by Nancy Warren
How dare he go back to New York? She fumed. She’d assumed the townspeople had at least a week or ten days for him to recuperate quietly while they figured out how to raise the money for the back taxes. Or at least worked out how to prevent him and his employers from destroying Beaverton.
A gastric attack so bad he thought he might die was not going to endear Beaverton to Joe, and so far no one had found either an alternative buyer for the property or a few hundred thou in spare change to pay the back taxes.
Joe’s cell phone picked that moment to go off, jangling in time with her irritation. He was so stupid. How could he walk away knowing he was going to destroy such a wonderful community? How could he walk away from her?
While she fumed, she stalked into the library cum office and snatched the phone up. “Yes?”
A female voice said, “Is this Joe’s phone?”
“Yes it is.” Emily said, thinking she had no right to answer his phone. What on earth was she doing? She could barely hear the woman so she marched outside into the middle of the lawn as she’d seen Joe do.
“This is Anna. His assistant. I’m wondering how he’s doing?”
“He’s been very ill, Anna,” Emily said, thinking Anna sounded much too young and attractive. “His doctor has advised him to have complete quiet and rest for the next seven to ten days.”
“But what about—”
“It’s a matter of life and death.” Okay, not Joe’s life, but the life of Beaverton and every one of its residents and if a little prevarication would save them all, she’d indulge. This once.
“Oh, my God. I had no idea.” The woman sounded truly distressed, so Emily relented. One day Joe was going to find out about this conversation and then he’d kill her. “With complete rest the doctors have every confidence in a full recovery. Of course, he can’t be disturbed with calls or emails or reminders of work.”
“Wow. I wish he wasn’t so near to closing a deal.” The assistant blew out a noisy breath, but Emily got the feeling she was more concerned about everything she’d have to do than about Joe’s health, so she didn’t worry too much about her little white lie. Okay, big, fat, black lie. And also, she had no intention of asking Anna to organize Joe’s transport out of here as he’d requested. But then she hadn’t said she would, so that wasn’t exactly a lie.
“I’m sorry. But it could have been a massive heart attack and he could be dead. That would be worse for business, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know. I think the client would get it that he’s dead. Anything else is going to be a tough sell.”
She had a sudden picture of Anna. She probably had long dark hair, wore a power suit with killer heels, carried a thin briefcase and had a cell phone earpiece hanging out of her ear that matched Joe’s. She was probably multi-tasking while she talked to Emily. Writing the company’s annual report, updating her resume in case Joe didn’t make it, and filing her nails.
“Joe’s only resting comfortably because he knows he can count on you.”
“Yeah. Yes of course. Tell him to take care, okay?”
“I will. And you promise not to let anyone bother him?”
“I’ll do my best. Um. Would it be okay if I called you for updates on his condition?”
Emily thought about that. It seemed only fair. “Sure. You’ve got the phone number here at the bed and breakfast.”
“Can’t I call his cell?”
“No. The doctor insisted he not be disturbed. He won’t be answering his cell.”
“Wow. That doesn’t sound like Joe. He must be sick.”
“Seriously.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks a lot. Tell Joe to call me as soon as he’s feeling better. I don’t think he’s ever missed a day of work before for sickness. Huh.”
Why was she not surprised?
“Thank you for calling, and Joe asked me to pass on his thanks for all you’re doing.”
“Yeah. Tell him to remember that at salary review time. This is not going to be easy.”
Emily pressed End and then looked at the little package of trouble in her hand. Not only were her town and her friends in trouble, but so was Joe if he ever stopped for a second to think about his life.
What she was about to do, was for everyone’s good.
Returning to the house, she went into the library and unplugged the cell phone’s cradle, then took it and the phone into the parlor and locked them in the safe behind her great grandmother’s portrait.
If anyone would approve of Emily’s actions, she knew it would be her great grandmother, and she couldn’t think of a more fitting guard to watch over the safe and its contents.
That done, she went back to the office. Joe’s laptop still sat on the desk where he’d left it. She tapped her fingers against the desk surface, thinking. Once more she picked up her phone. This time she called Harry Farnsworth from the computer shop, who’d set up the Internet for her.
“Harry,” she said when she got him, “I need your help with the Internet connection.”
“Is it acting up?” he asked.
“No. But I need it to. I need to mysteriously lose online access for the next week.”
“Not a request I get every day. Is Olive spending too much time on porn sites?”
“No! At least I don’t think so.”
He laughed. “She knows her way around the Internet. You’d better tell her you want the connection to stay down or she’s likely to fix it for you.”
“Okay. Got it. I don’t want Joe having access to his business, that’s all. He needs to rest.” She was cutting the poor guy off from his world. In trying to save him, she might kill him. She felt like a cross between Florence Nightingale and Lizzie Borden.
“What about your business?”
“I’m making sacrifices for the town, Harry. Have you heard about the meeting tonight?”
“Yeah. Just got the call.”
“Good.” The phone tree was working then. “Can you come back to the Shady Lady after the meeting and disable the Internet connection?”
“If you’re sure.”
Now she’d taken care of preventing Joe from leaving, she had to make him fall in love with the town. Plan A was to get the money together to save Beaverton, but Plan B was to stop Joe and his clients from wanting to locate their factory here in the first place.
She didn’t know which plan was more fraught with failure, but she’d give them both her best shot.
Her great grandmother had made a booming success against worse odds.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Joe was not in the best of moods. He’d lost a fight with a nurse about a wheelchair and felt like a toddler in a stroller as the big-armed, big voiced nurse wheeled him toward Emily who waited at the patient discharge exit.
Emily looked like the first ray of sunshine to a guy emerging from prison. His heart jumped at the sight of her, which only pissed him off more. If he’d ever made a bigger fool of himself in front of a woman he was trying to impress, it was buried so deep no therapy on earth could dig up the memory.
Having a coronary while doing the nasty was a humiliating cliché, but he hadn’t even managed a real heart attack. He should be glad, of course, that he was essentially healthy, and naturally he was, but at least if he’d choked in bed because of a heart attack, no one would hold it against him.
Mighty Joe Montcrief had been felled in the act by indigestion. A faint burn began to work its way up his esophagus and he breathed deep and slow to try and get it under control.
Emily smiled and waved when she saw him and walked quickly forward. She obviously couldn’t decide how to greet him with Nurse Bertha chugging along behind, so she settled on a cheery “Hi,” and then walked awkwardly alongside the wheels of his rolling throne. He hated having to look up at her.
“Hi.” He sounded surly and he knew it.
“Somebody’s a grumpy bear today,” his nurse informed Emily and everyone else within a twelve-block radius.
“Somebody’s a
fat-assed dominatrix wannabe,” he replied.
Emily choked on a laugh, then spoke over his head. “Has he been a troublesome patient?”
“The young men are always the worst. Don’t want to take their medicine, don’t like following hospital rules, like the one where we always leave in a wheelchair.” She spoke the last bit down to him in the voice a nursery school teacher would use to a kid who’d peed on the floor.
If he’d known his departure from the hospital would be as ignominious as his arrival, he’d have called a cab, or he’d have taken a bus. Hell, he’d have walked all the way to the Shady Lady.
“Thank you nurse,” he said, as the exit approached. “Little Joey can walk on his own two legs now.”
“Well, your nice young lady’s here in case you fall down. Hold her arm, now. There’s no shame in being weak.”
Now he was standing, he felt a little more in control. “Thanks for taking good care of me, Maude,” he said, giving her a smile and extending his hand.
“Oh, you are one sweet boy,” she said, and ignoring his hand pulled him into her massive bosom for a hug so suffocating that he almost landed back in the ER.
“Bye,” he managed when he could breathe again. The nurse beamed at him as though his recovery from indigestion was a miracle.
“Are you okay to walk on your own?” Emily asked, looking at him anxiously.
He hadn’t touched her yet today and she sure hadn’t treated him like a man who’d been inside her body, albeit he’d only been there for about seven seconds before pain so severe had struck that his cock had about shriveled and died on the spot.
“No,” he lied, and threw an arm around her shoulders. This left her with little choice but to put her arm around his waist.
Behind him he heard a large lungful of sentimental sigh follow him out the door.
“Nurse Maude thinks we make a cute couple,” he said, turning his head and leaning down to murmur in the general direction of Emily’s ear. The sun caught her hair and it sparkled gold and platinum.
She laughed. She felt good against his body. Tucked under his arm, she fit nicely. They walked with an easy rhythm as though they’d been going steady for years. The sunshine felt good against his skin. When he breathed he caught the smell of her hair, like flowers and spice. “You know what I wish?”
“That I’d stocked up on green Jell-O?”
“Close. I wish my gastric attack had held off another hour.”
The perfect harmony of their stride was marred when she stumbled over her feet.
“Oh, well. I... um…” He didn’t need to look at her face to know she was blushing.
“I hope you’re trying to say you’ll give me another chance.” Maybe it wasn’t exactly suave to be hitting on her the second he got out of the hospital, but he’d thought of little else but picking up where they’d so disastrously left off the other night in her bed.
“Look, Joe,” she turned to him and he didn’t give her a chance to blow him off in the hospital parking lot. He cupped the back of her head and kissed her. She made a startled sound, which was good because her lips needed to part for any sound to get out. And then he had her. He poured everything he had into that kiss, not only because he felt he had to make up for the other night but because the minute their lips met he felt the rush of heat. He pulled her gently against him until there wasn’t a hint of space between them.
He’d meant the kiss as a teasing reminder that they weren’t nearly finished with each other yet, but he was blind-sided by the power that slammed into him. Her lips trembled beneath his and he couldn’t resist taking the kiss deeper, possessing her mouth the way he wanted to possess her body.
He felt her hands on his back, all over the place as though frantic to feel him. She tugged him closer, but there wasn’t any closer – not with their clothes on. What her body was trying to tell them both was that it wanted him inside her. And he rubbed against her, letting her feel the hard-on he had for her, letting her body know the feeling was mutual.
They might have stayed there all day, except for the intrusion of a car that pulled into the lot. With a shaken laugh she pulled away, giving him a glimpse of passion-drenched blue eyes, wet, swollen lips and a stunned expression.
As he threw his arm back across her shoulders, he felt he’d gone a long way to restoring the tone of their relationship.
“How do you feel?” Emily asked him once they were in her car and pulling out of the hospital parking lot.
“Up for anything you’ve got in mind,” he said, and he did mean up. As though to compensate for the way it had let him down during his gastric attack, his cock was standing at attention now. He’d had a taste of paradise and he couldn’t wait for more.
With a prescription for super antacid in his pocket and his last hospital meal already nothing but a tasteless memory, he felt better than any man just released from hospital ought to feel.
“Could you handle a little tour of the area?” she asked him. “I’ve got some things to drop off at Potter’s farm. It’s out this way.”
“Sure.” And if he could drag Emily behind a handy haystack, so much the better.
They drove out of the hospital grounds and within minutes, were heading into rural territory. Joe had been inside bilious green walls – exactly the color a guy wanted to stare at when he was bilious himself – too long. As he looked out the window of the car he noticed how big the views were here. He liked his usual views. High rises, the East River. Falafel and pretzel vendors on every corner. Here there was vastness, a lot of stuff that looked like wheat waving around and not a Starbucks in sight.
The sky seemed bigger, higher somehow and a whole lot bluer. He had a sudden urge to walk outside and smell the air. He wanted to speed down these country roads on his new bike.
Ah, what was he thinking? It would smell like dirt and cow dung and he didn’t have time to ride. He had to catch up on the work he’d missed.
They didn’t talk much. He drifted along with the rhythm of the road, letting his thoughts trail.
The Gellman brothers were going to be beyond ballistic by now. They wanted the land and buildings and the mineral rights tied up ASAP, but right now, Joe was having trouble getting too worked up. Anna would be holding them at bay. He’d call the second he got back and pick up where he’d left off. So they lost a few days. The world’s farms weren’t going to run out of phosphate in the next week.
There was an environmental assessment that needed to be done. They’d figure it out.
The car bumped down a rutted road and he saw a farmhouse ahead. A white farmhouse with boxes of red geraniums out front and a golden lab on the front porch. It looked like a setting from a movie featuring a farmhouse more than a real one.
“Well, how about that?” he said, amazed.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Emily said.
“Yeah.” She got out and so did he. The car doors thunked behind them.
He stretched and breathed in. Okay, so he didn’t smell dirt and cow pies. It was more like dry grass and a hint of horse. The dog barely bothered to bark, managing only one half-hearted woof. It was an old one with an arthritic hind leg, he saw, when it hoisted itself to its feet and took the stairs slowly before ambling toward them, its tail waving slowly as though anything more vigorous would hurt.
Emily gave it a pat on the head and kept walking, but Joe squatted and gave the poor old mutt a good rub. The dog wriggled in ecstasy and rolled to its back for more.
“Can you teach Emily to do that for me?” Joe asked, rubbing the dog’s belly. When he hit a certain spot the dog’s back leg – not the arthritic one, the other – twitched. Joe laughed. “You’re a sorry son of a bitch, aren’t you? Somebody should have put you down long ago.”
The dog thanked him for his opinion by licking his hand.
When he got to his feet, Emily emerged on the porch with another woman. She was one of the youngest he’d seen in town. Early forties at a guess. She looked like the kind of woma
n who kept a loom in her living room and wove her own curtains. She wore a flowing skirt and a man’s work shirt, round glasses and long brown hair in pigtails.
“I hear you’re a visitor in town,” she said with a wide smile, coming down the front steps to shake his hand.
“That’s right. Joe Montcrief”
“Welcome. I’m Amy Potter.”
“Pretty place,” he said, feeling something was required.
“Would you like a tour?”
No. He’d like to get back to the Shady Lady, call the office, get his deal back on track and then take Emily to bed where he was going to wipe from her mind their last unfortunate intimate encounter and replace it with something a whole lot better. But this woman looked so eager and he doubted she got a lot of company. “Well, maybe a quick one.”
He cursed himself as she said, “Come on Buster. Let’s take Joe for a tour,” and they all had to slow their pace to that of the old dog.
They walked behind the barn and he saw a collection of the saddest, most pathetic horses he’d ever seen. They made Buster here look like a Westminster Dog Show champ.
Emily walked to the fence and leaned on it. As though somebody’d rung the dinner gong, the horses started to plod, limp and shuffle their way forward. “I’ll get some apples,” Amy said, and disappeared into an open barn.
“I hate to be the one to break it to you, but those horses belong in a glue factory.”
“And that’s exactly where they’d be if Amy didn’t rescue them. There’s nothing wrong with those horses. They’re healthy, just old. Some of them aren’t even old. They were raised and kept pregnant to provide urine for hormone replacement therapy.”
He glanced a question at her.
“For women going through menopause? Pregnant mare pee has a ton of estrogen in it. But when hormone replacement therapy was linked to cancer, the market kind of dropped out of the pregnant mare business. All those mares weren’t needed any more, nor were most of the foals.” Emily shrugged.
“She’s running a haven for wayward mares?” There was something ludicrous in the notion.