by Nancy Warren
What she didn’t tell him was that she had an awful feeling it already had happened. And with the man who was planning to destroy a town so special that people were healthier and lived longer than in the regular population. She bet that would stop being true if Joe’s mining venture went ahead.
Meanwhile, now that she’d unburdened her conscience, she had to go get something for the town wrecker’s dinner.
Something bland but interesting, not spicy but tasty. Or maybe she’d give him fish baked in milk and then play footsie with him under the table to distract him from what he was eating.
After a good ride, where he let the Ducati go and hung on for the ride, Joe parked the bike in town and wandered up Main Street, gazing into windows and doing something he never did. Strolling. Stopping to chat to the people who knew him, and knew all about his business and his recent medical troubles – and that was pretty much everybody.
He wanted to buy Emily a present. It was difficult to think of the right kind of gift, though, for there were several things he wanted his gift to convey.
First, there was thanks for driving him to the hospital, visiting him, bringing him home – all that going beyond the call of duty as an innkeeper activity for which he was profoundly grateful.
He also wanted to buy a gift for Emily herself, for the woman who’d given him so much joy last night. If he were at home, he’d send a couple of dozen long stemmed roses. An uncomfortable image flashed across his mind of that arrangement his office had sent him in hospital. That same, standard arrangement they sent everyone; was he as predictable with the long stemmed roses?
Well, he wasn’t going to buy roses for Emily. There didn’t seem to be a florist in Beaverton and besides, Emily had a garden full of flowers. She spent half her life out there tending roses – which obviously gave her pleasure. The last thing he wanted to do was send her the cut variety.
He wandered up Main Street. The trouble with wandering when there was no phone attached to your ear was that it gave you too much time to think. Too much time to remember the look on Emily’s face when she’d left his room last night.
Why hadn’t he pretended to fall asleep? At least then he’d have had the pleasure of holding her while she slept. He’d have given up his own rest. It wouldn’t have made much difference. After she left he had a crap sleep anyway.
If the shopping told a great deal about a town, and Joe had never thought about this one way or another not being much of a shopper – but if it did, then Beaverton was one very odd place.
Not that he needed a lot of extra evidence.
The art gallery specialized in a number of painters he was unfamiliar with whose work featured nudes. Nudes recumbent, nudes standing, nudes playing croquet, pairs of nudes going at it. As interesting as the art no doubt was, he kept walking.
He left there and wandered next door to the gift shop. He got the idea that everyone with a hobby got a spot in the gift store. Bad pottery, crocheted toilet roll covers, quilts, beeswax candles and hand blown glass sculptures in sensuous flowing lines that made him think of naked women. The town whittlers had been busy as, well, beavers creating replicas of the town’s gigantic mascot, most dandruffed with dust.
He kept going.
The barbers in the barbershop he’d been warned never to set foot in waved gaily as he passed, the woman never stopping her snipping.
He wasn’t a stroller. A wanderer. A browser. And yet, wth no cell phone, no laptop, he didn’t know what else to do with himself. Emily had gone out so he’d decided to do the same, but all he wanted was to get her alone again. Desire for her thrummed beneath his skin in a steady beat, like his pulse.
He passed a bakery. Oh, how they all waved, but he wasn’t that naïve. Emily was a terrific cook. What could he buy her at a bakery that she couldn’t bake better herself?
He waved back at the friendly strangers and kept walking. He knew he’d find something, if he just kept looking.
There was a dog lying with its head on his paws outside the bakery. When Joe looked down at him, his tail wagged feebly.
“Hi, Buster,” he said, squatting to pat the poor old beast. Buster licked his hand and wriggled his arthritic body – which for Buster was like turning cartwheels. “Oh, you’re a good old boy, aren’t you?”
Buster agreed, and wagged his tail some more.
“He sure did take to you,” said the kindly plain woman who owned not only Buster, but the Ranch of the Damned.
Joe rose. “Hi, Amy. Nice day.” And then was inspired to ask this woman, who was obviously one of Emily’s friends, if she had an idea for a gift for his landlady.
“Emily’s a classy woman,” she said with a slight frown. “Most of what this town sells, she wouldn’t want.”
“I was afraid of that. I thought of roses, but there’s no florist. And anyway, she grows them.”
“I’ve got some new hybrid bushes in.”
“You have? You mean real rose bushes?”
“Sure.”
He beamed at the woman, beamed at Buster. Of course giving a rose bush to a woman who loved to grow roses had to be better than the cut kind. “Perfect.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Emily had spent most of the time since she’d returned from Gord’s office dodging the aunts. Okay, so she had slept with Joe. So what? It was her business. His business. Not Aunt Olive and Aunt Lydia’s business. But did they know that? Oh, no.
And after all but fully consummating their relationship again over the breakfast table, what had he done? He’d taken off, that’s what. He’d left the Shady Lady while she was on her errand to see Gord and when she returned no one knew where he’d gone. It wasn’t that she cared exactly, but where the hell was he? A workaholic with no toys? She’d expected that he’d be haunting her every second, bored out of his mine, not that he’d disappear.
As always when she felt churned up, she picked up her caddy of garden tools and went outside, where the scent of roses soothed, the glossy leaves welcomed her, and the bees buzzed like old friends.
She had no idea how long she’d been out there when she heard Joe’s voice. “Hi.” That’s all he said and she felt her heart jump.
She turned toward him in what she hoped was a casual way, and saw he had his hands behind his back and an air of suppressed excitement.
“Hi,” she replied.
“I had a good time last night,” he said.
The smile that bloomed came from somewhere deep inside. “Me, too,” she said.
“I wanted to get you flowers. So I did.”
He brought his hands out front and her jaw dropped. “That is so perfect,” she cried.
As she walked toward him, he held out a potted rose bush.
“I tried to find a color I didn’t think you had.”
Mr. I-don’t-know-what’s-in-my-sandwich had taken the trouble to learn the colors of her roses?
“Thank you, Joe,” she said. She felt a little foolish. No, not foolish exactly, more flustered. How odd. She never acted like this. She couldn’t even raise her gaze from the tight bud of the apricot-colored hybrid. She reached out and touched the peachy-pink edge that flirted from behind the tight green bud. “I can’t think of anything that would have meant more.”
“I’m glad,” he said simply.
There was a pause. Finally she glanced up and found him staring at her so seriously she wished she’d kept her gaze on the rose.
“Well,” she said after a moment. “Where should I plant it?”
They both looked around the garden, so overflowing with green stalks and leaves and colorful blooms that Joe wondered where she’d even find room for another rose bush. She didn’t seem to see any problem, however. “I want it to go somewhere prominent, so that I remember you every time I look at it”
Something to remember him by? He felt a little huffy to be so quickly dismissed from her near future, until he realized that of course he was intending to go and had never pretended otherwise.
; She was a practical woman, that Emily, not one to let a little romance cloud her thinking.
Romance. He considered the woman standing in front of him admiring her rose bush, clearly obsessed with finding it the ideal location. No doubt she was thinking about soil variables and hours of sunlight and not about the man who’d given her the plant. Romance? He’d never seen a woman less given to romance than Emily.
He thought about earlier, in the dining room. The fact that she was facing him at breakfast after they’d slept together hadn’t fazed her at all, but his kiss in front of her aunts had rattled her shutters all right. They weren’t the sort of aunts to mind a little kissing over the breakfast table – in fact, he guessed they’d be a damn sight happier to see Emily bent backwards over a man’s arm than they were to see their daily bran flakes.
Suddenly, he got it, the thing that had bothered him this morning. Emily had enjoyed sex with him, but she didn’t seem to have any romantic feelings toward him. Of course, that ought to make her his ideal woman, so why did he want her to try to talk to him about his feelings? Why did he want her to suggest a picnic or the movies or any one of a thousand foolish activities he wouldn’t have time for if he had his computer and phone?
He didn’t question his motives too closely, only followed the irresistible impulse to see if he was right.
“You see sex and romance as two different things, don’t you?”
“They are two different things,” she said looking at him as though he weren’t too bright.
“Not to most women.”
“I am not most women.”
“Thank you, I can see that.”
“What is bothering you, Joe?”
“I don’t know. It’s strange to meet someone who only wants me for sex, I guess.”
She laughed. “What would you have me do? You’re leaving in a few days. I had a great time last night. I loved our time together and I’m hoping we’ll do it again tonight, but I’m not going to swoon all over you and start planning the wedding. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No! I only want to feel like you’ll still remember my name a week from now.”
She patted his cheek. He could not believe it. She patted his cheek. “I’ll always remember you with fondness, Joe. And I’ll have your beautiful rose to remind me of you.”
“So you equate romance with permanent commitment, is that it?”
“Are you writing a thesis on this topic?”
“No. I’m making conversation.” Though he wondered why he bothered. It was clear the woman was more interested in yanking up weeds and slopping fertilizer around than she was in talking to the man who’d spent some of the nicest moments of his life inside her body.
All right. Fine then. He’d talk about something she might find interesting.
“I haven’t told you why I’m here.”
She glanced up at him, her expression unreadable. “No. You haven’t.”
“I think you’re going to like what I have to tell you.”
This time her expression was perfectly legible. She looked astonished. “You do?”
What did she think he was doing here, destroying the place? She really had some opinion of him. He was anxious to let her know the truth. “I’m here to save Beaverton.”
“Really.” She was on her knees squinting up at him, so he must have mis-read her expression. She looked disgusted, but how could she be? Maybe she thought he was planning to take all the credit personally for saving her town.
“Well, not me personally, of course, but I’m here representing a company that wants to inject a great deal of capital into the area. They’re going to bring industry to the area that will employ a number of people. If all goes well, the work force will increase, businesses will prosper. The Shady Lady will be packed every night; Emily, we’ll put this place on the map.”
She looked at him the way she might have looked at one of the insects crawling among her roses, one she couldn’t immediately identify. “What kind of industry?”
“It’s not the specific industry that’s important, so much as the benefits it will bring to the area.”
“Still, I’m curious.”
“Phosphate. This area is rich in it. And since phosphate is critical to the global agriculture industry I’m sure you can see how exciting this find is.”
She rose and turned to him. “What’s the process exactly to retrieve the phosphate? And why Beaverton?”
“Two excellent questions.”
“I hope you have two excellent answers.”
“Emily, would you cut the attitude? I’m telling you, I can help save this town. Okay, so phosphate’s not the sexiest commodity going, but we’re talking cash infusion, an expanded workforce, progress, Em, progress.”
“And the answers to my questions?”
“Right.” She could drop the hostility. That would help. “The process, and why we chose Beaverton.”
She nodded.
“Well, the process isn’t something I completely understand, frankly. Beaverton’s got two things going for it. There’s a great deal of phosphate under the soil, which is easily mined, and the old sanitarium property has been closed for years. The company I represent will take it over, pay the back taxes, bring prosperity back to Beaverton.”
She gave him a steely-eyed Gary Cooper at High Noon unblinking stare. “How do you get the phosphate out of the ground, Joe?”
“It’s a surface mining technique.”
“But the ‘surfaces’ around here are all in use.”
“Look, I realize there are going to be some ruffled feathers and inconvenience, but progress always causes some opposition. It’s human nature to resist change. I thought you would be more forward thinking.”
“Forward thinking? Joe, these are people’s lives, their fields and nature, their livelihoods.”
He snorted.
“Okay, so they’re not Fortune 500 companies, but what about Amy Potter’s horses? Where are they going to go while the land is stripped from under them? What about her organic vegetables? Or Max’s potato farm? You can’t simply yank the phosphate out from under them and think it won’t completely mess up their lives.”
“Actually, Em, we can. Mineral rights can be claimed by anyone.”
“Oh, that is so unfair.”
“They’ll be compensated.”
“Hah. What kind of compensation is there for those poor horses? Can you compensate my roses if they’re yanked out of the ground? Can you compensate me for the memories that are in this garden and the love and attention I’ve devoted to it?”
“Nobody’s going to mine your back garden, Emily. Get a grip.”
“But, don’t you see? Everyone feels the way I do about their little corner of paradise.” As they’d been talking, she’d planted the rose, added another hint of paradise to the garden. “That’s what this place is to us. Nobody here is looking to get rich. Beaverton is a community where people get along and look after each other, where nobody cares if you’re eccentric or different. How many places like that exist in this country, Joe? Or in the world? Can you put a value on that?”
“You’re looking at this emotionally,” he said, wishing she hadn’t mentioned those horses. He’d have to see what would happen in a case like that. “Try to be practical.”
“I can’t be practical about this. My great grandfather built the sanitarium and he left it to the town of Beaverton. He worked his whole life to improve the health and peacefulness of this area. He would turn over in his grave.”
“Then maybe the town should have paid the taxes,” he said pleasantly, but through gritted teeth. He’d thought Emily would be jumping for joy at his news not looking at him like he’d shot her puppy.
“I want to show you something.”
It was probably another heart-rending animal rescue operation. “I’m not interested.”
“Oh, I think you’ll be interested in this. It’s the insiders’ tour of the sanitarium. Trust me, nobody knows
that place like I do.””
“You have keys to get inside?”
“Yes.”
Figured. “I’ve already seen it.”
“Not the way I can show it to you. I’m going to wash up and change into my leathers. I’ll be with you in five minutes.”
Another ride? With Emily? She knew he couldn’t resist.
Because he could never stand to waste time, he picked up the now empty black pot that the rose had come in. A dusting of dirt lined the inside. He stacked it neatly where she kept others, tucked around behind the house. He picked up Em’s discarded clippers and resumed dead-heading the roses. She had so many roses, there were always things that needed doing. He found the repetitive task soothing, and as he fell into a rhythm, he noticed that his stomach was feeling better. Not just better than since his attack, but better than it had in months. Probably the gastric thing had been coming on for ages and he hadn’t noticed.
“Fire, fire!” yelled a familiar voice. Since Em was upstairs and probably out of earshot of the frantic middle-aged fireman with his plastic hat, Joe pointed out the freshly-planted rose. He’d been about to give it a good soaking anyway.
Now that he wasn’t busy either getting his panicked heart beat back in control or pondering the lunacy of this town, he took a moment to admire the way the fireman focused on his task, watering the roses so he got their roots and not their leaves. After he was done, he coiled the hose neatly, saluted smartly and was on his way.
“You’re looking kind of stunned,” Emily said when she emerged in her leathers. Her jacket was open and under it he could see a tank top that was the same color as the rose she’d planted. “What’s up?”
How to explain that he was starting to get what she meant about this town? How would the new influx of factory workers and small business owners take to an old guy in a red plastic fireman’s helmet? Or a sweet old lady kleptomaniac? Would all those people who lived in Beaverton because it was the kind of place where they would never be laughed out of town, suddenly be laughed out of town?
It was nothing to do with him, of course, but still. He wondered.
“That top is the same color as the rose you just planted,” he said since it was easier to talk about her clothes than about his feelings about the townspeople.