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. You 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.”
When he didn’t answer, she turned to stare at him. His face looked frozen, his eyes empty. Finally, he shook himself and said, “That came later. I was a hellion growing up. I had to learn.”
“Come on, let’s go check out my barn! I want to see it.”
He grabbed her hand and pulled her back down. “It’s behind a thicket of locust trees with three-inch thorns that can puncture a femoral artery. It’s covered with wisteria and poison ivy. The pond is overgrown with so much duckweed you could fall in before you knew there was water.”
“It’s mine and I need to see it.” She knew she sounded petulant, but she did need to see it. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her about it? After she grew up, why hadn’t Aunt Martha?
He breathed deeply and ran his hand down his face. “Yeah, okay. Tomorrow afternoon, if I can get off a little early. You do not go alone. This time of year the water moccasins and copperheads are too slow to avoid you.”
“Why couldn’t we fix it up to use for rehabilitating animals?”
“Too far away and completely overgrown. You’d have to traipse out there in the middle of the night to feed. You’d fall in the pond.”
“No, I wouldn’t. Besides, my babies are not staying outside at night.”
He didn’t bother responding. When the cage was done, the skunks would go outside the house. They had to learn to live in the wild. They needed to be released as soon as they were relatively safe on their own. Once the cage was finished, he and Emma could have what promised to be an unpleasant confrontation about where the skunks spent their nights. No sense borrowing trouble.
“Last but not least,” he said and suspected this would be the capper, “not only are there snakes in the barn and the pond, but some great, big snapping turtles, too. They pretty much stay around the pond, where there are plenty of frogs to eat, but occasionally one of them will wander up in the yard looking for birds’ eggs that’ve fallen out of the nest. I’ll enlist Earl on Saturday after we put up the kennel, to try to net the big ones and transplant them to the river bottoms ten miles away. It’ll take two of us. Some of them weigh over a hundred pounds.”
“I’ll never walk into the yard again!”
He laid his hand on her arm and glared at her. “You are living in the country. Not the city. Not the suburbs. This fall you’ll have deer on the lawn, and I’ve spotted both fox and beaver. Oh, and coyote. Then there’s the occasional bobcat. Saw a puma once, but I suspect he was just trekking east. Haven’t seen him for a couple of years.”
She jerked her arm away. “My God! What else? Grizzly bears?”
He grinned and shook his head. “No grizzlies. Spotted a black bear in the bottoms a couple of years ago. The only one I’ve ever seen around here. They’re generally east and north of the Kentucky border, and they’re rare even there. Our bear was simply lost. We followed it north out of our territory, where it became another ranger’s problem. It was a young male bear. No cubs to worry about.”
“Would you have? Worried?”
“If we’d had to. If they’d been abandoned or orphaned. Barbara would’ve taken them on until we could get them to the zoo in Memphis.”
“So bears are fine to foster, but skunks aren’t? That’s nuts.”
“It’s the rules, and for good reason. That’s why we bait the bottoms with rabies protection. So far we’ve never had a single case of rabies from any animal around here, not even bats. The few cases in Tennessee are in the hills east of here and in North Carolina. No incidences anywhere in west Tennessee for many years. The regulation about bats and skunks may be outdated, but it’s better to err on the side of safety. We warn the public to stay the hell away from all wild animals. If any of the critters become a nuisance, we’ll trap them, vaccinate them, and if they are clean, we’ll move them.”
“What else am I likely to run into around here?” she asked.
“The ubiquitous raccoons. Once a year we try to move them back to the river, but they come back when they start to wean their young in the spring.”
“Baby raccoons are so cute.”
“But a full-grown raccoon can tear you up. The males can weigh over fifty pounds. Actually, Memphis has more of a problem than we do. People leave dog food outside, and raccoons love dog food. Then we see the occasional possum. They really do roll up in a ball when they’re scared. You don’t want them around horses. They carry EPM, which can kill a horse. There are armadillos, of course. They can carry leprosy.”
“Leprosy? Good grief! How about bubonic plague?”
“Not yet. No hantavirus either.”
“What’s that?”
“Mostly in Arizona and New Mexico. From mice.” He grinned at her again. “Don’t worry. The only armadillos you’re likely to see are dead on the road. We get weasels, beavers and marmots around the lakes. They eat the insulation off wires on people’s boats. Woodchucks. Mice and rats. And the hawks and owls that eat them. Turkey buzzards, too. The occasional eagle strays down from Reelfoot Lake. So far, no alligators this far north, but with global warming, who knows when they’ll show up? I’m sure I’m forgetting some critter or other. Like your skunks.”
“And massive turtles to chew your foot off and eat your fingers. Please stop! I don’t want to know. All we’re missing is your friendly neighborhood Tyrannosaurus Rex.” She pushed her chair back, picked up the plates and set them in the kitchen sink. “I may never leave the house again. No wonder I have skunks! What on earth is lurking under my bed? One of your king snakes?”
“You shouldn’t get so much as a dirt dobber inside. Miss Martha had this house buttoned up so critters can’t crawl in.”
“Like skunks?”
“The Mulligans must not have latched the back door properly, so it didn’t close all the way when they left. The rainstorm could’ve blown it open enough for the momma skunk to squeeze in with her kits. She needed some safe place for them while she went off foraging.”
“And never came back.”
“She would have if she could have, I promise you,” Seth said.
“Could a snake have slithered in after the skunks?”
“Your pantry door was shut, so nothing got into the main part of the house. And if there’d been a snake in the pantry, those skunks would not have been sleeping peacefully. Little as they are, their instincts would’ve kicked in. They’d have tried to kill it. Your house is safe. No snakes, no varmints. No basement for anything to hide in, and no way for critters to sneak into the attic. The vents are all stuffed with steel wool.”
“What about outside motion sensor lights? Don’t I need them?”
“You need new bulbs for the ones you already have. I’ll pick some up tomorrow. Earl and I can put them in for you. He said that, barring the unforeseen, if we get the posts in and set, he’ll bring his wife over on Saturday morning for a couple of hours to help attach the wire and watch us net turtles. Probably some of the others guys will come by to help, too.”
“I can’t ask them to do that!”
“Earl wants to meet you. So does his wife. She was raised in town, so she knows the local gossip. They may even bring the kids if that’s okay.”
“Of course. I’ll get some hot dogs and hamburgers for lunch. If they’re going to help, they deserve to be fed.”
“Not necessary, but a great idea.” Seth got to his feet. “Now that I’ve frightened you half to death, I’d better get on home,” he said.
She followed him to the front door, expecting him to reach for another kiss. This time she forestalled him by shoving him away—just barely. “I dumped a perfectly good fiancé less than a week ago,” Emma said. “Well, Trip wasn’t so good, but I thought he was, until the last minute.”
“I am not this Trip person.”
“No, you’re not. You’re much more dangerous than Trip ever was. You look right at me and you listen to me and you scare the living daylights out of me.”
“Scare?”
“And I’m not going to fall into bed with you or anyone else a week after I became unaffianced. Can you say rebound, boys and girls?”
“I don’t think unaffianced is a word.”
She considered smacking him on the shoulder, but decided that would be counterproductive. “If it’s not a word, it should be, even if I just made it up.”
“Am I asking you to fall into bed?”
“You’re not?”
“I won’t deny I’d be delighted if you did. Any male who’s attained puberty would be. But I’m not some Viking warlord raiding the neighboring villages to capture Valkyries to carry off to Valhalla.”
She tried to stay serious, but she wound up snickering. “You’ve got your metaphors mixed up, not to mention your Norse mythology.”
“The heck with my metaphors and my mythology, too.” He reached for her shoulders, pulled her against him.
She was expecting another of those blowout kisses. Instead, he stopped short of her lips, then brushed them gently, teased them with the tip of his tongue. She opened to him, met his tongue with hers and sank against his chest while little spurts of fire ran up her spine. When at last he broke the kiss, her head fell back and, eyes still closed, she whispered, “Oh, my.”
“Yeah,” he whispered back.
“Go home. Please. Now.”
“If I have to.” This time the kiss was indeed one of the blowout ones that made her knees go weak. She eventually—but not too quickly—moved back. “Git!” she said. “This is not fair.”
“By whose rules?”
“Mine, damn it!” She fled inside and shut the door firmly against him.
* * *
WHEN EMMA GOT her breathing under control, she considered that, for all intents and purposes, she was having a party on Saturday. That meant another trip to the grocery store. Who knew how many others would show up to help and stay to be fed? Emma sighed. She’d never done much impromptu entertaining in the city.
She’d have to make a stab at cleaning up the house for company. Fresh towels in the bathroom. Cold beer. Sodas. She had a yard that needed cutting and no lawn mower available. She wanted a used one she could afford. Another unforeseen expense. Whoever came would have to put up with uncut grass. She couldn’t even borrow Seth’s. She didn’t know how to drive a riding lawn mower, and the mayor had said Seth’s wasn’t working properly. She wasn’t familiar with any landscaping services out here, never mind the cost.
On top of that little problem, she apparently had an entire zoo wandering around her property. A phantom barn choked like Sleeping Beauty’s castle in wisteria and thorny locust trees. A pond filled with poisonous snakes and vicious snapping turtles. Seth inviting people first and asking later. Seth planning and building the cage. Seth getting the lightbulbs and putting them up. Okay, he was trying to be helpful, because she was obviously a greenhorn, even if she had spent summers here as a child.
She wasn’t a child now. She’d kicked a man to the curb for trying to run her life and groom her to play his own little Galatea to his Pygmalion.
There was a definite divide between being helpful and taking control of her life. No matter how sexy and competent and handsome and knowledgeable Seth was, and as much as she needed his help, if he tried to run her life for her… She’d see about that.
Tonight he’d kissed her again, but a totally different kind of kiss. She should’ve been clearer that she was not looking for a replacement for Trip. If she responded as she had tonight, it was no wonder if he thought she was beddable. Which she wasn’t. Not at all.
Pheromones were the darnedest things. She should be so devastated by her breakup with Trip that she wouldn’t notice Brad Pitt if he walked into her kitchen. As a matter of fact, she’d never had such an immediate reaction to a male. She’d thought she was invested in Trip—after all, she’d agreed to marry him—but this ka-blam reaction she had to Seth was outside the scope of anything she’d ever felt before.
But that was simply rebound. All that adrenaline had to go somewhere, and he’d appeared at the optimum moment.
She fed the kits, who barely woke up long enough to take their gruel before they went back to sleep.
It wasn’t too late to call her father. She had promised.
Neither of her siblings ever answered the landline at home. They were too busy texting and talking on their cells. If a tornado destroyed their cell towers, teenagers across the nation would have a meltdown.
Andrea, not Daddy, answered the landline. “Ah, so this is Green Acres reporting in?” she asked.
“I’ll have you know I do not have a thousand-pound pig in my living room like on the TV show.”
“Good thing, too. The idea of cleaning up pig poo on the carpets does not bear thinking about. How are you really? Any job offers yet?”
Emma felt a surge of guilt roll over her. She couldn’t get a job of any sort if she spent her time playing nursemaid to small animals. Better not mention the skunks. Andrea would definitely not understand the need for secrecy. She’d have to talk about them at her golf foursome. They’d make such a good story. “Nope. Trying to get the house in order and the boxes unpacked. I thought I just brought the bare essentials.”
“Met your neighbors yet?”
Another wave of guilt. “The only close neighbor I have is a game warden who lives across the street.” Emma had no intention of telling Andrea anything else about him. “And I’ve met the local veterinarian and a couple of people in town, including the mayor.”
“Great. Is the mayor married?”
“He’s bald and weighs close to four hundred pounds. I think he has a wife and a passel of children.”
“Then are there any handsome, rich, unmarried farmers around?” Andrea’s voice dropped to that throaty whiskey baritone she always used when playing around in Emma’s love life. “Oh, Lord, Em, honey. That was inappropriate. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m realizing I had a narrow escape from Trip.”
“Trip has called your father a dozen times a day. Tonight, he got me instead. I thought he was going to burst into tears. What did you do to him?”
She doubted Andrea would have broken up with David French because of a casual infidelity. But then Andrea put up with a lot from him at one point in their marriage. He started working what sometimes seemed like 24/7, and playing golf the few hours he had left over. With three children at difficult stages, Andrea told Emma later that she felt as though David had opted out of the family, and left her to deal with them single-handedly. He stopped coming to their games or Emma’s horse shows. At Andrea’s insistence, they went to marriage counseling. It worked. Emma felt certain that was because even when the situation was at its worst, they never doubted their love for each other.
“Trip and I didn’t want the same things anymore,” Emma said.
“Better to find out now. Even when we were going through that rough patch with you three hellions, David wasn’t unfaithful. Not sexually, anyway. One of the things I’ve always loved about him is that he can see a problem and change to fix it. Most men either can’t or won’t.
“That’s when I went back to working part-time with my decorating. I love you all, but I needed to get away from you to do my own thing, too. Better to have no man than the wrong one. That’s what I tell Catherine, but at this point she falls for a different boy every day or so.”
Actually, that surprised Emma. She’d always figured that Andrea would take the best available man as opposed to none.
“Your father is off playing poker at the club,” Andrea said. “His usual once-a-week game.”
“Do you mind?”
“Lord, no! The dynamics have changed now that you children are more grown up. I don’t feel abandoned when everyone’s gone. In fact, I’m grateful for the peace and quiet. Call him on his cell, why don’t you?”
“And interrupt a royal flush? I promised to check in, so you can count this. Tell him I really am fine. Tell the brats I miss them. You, too.”
“I love you, kiddo,” Andrea said. “Get yourself together and come home where you belong. Mrs. Miller from next door to you is checking on your town house. I hope you’re back before somebody offers to rent it.”
Emma hung up and leaned against the couch. She hated the idea of renting her town house, even on a short term lease, but it was the sensible thing to do. The mortgage was expensive. She regarded moving back to her parents’ house as failure, even if it was only for a short term. At least she had options. So many people didn’t.
She was also lucky to have landed a stepmother she’d come to love. That had taken a while on both their parts. Andrea was considerably younger than Emma’s dad and had not signed on to marry a widower with a motherless child. Still, she was game. After the other two were born, the nanny costs skyrocketed, but like so many second wives much younger than their husbands, she’d been expected to pick up and travel with him at a moment’s notice. Not quite a trophy wife, because Emma’s mother had died and not divorced, but a trophy nonetheless. And she was good at her role. She had been a top interior designer when she met David French, and only started working part-time after the children stopped needing her so much. Emma could thank Andrea for teaching her how to raise funds for everything from the symphony to the ASPCA. She could charm big bucks from Scrooge.
Now, there was a thought. How did the local rescuers interact with the other animal rescue organizations? She’d have to ask Barbara. She hoped she’d be back in Memphis soon with an interesting job like the one she’d had, but until she was, she might as well do some work with the animal people. She’d talk to Barbara about it tomorrow.
The alternative was to sit on her broadening rump and feel sorry for herself. Even Trip might start to look good. Nah.
As for his calls to her father… She felt certain Trip wanted to win her back so he could dump her. His sense of his own worth had taken a hit, and he obviously didn’t like it. How had she not known what he was? How could she have agreed to marry him? The next guy she liked, she’d plumb the depths of his history and his character before she took any irrevocable step.
Such as what?
How could she be so totally over Trip so fast? Was she that shallow? Apparently so. Because she was a whole lot happier than she should have been with no job and no fiancé and no prospects.
Her thoughts flashed to Seth. Bon appétit! She went to bed laughing.
She remembered that the vet’s clinic opened for business at eight thirty, but when she called, the line was already busy. Maybe she should forget about talking to Barbara. As she waited for the babies to finish their gruel, she went down the list of chores she had to do before Saturday, when she had company coming. She could put the pedal to the metal tomorrow and concentrate on résumés and phone calls today.
The third time she called Barbara, she got through.
“Barbara,” Emma asked. “Are you on your way out or can you talk?”
“Both. I’ve got a tup with an abscess on his jaw. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. You can ride along. Shouldn’t take long, and I could use the extra hands.”
Why not? Another morning of boring résumé writing down the tubes, but hey, what was money? She hadn’t put on a pair of panty hose or a skirt since she’d moved into The Hovel. That felt like winning a nasty battle.
The first thing she said when she climbed into Barbara’s monster truck was, “What kind of animal is a tup?”
“It’s what the Scots call a breeding ram. And the required action is called ‘tupping.’ So if some guy with a Scottish burr asks you if you’d like to tup…”
“Say no.”
“Not necessarily,” Barbara said with a grin. “Depends on the guy.”
“What about you? Have you ever considered remarrying?”
“At my age? With grown—well, semigrown—kids who keep me broke and on the verge of a heart attack? I have no intention of getting naked with a strange man. Even if I knew one strange enough to be interested.”
“You look great.”
“The corollary to that is ‘for my age.’ I don’t think after the years without my husband I could adjust to having a male living with me again. They want their laundry done and folded or—God forbid, ironed—and meals cooked for them and a reasonable schedule they can count on. Not happening with my job. If I was supposed to be doing corporate wifely things at some fancy function, and a cow got stuck in the middle of delivering a calf, I’d pick the cow every time.”
“You’d never marry a man who didn’t support your decision.”
“So far as I’ve found, there ain’t no such animal. Not after John. The turn-in we want is a couple of hundred yards along on your side of the road. It’s only a break in the privet hedge, so look sharp.”
Barbara made the turn and found their way blocked by a five-bar steel farm gate. Without being asked, Emma jumped out, held the gate open, shut and fastened it after Barbara drove through, then jumped back in the car.
They followed a narrow dirt and gravel driveway that had probably not been graded or had gravel added to its surface in years. Barbara’s truck didn’t have the finest shock absorbers either. Once, Emma bounced up and hit her head on the edge of the closed sunroof and saw stars. Eventually, however, they pulled up in front of a medium-size red barn that had not seen a lick of paint since the gravel driveway was new and smooth.
The man who loomed up out of the darkness in the barn looked a lot like the mayor, except that his weight was stretched up to at least six and a half feet instead of being squashed down like the mayor’s. He wore muddy boots, muddy jeans, a muddy shirt and a sweat-darkened John Deere baseball cap. “Hey, Dr. Barbara,” he said, holding out a giant paw with patches of dark hair on the knuckles. “This here pretty lady must be Miss Martha’s niece.” He enveloped her hand after he shook Barbara’s.
Emma nodded. Of course he would have heard about her. “Are you by any chance kin to the mayor?” she asked as she rubbed feeling back into her fingers.
“First cousin on my momma’s side. How’d you guess?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Growin’ up, folks thought we was twins. Then he started growin’ sideways while I kept on straight up.”
“Where’s your ram, Holloway?” Barbara asked as she pulled her travel case from the backseat. “I hope you’ve got him confined.”
“Well, now, as to that…”
“I refuse to chase your ram all over the pasture.”
“Not as bad as that. We got him in a stall. Just that it’s the foaling stall.”
“Holloway, it’s half the size of this barn!”
He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Gimme a little minute. We’ll get a couple ropes and hog-tie him.”
“Until I can get some tranquilizer in him,” Barbara said.
“He’s a real sweet ram generally, but his jaw hurts, so’s he can’t eat. He does like to eat almost as much as he likes his ladies.”
From outside came three young men, also giants. “Sons?” Emma whispered.
Barbara nodded. “Boys, y’all go help your daddy.”
They didn’t meet the eyes of either woman, but marched off toward the far end of the barn and through a stall gate.
“They’re kinda shy,” whispered Holloway.
“Here we go,” Barbara said.
The boys were huge compared with the ram. He, however, had large horns, four sharp hooves and apparently the temperament of the Tasmanian Devil in the Saturday cartoons.
“Should we help?” Emma asked Barbara.
“Are you completely insane? Just watch.” She brought out a syringe, filled it with some sort of liquid, then waited by the gate.
Emma had watched children’s goat rodeo classes at the fair. This was the same sort of thing, except it was one goat versus four large men. At one point they cornered the ram against the fence, only to have him rise up on his hind feet and drive his horns into the belt buckle of the largest of Holloway’s sons, who flew back six feet and landed on his rear end.
He clambered to his feet, brushed off the seat of his jeans and said, “That’s it.” He rushed the ram, grabbed one front and one rear leg, flipped the ram flat on his side, then sat on him.
Barbara hurried into the stall and emptied her syringe into the ram’s rump.
“You can get up as soon as he’s unconscious,” she said.
Five minutes later, the ram snored peacefully. The lump on the side of his jaw was the size of a softball.
Emma brought Barbara’s case to her.
“Stand back,” Barbara said. “I’m going to drain this thing. It’ll be nasty.”
It was. Smelly, too. After Barbara had lanced and emptied the wen, she cleaned it and felt around inside. “Hello,” she said. “Here’s his problem.” She took her forceps and carefully withdrew a five-inch-long twig from the wound. “He must’ve run into the hedge when he was chasing down his harem.”
She finished cleaning, dosed with antibiotics and gave instructions for Holloway to keep up the treatment. “Needs to stay open so it can heal from the inside. You’ll have to irrigate twice daily. He ought to be good as new in a couple of days.”
When the two women drove back down the driveway, the four large men watched them silently.
“Well, that was fun,” Barbara said.
“I didn’t do anything to help,” Emma said.
“You stayed out of the way and handed me stuff. That’s plenty. I don’t mind blood, but I do hate pus. Bleh.”
“Poor little ram,” Emma said.
“If you can put up with that without turning a hair, you can probably handle anything. Come on, I’ll make you a double latte when I get back to the clinic. There’ll be folks waiting for me to open up and mad as snakes because I’m late. I really have to get somebody in full-time to answer the phone and schedule appointments.”
Half a dozen trucks, two horse trailers and three SUVs waited in the parking lot of the clinic. Not a single sedan. As Barbara parked, doors opened and prospective clients piled out and followed her to the door.
“Sorry, y’all,” Barbara said. “Let me get the coffee on and clean myself up, and we’ll figure out what sort of order to see you in.”
Without being asked, Emma slid into the vacant seat behind the receptionist’s desk, opened the appointment book to a new page, entered the date and began to check in the clients who were waiting. For twenty minutes she fielded clients’ questions, wrote notes and generally did the job as she guessed it should be done. She’d worked the reception desk during the summers she’d been an unpaid intern at a couple of temp agencies, so this wasn’t completely unfamiliar. But she discovered that the computer was password protected and she didn’t have a chance to check with Barbara. She didn’t know how to open it, much less bring up the data. She did the best she could by taking hand-written notes. The clients seemed to have evolved their own way of working out the order in which they were seen. Since there didn’t seem to be any genuine emergencies, that turned out quite well.
An hour later, the chaos had resolved itself to semiorder, but semiorder punctuated by meows, barks, the screech of one red macaw and the squeal of a small potbellied pig. Emma met her neighbors, overheard more gossip than she had in a dozen years in Memphis, and actually enjoyed herself. As she saw the last client with her beagle puppy out, Barbara left the exam room. “Put the closed sign up,” she said. “I’m starved.”
“Good grief,” Emma said. “So are my babies! I have to get home.”
“Can’t thank you enough for helping out. You really jumped in there.”
“I couldn’t even turn on the computer. You’ll have a lot of notes to transcribe.”
Barbara collapsed into the nearest client seat. “How desperate are you for a job?”
“Desperate for the right job.”
“Meaning not one that pays just over minimum wage and works your tail off?”
“I may be at some point. But if I keep not sending out résumés or networking, that may be sooner rather than later.”
“So, stave off the wolf at the door a little while longer. If you could do what you did this morning, I would bow down and kiss your feet.”
“I thought you had a high school girl.”
“She does a couple of hours after school three days a week and a couple of hours Saturday morning. She cleans the cages and scrubs the floors, and if she has a few extra minutes, she does some computer work. But mornings are crunch time. Say, eight thirty to noon, or eight thirty to two? Not even every day.” Barbara was starting to look pitiful.
Emma laughed. “I’d rather ride with you. Tell you what… I’ll work for you eight thirty to noon three days a week if you’ll teach me about fostering animals.”
“Done. Which days?”
“Which are the heaviest?”
“Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. Saturday is covered.”
“Let’s give it a shot,” Emma said. “If it doesn’t work out, no pain, no foul.” She flipped the sign on the door to Closed. “Now, I have babies and me to feed.”
“I could maybe scrounge up a can of soup or something…”
“Nope,” Emma said. “Let’s start as we mean to go on. Anyway, so far it’s been fun. See you Monday.”