake like that.”

  “We’re not all hicks.”

  “I didn’t mean that. But it’s no fancy French bakery either. I wish I could cut into it right now.”