Buch lesen: «Help Wanted: Husband?»

Chapter One

He was the largest man Lorna had ever seen. Not that she’d seen that many, having spent three-quarters of her life at the Sacred Heart Academy for Girls, and the other quarter within these county lines. But she’d seen enough. One too many, the population of Hope, Massachusetts, was still saying, and if anyone was bold enough to say it to her face, Lorna would have to agree.

Standing behind the trees she’d been pruning, she watched the mountain of a man as he rounded the rusty pickup. His jeans were worn white, emphasizing sturdy Viking legs. His shoulders were a yard wide. The faded denim jacket stretched across their width normally would be too thin for this time of year, but today’s weather was good. Only the old snow in the woods remembered winter. The man crossed onto her property and with each heavy step, she waited for the ground to give a fine tremble.

He stopped, his gaze on her house. It was an upright saltbox, formerly New England austere until five days ago when Lorna had found some old shutters in the shed and painted them yellow. Not a polite yellow. A screaming yellow. She suspected it was this trimming that held the stranger’s eye. She was going to paint the weathered door next. Blue—a brilliant, peacock-strutting blue. No more somber colors. That was one thing she’d sworn off when she’d buried her husband less than six weeks ago. Life was too short and too brazen for grim colors. Good to her new vow, she’d worn chartreuse to the funeral. She’d sashayed past the pews, the murmurs soft as pillow talk. Still Lorna knew what they whispered. A madness born from grief. Craziness was expected, even excused, when two days earlier your husband had been surprised by a shotgun while in bed with another man’s wife and shot in an area of the anatomy unmentionable in mixed company. Suffice it to say, the tale would never be told without men wincing and women nodding in silent satisfaction that God does indeed work in mysterious ways.

But there’d been no madness for Lorna that day her philandering husband was laid to his eternal rest. If she’d ever been crazy, it was three months before when she’d actually believed her husband had married her for love instead of her family’s money. No, that day as she’d moved past the murmuring congregation, her clarity was as vivid as the casket’s polished brass.

She had made her way down the aisle, squinting at her father already in the front pew, which had always belonged to McDonoughs. Her ancestors had founded Hope, each generation adding acquisitions and properties until today, the family was the richest in the county and its head, Axel McDonough, known to one and all—even his only daughter—as simply “the Boss.”

But that day, as her father had turned to his daughter coming up the aisle, she’d seen the always-present disapproval on his face deeper than the ruts still frozen in the road. And in that moment, sashaying in her chartreuse A-line, with her wonderful clearheadedness, Lorna had known she would never call him or any man “the Boss” again.

The giant hadn’t moved. Lorna levered her arm, testing the weight of the hand cutters. Without a doubt, the stranger had the meat and the muscle, but she had her newly earned lucidity. No man would ever get the best of her again.

The stranger staring at the house suddenly smiled, releasing the years from his face, adding devilish lights. Lorna locked her knees, the pad of her index finger testing the pruners’ pointed tips. She’d seen smiles come easily like that before.

HOPE, JULIUS HOLT thought. It was the town’s name. It was also what had brought him here. He liked it—the name—and that was good enough reason as any for a man with no patience for self-examination. He’d seen the Help Wanted ad and followed the road that shadowed the river’s path to the south, the route so curved he could only see to the next bend and then no farther. He’d seen the fields first, then the orchard stretching to the sky’s line. Many of the trees had been let go too long. Their branches were tangled or reached wide, shivering in the slight breeze, but light showed between the stripped limbs, and their rows were neat and even. He’d let the thick-trunked trees lead him, imagining a farmhouse at their end so old and settled no windows opened without a wrestle. The outside could probably use paint, but snow crocuses would be coming through the moist soil and lilac bushes would soon bud to soften the house’s plain corners. And beneath that shingled roof, there would be a family, a dog that rarely barked and a million memories. Julius had followed the long road, the gray trees to his right and the river too far in the distance to hear its flow, and imagined that house as clearly as he knew no hard-living man such as himself belonged there. Then he’d rounded a curve and been stopped cold by those canary-yellow shutters as out of place as he’d been his whole life. He’d pulled over to the side, gotten out, taken only a few steps when those brassy shutters stopped him once more. He’d smiled and thought, Well, I’ll be damned. Hope.

He was at the orchard’s edge when a sharp green streak flashed between all that gray. A thin, tall woman stepped out from the angled rows in a vivid lime sweatsuit completely at odds with her pinched lips and her brow’s stern set. It was another sight so unexpected his smile came back wider. He stood, grinning ear to ear, knowing he looked as idiotic as the rail of a woman draped in Mardi Gras colors and aiming the pruners’ steel points at his heart.

“Ma’am.” He nodded.

“It’s ‘miss,”’ she corrected, her superior tone harsh to his ears.

“Miss,” he obliged. He reached into his back pocket, she all the time eyeing him, her grip strong on the cutters. He pulled out a torn piece of newspaper, unfolded it. “I’ve come about the job.”

Her eyes narrowed to inspect him. He kept his gaze steady and waited for her to speak. Her eyes were the gray-green of a river and soft as the rest of her seemed hard. She blinked fast. Her eyes narrowed even further. She pressed a hand to her stomach and raised her other arm, brushing it across her brow’s high slope, pointing the cutters heavenward. She blinked hard. Her expression shifted. He saw the surprise in her features such as he’d felt moments ago. Her arm dropped. The cutters hit the ground. The woman swayed like the spare, overgrown limbs behind them.

“Ma’am…I mean, miss…”

He looked into her eyes. Helplessness came into the gray-green waters as the woman whispered in a most confounding feminine plea, “Oh, my,” and keeled over onto his feet.

“Miss? Miss?” Julius squatted and shook the woman’s shoulder. Her eyes stayed closed, but she seemed to be breathing. He shook her shoulder harder. “C’mon, lady, don’t leave me now,” he heard himself plead as if he’d been searching his whole life for a carnival-colored, run-down farm with a mistress to match. He picked up her sharp-boned wrist, grateful for the faint but steady pulse beneath his fingertips. He patted the back of her hand, glancing around. Even if he was the type to yell for help, there didn’t seem to be another soul about the place. He looked down at the long-boned woman. Her face, relieved of expression, had lost its stern lines. Her skin was clear and smooth as the day’s rise.

He checked again but saw no one. “Damn.” He gathered the woman in his arms and lifted her.

LORNA WAS FLOATING, the gentle, rocking motion and pleasant solid warmth too agreeable to give up. She cracked her eyes, stared at a gold glint just beyond her nose, focusing until a saintly face became recognizable. She reached to touch the shining face.

“Saint Nicholas.”

She snapped her head back. Past a thick neck, the gold image suspended on a chain around it, she saw the man. His full lips were dry and naturally curved as if always amused. His eyes were a startling hot blue, the exact shade she’d envisioned painting the front door. The color caught and held her.

“Patron saint of—”

She heard no more, twisting like a wild animal in the powerful arms around her. Her hands flailed at the man’s face. “Let me go.”

“Easy now,” the man said, with such an note of tenderness she was startled into a second of submission. The beat of his heart was beside her ear. The rhythm matched each step he took. She arched her body and thrashed once more.

“There now.” Even as her hands struck at him, caught him square on his jaw, he eased her onto the porch steps with the same surprising gentleness she’d heard in his voice. He stepped back, not even bothering to rub his chin where her blows had landed. He looked down at her with his always-amused expression. Her chest heaving from the fight still boiling within her, she glared at him, gathering details for the police report. His features were strong, blunt, like stone whose lines had been gradually worn by the elements. His eyebrows were thick, black and heavy, emphasizing the lightning blue of his eyes. She could still feel his arms around her.

“You might better sit a moment or two. You went down like a sack of potatoes, miss.”

“I fainted?” she asked, though now she remembered the dizzying wave, the light-headedness that often came when she rose too fast or forgot to eat. Her anger lessened as quickly as it’d been ignited. She sucked in her cheeks and looked away, her irritation only at herself. She felt like a fool. “I skipped breakfast.” Actually she’d tried a few saltines but hadn’t been able to keep them down. She glanced at her watch. “And lunch.”

She pushed herself off the steps.

“You should sit.”

“Thank you, I’m fine.” She ran her hand across her crown, checking for loose strands as she drew herself up. “Thank you for your help.”

The man’s hands reached out to steady her. She stared at those large wide hands, remembering their strength. She raised her head, met those brilliant blue eyes. She made her voice all business. “You’re interested in the position?”

He studied her. She was taller than an average woman and long limbed, long fingered. Her face was long, too, and her lips full but pressed fast to each other. Her nostrils were cut high. Her gray-green eyes were flat as smoke now but closed, their lids were milk-white and fine veined as lace. And when they’d first opened, as he’d carried her in his arms, those eyes had held the sweetness men oftentimes thought about at night.

Those eyes focused on him now with the sober stare of a taskmaster. Turn and run, he thought, self-preservation his first instinct. But behind the woman, he saw those wild yellow shutters, proclaiming their right to be. “Yes, Miss—”

She brushed her hand once more across her smooth crown, looked tired. “It’s Mrs., truth be told.”

She felt the dizziness come again as his blue eyes examined her. She reached for the porch rail, but when his eyes darkened with concern, she straightened and stood without support. “Mrs. O’Reilly.”

“Mrs. O’Reilly.” He considered her a mute moment, then smiled. She saw in that smile a man used to finding favor with women. “If I might speak to the boss?”

Her long frame became even taller. “You’re speaking to the boss, Mr….?”

The surprise in his eyes stayed only a breath, but the smile remained, his face full of a warmth and invitation that made most women instinctively lower their lashes as they returned his smile. Lorna pinched her lips together.

“Holt. Julius Holt, Mrs. O’Reilly.”

She folded her arms across her chest and spoke through tight lips. “Had much experience, Mr. Holt?”

He smiled still. “More than most.”

Her lips pursed, her earlier vexation gaining strength again. “How about at farming, Mr. Holt?”

“Born to it, ma’am, in Oklahoma on my grand-daddy’s farm until it went bust and my father moved us to California to try our luck there. I was about seven I recall.”

His tone had turned conversational, as if ready to tell her anything she wanted to hear.

“And did you have any?”

“Ma’am?”

“Luck? Did you and your family have any luck in California?”

He shook his head, the easygoing smile joined by a dry chuckle. “Not a speck.” His face sobered. “We were living in an old boxcar set on concrete blocks when my daddy had a cerebral hemorrhage.” He leaned in, the laughter gone and those blue eyes electric. “Dead.” He snapped his fingers. Lorna jumped. “Right before my eyes. Just like that.” He leaned back. “The biggest surprise was the drink didn’t get him first. Ma hung on for a while, raised chickens, had a big garden, but eventually the drink did take her.” His delivery became matter-of-fact. “I worked the farms in the valley beside the Mexicans almost a year before the State caught up to my sister and me.”

“How old were you?” She hadn’t meant for the question to come out so soft.

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen?” Lorna tipped her head, eyeing him. She’d heard lies before.

He leaned in too close again. He knew she wanted to step back, but she didn’t. He liked that in her. “By twelve, I could buck hay all day.”

The woman raised her chin, the high flare of her nostrils giving her a haughty expression that instinctively provoked him. He tilted his own head, about to give her the old once-over when he noticed the garish green of her outfit again. His belligerence slid away to amused appreciation again for this odd woman with a penchant for outlandish colors. He let his grin widen, wearing it as boldly as her flamboyant colors, knowing both their affections were only to deflect focus.

He looked around, casual-like, assessing the farm instead of the woman. Past the set of her shoulders, he saw the buildings, one so dilapidated he wondered why winter winds hadn’t taken it out of its misery. The others needed repair also. He saw stretches of tarpaper where shingles once had been. An old car with no wheels sat rusting beside one low-roofed building. A door hung by one hinge off another. Farther on, he saw fallen trees flattening the brambled remains of plantings. Enough work here for an army of men, let alone one man who never seemed to stay a month or two before circumstances or need drove him on.

Still he had to admire that orchard with its bull-necked trunks stretching out in every direction. Real pretty country once he’d gotten past the new subdivisions beginning to surround the main part of town. He saw the pond in the lower field thawing at its edges, looked to the slopes of the land resting at the horizon. A man could sit, take a breath and feel whole here. Julius’s gaze moved back to the tight-mouthed woman. His pleasure receded. Pretty land and loud colors aside, the schoolmarm and he weren’t exactly a match made in heaven. He met her snooty expression and the urge to needle her arose as naturally as the smile still on his face.

“The ad said starting salary was seven dollars an hour?”

She nodded. “Plus room and board.”

“Seven dollars an hour?” He was incredulous. He didn’t think it was possible, but her mouth pinched even tighter. He was enjoying himself now.

“It’s a reasonable wage.”

He let out a laugh. “It’s an allowance, sister.”

She squared her shoulders. His gaze dropped as her nicely shaped breasts thrust up.

“I am not your—” Her lean, long frame weaved as if to fold up on itself once more.

“Whoa.” He caught her elbow, moved beside her and supported her lower back with his other hand. “No law says we can’t sit while we negotiate, is there now?”

Her body tensed beneath his touch. She shook him off, easing herself onto the steps without his help. He saw the fine flush of sweat across that high, proud brow. He patted his pants pocket, hoping for a tissue. One pocket was empty except for a worn wallet with no pictures and little money. In the other pocket, he found a cocktail napkin with a name and telephone number that he’d never call scrawled across it. He shoved the napkin at the woman.

She glanced down at the wrinkled square he thrust at her.

“The Fat Dog Grille” was imprinted in a curve across its top. Beneath it, the name and number were written in a feminine flourish. The woman looked up at Julius. “Lulu? You actually know someone named Lulu?”

He smiled slowly. “And she’s not even the first Lulu I’ve known…nor the last, God willing.”

She snatched the napkin from him, her gaze stern even as she tucked her lip as if biting back a smile. She paled and pressed the square to cheek. She flattened her hand against her stomach.

“You gonna be sick?” His alarm was real.

The woman took a deep breath and sat up yet straighter, which until then, Julius hadn’t thought possible. Her spine stiff and her expression inflexible, she handed him back the napkin. “There is no negotiation, Mr. Holt. The pay is, as stated, seven dollars an hour with room and board.”

Pursing his lips in imitation of the woman, he studied the acreage as if actually considering her offer.

“You put up those shutters?” He glanced away from the bright rectangles quickly, catching her off guard, her expression unschooled. He didn’t want to see what he saw. He knew she didn’t want him to see it either—the flash of desperation. His impulsive smile disappeared. Those gray-green eyes were going to be her undoing. His, too.

He was about to say goodbye when he saw a keen challenge in her gaze.

“Don’t change the subject, Mr. Holt.”

He sat on the steps, spread his knees so his body took up more space. He plucked a piece of grass. “Are you offering me the job, Mrs. O’Reilly?”

She inched to the opposite side of the steps. “No.”

“So, negotiations are still open?”

“No, Mr. Holt. There are no negotiations.” She stood too quickly, grasped the rail. He reached for her arm but she twisted away from him, steadied herself on the rail.

“Liver,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” She swiveled her head toward him; her eyes gradually refocused to find him.

“Eat some liver. It’s full of iron.” He took in her slim frame. Her legs were long as a restless night. “You take a multivitamin?”

She folded her hands at her waist. “Thank you for your concern, Mr. Holt, but I’ll be fine. Thank you for coming by.”

He’d been dismissed, but only his gaze moved to his pickup on the shoulder of the dirt road, then back at the woman with her neon-green sweatshirt and her crazy yellow shutters and her colorless face. “Had a lot of others apply for the job?”

“You’re the first.”

He liked her for not lying. He smiled. She sank onto the steps as if even her slight weight was suddenly too much.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I painted those shutters.”

He kept smiling at her. “It’s a fine yellow.”

Her expression stayed tense except those betraying gray-green eyes softened. “Soon as I get a chance, the door’s going to be bright blue.”

He studied the weathered door, nodding as if he could already see it painted. “You like bright colors?”

“Never much thought about it until I wore chartreuse to my husband’s funeral last month.” She shrugged, looked tired. “Now I can’t seem to get enough of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

She looked at him as if she didn’t understand. “About your husband,” he clarified.

“Oh.” She looked out to the road.

Her reaction intrigued him. “You’re not?” Instinctively he knew she wouldn’t lie.

She looked at him. “I wasn’t happy about it, mind you.”

He was silent but not in judgment. He’d also known men who had deserved to die. He didn’t ask what happened. He had no right. Still, if she decided to tell him, he would listen. Everyone deserved that much. He plucked a piece of grass, traced its length and gave her silence should she want to speak.

She watched him from the corner of her eyes, liking the quiet, thoughtful way he touched the grass as if it were priceless.

“He was in bed with another man’s wife,” she said flatly. “The husband found them. They called it a crime of passion. Passion.” She repeated the word and shook her head.

He saw her eyes confused and vulnerable and, without a doubt, a man’s undoing.

He shifted on the step, his hand reaching to tug at the bill of his baseball cap before he remembered he’d taken it off in the truck. He liked to face a new situation bareheaded, barefaced, without his eyes shaded, signaling secrets. Not that he wasn’t like everyone else with one or two hidden truths. He couldn’t help wondering what mysteries the woman beside him concealed?

He shifted again. The woman stared at the dirt road as if waiting for an answer to come walking down its dusty length. The silence stretched out.

“The woman with your husband?” He broke the silence.

She turned to him, her expression sharp.

“Her name wasn’t Lulu, was it?”

Like a traitor, one corner of her mouth crept up, then the other followed. He knew she didn’t want to but she smiled, everything about her softening, and he knew her laughter would sound pretty to a man’s ears. Her eyes gentled again, as if grateful. She brushed her hand across her crown, although not one hair dared stray from the ponytail low on her neck. He had to leave. A vulnerable widow with shrimp-pink lips and gray-green eyes that turned warm when she smiled. Seven dollars an hour. He’d been wrong about those shutters or he would have heeded their warning as soon as he saw that neon yellow. CAUTION.

The smile and the softness left the woman as abruptly as they came. She once more was as brittle and thin as the limbs reaching in the fields. “It doesn’t much matter what her name was. What’s done is done.” The widow stood, brushing at nothing on the front of her sweatshirt. Her hand rested on her stomach. “Seven dollars an hour and room and board is what I’m offering.”

Julius leaned back, on his elbows, settling in to the stairs. He looked around, noting again the neglect. “You just bought this place?”

“My husband inherited it from his aunt. She never had any children, and he was the only son of her sister lost to cancer a few years back. My husband never knew his father. His aunt was all the family he had left, and it was her dying wish he have the farm. As soon as he heard the news, he hightailed it up from New Orleans, the handsomest man ever to set foot in Hope. Charming, too, with his Bourbon Street drawl and his sweet ‘ma chère.’ He was all ready to unload the land and reap the rewards until he learned the property was zoned farmland and couldn’t be sold to commercial developers. Kind of narrowed the field of prospective buyers to zero. He put the land up for sale anyway, and, in the meantime, married me for my family’s money and influence.”

It was the way she recited the words without expression that let Julius know she’d been wounded.

“Two days after his death, I took the farm off the market.”

“You’re a farmer, Mrs. O’Reilly?”

“Barely know the first thing about it.”

He chuckled. She just might be crazy.

“Until a short time ago, I never did anything except what was expected of me.”

He considered trying to make up his mind if she was nuts.

As if reading his thoughts, she said, “They all think I went around the bend from the shock of my husband’s death.” She looked out to the gray, sturdy trees that had first drawn his eye. “But this place is mine…my orchards, my fields, my land to dream on.”

He saw the same strength in her expression as he’d seen in those thick-trunked trees and he understood. The woman wasn’t crazy. She just wanted her own small square of the world where no one told you what to do or the right way to live your life. A place of your own. Home. He’d dreamed the same dream once, but in all his travels and in all this time, he’d never found it. Then he’d stopped looking. Just kept moving.

“There’ll be a bonus though.” Yes, she thought—a bonus, a perk. “At the year’s end, after the first harvest, when the place is up and running—a percentage of the profits.”

Julius looked around the run-down spread. “First, you have to produce profits. A percentage of nothing is nothing.”

“There’ll be profits, Mr. Holt.” Such a strong, determined set to those narrow shoulders.

He pushed at his forehead, remembered his cap back on the seat of his truck and missed it once more. “You never farmed?”

“No.” She didn’t even try to hedge the truth. He again admired that. “But I’m reading everything I can get my hands on.”

“Books?”

She straightened taller. “It’s a beginning, Mr. Holt.”

A beginning he thought, noting the house was built on a slight rise not too far from the road, giving a good view of the property all around. It was a pretty spot.

“So, you’re a farmer, Mr. Holt?”

“Among other things,” he said, appreciating the land’s rise and fall.

“What other things would that be?”

“Let’s see, I’ve been a sign painter, a laborer, an amusement park ride operator. I drove a truck up North, laid pipe in the South, worked the docks along the Mississippi.” His crazy-quilt life spread out before him like the land circling him. “But mainly I’ve worked fields on both coasts and many in between. Apples and cherries in Washington, cotton and corn in Arkansas, peaches and peanuts in Georgia, potatoes in Maine.”

“My, you do get around.”

He eyed her, looking for mockery, but found none.

She ignored his sharp study. “Myself, I’ve never been much farther than the county line…except for school and summers when my father let the Aunties take me to the sea.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Do I look like a kidder, Mr. Holt?” Her smile this time was slim and self-deprecating.

“Never been no place? Why not?”

“Never had the desire, I suppose.” She shrugged. “This is home.”