Single Mom's Protector - Complete Series

by Nella Tyler

  “I figured you’d say something like that,” he agreed. “That’s why I’ve been consolidating my U.S. businesses and sold off everything overseas. I’m in a position now where I can sell this estate; if you’d like, we can move wherever you like.”

  “You mean it?”

  “The world is your oyster, my sweet, sweet wife. Pick anywhere you’d like to live, and I’ll get us there. I love you and want you happy.”

  “Not as much as I love you, my darling Cole.”

  Cole pulled her into his arms and when Carson’s back was turned, Cole kissed her hard on the mouth and then pushed her hair aside as he kissed her ear.

  “I love you.”

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  DIRTY – THE COMPLETE SERIES

  By Nella Tyler

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 Nella Tyler

  Chapter One

  Autumn

  I watched my dad surveying the new expansion to the farm, looking both satisfied and worried. “I don’t know why I talked myself into buying the new plot,” he said, shaking his head slightly.

  “We need it,” Tuck said, looking out over the new territory, as well. “Besides, you have to have enough land to pass on to both me and Autumn when the time comes, right?” Tuck looked at me with a smirk.

  “You don’t have to pass anything on to me,” I said quickly. Tuck had considered the family farm his since he was old enough to start working it; for myself, I thought that as long as I had enough money to live on and enough work to occupy my time, I’d just as soon live in town—but things hadn’t worked out that way.

  “Anyway, you got it at a steal, so it might as well be us that owns it and not some development company,” Tuck pointed out. In my opinion, that was far more helpful.

  “And, you’ll be able to turn enough profit on it that you can hire a crew, and not be out here working like a field hand all day, every day,” I pointed out. Tuck gave me a less-than-pleasant glance for that reminder.

  “I’m just not sure I’ll actually be able to get out this far every day,” Dad said. He looked at me. “Even with that new tractor we’ve got, it’s a big farm now.”

  “You can hire someone,” I suggested. “You should, actually. We made enough last year to pay at least one guy to come out.”

  “We can handle it ourselves,” Tuck insisted. “Hell, now that Addie’s almost one, she could be out working it with us—putting down seed, chasing away the crows. Get her some dungarees and she’ll be set.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Addie is still being weaned,” I pointed out. “You get squeamish on me whenever I wear a bathing suit—how would you feel about me breastfeeding her in the field?”

  Dad crouched down on the cleared-out land and scooped up a handful of dirt. It would take some working to make the new expansion ready for the planting in a few weeks’ time. He had had a notion to divide it between corn and soy beans for the first season, to see what kind of yields we could get.

  Dad had been growing corn for longer than I’d been alive, and he’d started growing soy beans for a challenge when I’d been about twelve years old, though never as much as the corn. If the soy took to the expansion well, he had told me, he would alternate between it and corn every other year, and hopefully expand the farm’s profits.

  I wished that I could be more help to Dad, but since I’d given birth to my daughter Adelyn, I’d wanted to stay with her as much as humanly possible. Now that she was almost a year old, I was able to do more and more around the house to help Dad and Mom—I took care of the vegetable garden and helped Mom in the kitchen and with the cleaning—but it was a different thing altogether to spend the day out in the field, sweating and working my ass off, taking breaks every few hours to feed my baby.

  I’d worked right up until the third trimester of my pregnancy before giving birth, and eventually, I was sure that I’d probably be needed out in the fields again—enough to merit spending a half day, or a few half days out there—before the next harvest came. But in the meantime, I was null and void.

  “You should put an ad in the classifieds, Dad,” I suggested. “I’m sure there are lots of guys in town who’d be willing to work hard for a decent paycheck. Hell, we’re not that far away from the college—you might be able to get a strapping young athlete to help you out in the fields.” Tuck and Dad both laughed, but I could see that Dad was actually mulling the idea over.

  “I’m not going to have time to go through all the applications on my own,” he said after thinking it over.

  “I’d be happy to help you screen them,” I told him. “I’ll even help you get the ad put in.”

  “You seem pretty anxious to get someone out here,” Tuck said, giving me a playful-suspicious look. “Getting lonely, sis?” I rolled my eyes.

  “I’m a single mother with a baby,” I pointed out. “No one is going to pay me any mind, even if I wanted them to. But Dad deserves some help around the farm to make the new expansion pay off.” I reached out for my dad’s hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Let’s head back to the house,” he suggested. “Give me a chance to think about it over dinner.” We walked back from the new expansion together, cutting across our own fields, still fallow from the winter.

  It would be planting time soon, and even if Dad hadn’t bought the new plot of land to add onto the fields we already had, I probably would have suggested he find someone to help. He wasn’t so old yet that he absolutely couldn’t work the land, but neither he nor Mom were as young as they used to be—and with only me and Tuck to help them, they were going to start losing money soon if they didn’t hire out.

  We started talking about what I planned to put into the vegetable garden once it was time to start planting there. We could get staples in town, and sometimes I liked to get something we couldn’t grow ourselves in the Iowa climate—oranges or peaches, things like that—but like most farmers, we grew and kept as much as possible: chickens for eggs and the occasional stew, tomatoes, squash, and beans in summer, cabbages, carrots, and other cold-weather vegetables in the fall and winter. I liked to experiment sometimes, getting different seeds from exchanges for stuff like heirloom tomatoes, different kinds of berries, or melons.

  When the growing season would be at its peak out in the fields, Mom and I would be canning and freezing as much as we could. The farm made a good bit of money, but it went a lot farther if we didn’t have to buy much in the way of food. “I think I’m going to do a big herb garden this summer,” I said as we got closer to the house.

  “Herbs aren’t much for eating,” Tuck pointed out. “Can’t have a salad made of ‘em, even.”

  “But they make other stuff taste better, and one of the seed exchanges we belong to has some interesting stuff—chocolate mint, Thai basil, things like that.”

  “Just make sure it’ll actually grow here before you put all that work in,” Dad suggested.

  I’d bought seeds from a catalogue once that I had thought—hoped—would bring me armfuls of beautiful flowers. I’d been maybe fourteen at the time and just starting to really pull my weight around the house. Instead of beautiful flowers, I’d ended up with a bunch of dead sticks in the ground when the summer heat scorched the plants, and no amount of water or fertilizer could keep them alive.

  When I’d gone crying to Dad about the failure, he’d looked up the plants and showed me that they were for a completely different “zone”—that had been the problem. Ever since then, I always checked twice or even three times before I took on a horticultural experiment, but I was pretty sure I’d never live that failure down, no matter how long I was
on the earth.

  “What have we got for supper tonight, Kimmie?” I could smell the meal Mom had made as soon as we got to the front door; I’d helped her early on, but she’d taken over the project when Dad had come home with the paperwork that proved his ownership of the new plot of land alongside our farm and Tuck and I had gone out with him to inspect it.

  “Chicken and dumplings, with some of that corn relish you like so much and strawberry bars for dessert,” Mom told him. “I think we might still have some ice cream in the outside freezer if you really want it, but it’s still too cold for my blood.”

  It was starting towards spring, but late at night, there was a chill in the air. I’d be grateful for my jacket when I left the main house with Addie to go to the guesthouse on the other end of the backyard.

  I’d moved in after things had gone south with the father of my child, and while I’d felt a little strange at first, I’d actually gotten comfortable in the cozy little place with its two bedrooms, tiny kitchen, and old-fashioned furniture. My parents didn’t have guests that often, anyway—that was why they’d offered the mini-house to me, instead of making me move back into my old room.

  I got my daughter out of the family room where she’d been playing with some of her toys in her playpen and loaded her up into her high chair. Addie didn’t eat all that much in the way of real food just yet, but I made a point of seating her at the table for every meal and giving her a little bit of everything so she’d get used to meals gradually—and so she wouldn’t get to be a picky eater like Tuck had been as a kid. I helped Mom serve up big bowls of the chicken and dumplings and a little plate of the delicious, rib-sticking food for my little girl, and we all sat down to eat.

  “Autumn seems to think I’m going to need some help managing that extension,” Dad said to Mom after we’d all had a few bites of food.

  “I still say we can handle it on our own,” Tuck insisted, wiping his mouth at the corners after devouring a big chunk of stewed chicken. “We’ve got equipment, and it’s not like it’ll take as much effort as the larger part of the field.”

  “But you two barely managed to keep up with the rest of the farm last year,” Mom pointed out. “I think hiring someone on makes sense; it’ll give you some insurance that you’ll get the most out of the new land.”

  “That was pretty much what I was starting to think,” Dad admitted. “And since Autumn volunteered to help me get through all the responses, I think it’s what we’ll do.”

  “How much are you going to pay?” I checked on Addie briefly. She was smearing one of the noodle-like dumplings against her lips, not really eating it, but she’d managed to get some of the carrots and peas into her mouth.

  “I’ll have to see what everyone else is paying,” Dad said. “I don’t want to cut into my profits too hard, but I also don’t want to lowball anyone who’d work hard for me.” I nodded.

  “The Hendersons up the way pay about $11 an hour, plus benefits,” I told him. “That seems like a decent deal to me—especially since you’re only hiring one guy. And he won’t be working the whole year, just most of it.”

  “Man, it’d be nice to be an employee instead of an owner,” Tuck joked.

  “Oh hush,” I said, shaking my head. “When have you ever hurt for money since you started working for Dad full time?”

  “I’m just saying,” Tuck said with a shrug.

  “Anyway,” Dad interrupted, breaking up the fight between me and my brother before it could really start, “I’ll put together an ad and we’ll get it in the paper. I’ll check around on pay and benefits first, and you’ll screen out the applications. Deal?” I nodded.

  “It’s a deal, Dad.”

  Chapter Two

  Cade

  I flipped through the paper while sitting on my front porch, drinking my first cup of coffee for the day. There were times when I considered canceling my subscription, but since it was only a couple of dollars a week, I’d never quite given it up.

  I was always grateful to have the subscription when whatever job I was working came to an end and I needed to find something to replace it. Otherwise, the coupons in the Sunday edition were pretty good, and I liked to do the crossword puzzles during dinner—at least, when I was working.

  It was my day off, and I thought about skipping ahead to the Accent section for the puzzles, but I knew I’d be better served to immediately go to the Classifieds.

  My latest project, helping build a new community development west of town, was finishing up for the season and with it my job would be finished; I needed to find something fairly quick to take up the slack. I took another sip of my coffee and found the ads, setting aside the rest of the paper to enjoy after I looked over the job openings.

  I normally tried to stick to construction jobs as much as possible, but there were only so many of those going on at any given time, especially in a small town like Ohanzee Plains. I couldn’t afford to be too picky—anything I was qualified to do, that at least was honest, I would try for.

  Of course, as I looked over the ads, it was obvious that the meth problem the sheriff’s department talked about on the news from time to time wasn’t getting any better. Some of the postings were to sell items that weren’t all that valuable, and I could only assume that the sellers were either in debt or looking to buy drugs. I skimmed the section for a few moments, pausing to make sure that I didn’t have anything to offer any of the people seeking to buy. Once I was sure that wasn’t the case, I moved onto the jobs.

  The little town I’d lived in all my life didn’t have a whole lot of jobs in any kind of long-term sense. A good chunk of the population was farmers, and most of them tried to maintain their own fields and ranches as much as they possibly could.

  There was always a good bit of seasonal work, including the construction jobs I normally tried to go out for, and there was always day labor—cleaning up the highway, clearing brush, things like that, if I got really desperate for money in between larger jobs.

  I’d done handy man work more than once in my life, starting back when I’d been in high school: mowing lawns, doing basic home repairs like replacing window sashes and things like that. I could take apart and put back together a basic motor thanks to the shop electives I’d done in high school, but I’d never gotten certified, so any kind of permanent mechanical repair job was out of my reach.

  I looked at each one of the postings carefully, trying to decide if it would be worth applying for. Some of them, where I recognized the company or the person posting the ad, looked good only if you didn’t know the personalities you’d have to deal with.

  Mrs. Evans wanted a handyman, but I knew for a fact that she tended to want to get eight hours of work for the price of five, which wasn’t something I was interested in fighting another time. Nathan Ellis wanted someone to help him clear the back 40 on his farm, but that job would only last a week—and I knew he tended to be a little late paying.

  I put my coffee aside and started looking at the entries more seriously, taking a pen out of my pocket and marking the ones that looked the likeliest. I managed to find a couple of listings that sounded like they’d be good options—most of them pretty short term, but they would be better than nothing. A house-painting job would probably last about a week, but the pay listed was good, and the family—the Smiths—was solid, I knew.

  There weren’t very many families in the town that I’d never met, even with a few people starting to come in as first generation residents. The kind of work I usually ended up doing made it easy to get to know lots of people.

  There was a longer-term job listed for helping hands to do some packing for a local farm equipment company—that would probably last about a month, and the pay would be decent, even if it didn’t come with any benefits. As long as I didn’t get sick or injured, I could make enough probably to float me for two months if I was careful.

  Farm Hand Needed! The ad jumped out at me as I came to the end of the last page. Nelson family farm is loo
king for help to cover newly purchased land. $13/hr. Frequent meals provided. Experience not necessary, but a plus.

  The ad surprised me; I knew the Nelson family mostly by reputation—they had a good one. But as far as I knew, they’d never hired anyone on for more than a week or two for the purposes of helping with the harvest. Then again, if Robert Nelson had purchased more land to expand his fields, it would make sense that they’d want to pull someone on for the whole season.

  I had gone to school with the Nelson kids, and I was pretty sure I’d heard gossip now and then about the son and daughter—that Tuck was dating so-and-so, or that Autumn had gotten pregnant with her boyfriend. I assumed that she’d probably married the father of her child. That was the usual course of things in town.

  The ad mentioned that it would be months of work, and at $13 an hour, it was nothing to sneeze at, especially with the meals that they were going to occasionally offer their worker in addition.

  Of course, I realized that even with a good reputation, it was possible the Nelsons would be as bad as any of the people I was trying to avoid working for, but it seemed less likely to me. The ad included an email address to write to and requested a work history and references. I considered who I could ask and how to go about submitting a work history. I had a resume that I used for time to time—I could update it with my most recent project and send it on its way.

  I set the newspaper aside and finished off my coffee, thinking about the problem of applying for the farm hand job the Nelsons had available. I was pretty sure it would be a popular opening. It was a good few months of work at least, and it was a good pay rate.

  But I was also pretty sure that none of the other temporary guys I was working with at the construction site were looking seriously for a job yet—we were slated for an early completion bonus. Those who weren’t going to give themselves a week off probably already had work lined up at another construction site, probably in the next town over. There’d be the usual seasonal workers applying, and people new to the town hungry for any job they could get. But I liked by chances overall.