End Of The Road: (A Clean Romance Novella) (Women's Adventure in Alaska Romance Book 3)

by Renee Hart

  “No.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I knew calling the police was the right thing to do, but I worried what Sunil would do if he got out on bail. I didn't want this situation turning into something worse than it already was.

  “It's fine,” I said, looking into Harold's eyes. “It's going to be fine.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” He leaned the two-by-four against his truck, then put his arms around me.

  I thought about it for a long moment. I hadn't really told Harold anything about the situation between Sunil and I. It would have spoiled the mood to bring up such things when we were on a date. I was sure Harold would support me, but I wasn't sure what he could do to help.

  Then an idea occurred to me. A stupid, foolish idea, and one that would no doubt anger Sunil quite a bit. It was also reckless and a bit dangerous. But it was a way for me to give him what he wanted without letting him win.

  “It might not be one hundred percent...legal,” I said. I shrugged and gave Harold a lopsided grin.

  “If it'll help you,” Harold said, “I'm all for it.”

  I told him my idea, and God bless this sweet man, he laughed out loud so hard that I couldn't help but kiss him and hold him against my chest until his chuckles subsided.

  Chapter 10

  I spent a lot of my free time over the next few days in meetings with my lawyer and on the phone with the insurance company. I stood in my kitchen Saturday morning wrapping up one of the last phone calls, glad that everything was going so smoothly so far.

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said into the phone, twirling a strand of hair between my fingers. “That's right. No, cancel the entire policy. Yes. Yes. No, I won't be needing to set up a new one. Well, that's just the way it is. Okay. Thank you. Goodbye.”

  I hung up the phone and leaned against the kitchen counter with a sigh. I thought I might be crazy for doing this, but after the past few months, I felt like I really needed to do something crazy.

  Harold pulled Babe the Blue Pickup Truck into my driveway a few minutes later. I greeted him at the door with a hug and a big kiss. His stubble scratched at my chin and made me giggle. “You letting this grow out again?” I asked, tugging at a few of the short whiskers.

  “Just for the vacation,” he said. “I never shave when I'm on vacation.”

  “Well, I still shaved,” I said, turning away and watching him over my shoulder as I sashayed down the hall. His eyes took me in and made me feel ten years younger.

  “This everything?” he asked as he followed me in. He picked up two of the suitcases that were sitting in the hall.

  “Enough to cover us for Spring Break,” I said. I grabbed my little duffel bag and slung it over my shoulder. “I just brought what we'd need.”

  We headed out to the truck and stuck my bags in the back, alongside Harold's. Spring break would run until a week from tomorrow, giving us nine days to ourselves. I'd arranged the final meeting with Sunil and our lawyers for the day after we got back. My lawyer was already drawing up all of the documents needed to turn over the cranberry bogs to Sunil, and all we'd have to do was sign them.

  But between now and then, the land still belonged to me.

  I put on some upbeat music as we drove out, singing along and enjoying the breeze coming through the truck's windows. Harold was mostly quiet, keeping his attention on the road. He didn't start talking until about half an hour into the trip.

  “So, you're sure about this?”

  “I'm quite sure,” I said. I kept my eyes straight ahead.

  “You're not worried about getting into any trouble?”

  I shrugged. “The land still belongs to me. And as long as it does, I can do as I please. Besides, if Sunil tries to bring me any legal trouble, his record isn't going to help him any. And since I'm pretty sure he's planning something illegal with the money from the land sale, I doubt he'll be the one calling the authorities. It would just draw attention to whatever scam or con job he's got going on with his other investors.”

  “All right,” Harold said. He rubbed a knuckle across the scruff on his chin. “I've never done anything like this before. Though I agree with you that Sunil shouldn't get to profit from this. After you told me about that real estate thing he pulled, I looked up the news. A lot of poor, decent folks got screwed out of their life savings because of him. I don't much care for that.”

  “It was the main factor behind the divorce,” I said. I rested my chin on my hand and stared out the window at the trees and the mile markers as they sailed past us. “Though I think we'd fallen out of love long before I learned what kind of business he was getting up to.”

  Harold reached over and patted my knee. I looked at him and he gave me a small smile. I laid my hand over his and our fingers intertwined.

  We rode in silence the rest of the way, until we reached the New Jersey Pine Barrens, home of the state's cranberry farms, including the land that I still owned for another nine days.

  We used my phone's GPS to get directions the rest of the way to the farm. I'd only been there a handful of times over the years, so I didn't quite remember the way. In the early afternoon we pulled off the road onto the long dirt driveway that led up to the farmhouse where Sunil's uncle had once lived.

  A couple of old, run-down barns stood off to the side of the house, and some rusted old tractors littered the front lawn. The fields beyond the house were flooded badly enough that at a glance, it looked like a lake. When the farm was in production, a combination of flood pumps and irrigation ditches would have been used to control the water levels.

  During the growing season, the plants grew in only a few inches of water. When harvest time came, the water level would be raised and special harvesting machines would drive through, scooping up the floating fruit and separating it from the vines. With the farm out of commission for so many years, of course, the fields were a mess. Plenty of cranberries still grew wild here and there throughout the fields, but there was nothing worth harvesting.

  We went up to the house and I dug the old key out of my purse. It stuck in the lock, but I managed to force the door open with a bit of work. The inside of the house was dusty and smelled faintly of mildew. The old wooden floors creaked beneath our feet. The afternoon sunlight filtered in through stained windows framed by rotten curtains.

  I flipped the light switch, but no lights came on. I'd forgotten that Sunil and I had turned off the electricity a few years ago, when we hadn't known yet what to do with the place.

  “It's not a bad little home,” Harold said, looking around. “Needs a little care is all.” He ran a hand across the old wood of the door frame, then knocked his knuckles against the railing on the old staircase, testing its durability. “A little paint, some cleaning, redo the floors. It's a shame this old place isn't going to have a family ever again.”

  “I never did get around to starting a family,” I said. “I suppose it's a bit too late to consider that now.”

  “Nonsense,” Harold said. He stepped over to me and slipped his arms around my waist. “You're still a young, radiant woman.”

  I laughed and slipped my arms around his neck. “I'm too old for children, Harold. By the time they finished college, I'd be in my sixties.” I shook my head and sighed. “That's not what I'm looking for now.”

  “Then what are you looking for?”

  I leaned up and kissed him. “You.”

  He blushed and grinned, looking like a little schoolboy. “Well, you have me.”

  We explored the little house for awhile, tidying up as much as we needed to in order to make the place habitable for a few days. One of the bedroom windows was broken and we found several years' worth of old leaves and general refuse inside, along with an old, abandoned bird's nest.

  The plumbing didn't work, which left us with the choice of either driving half an hour to the nearest gas station when we had to use the bathroom, or else doing it the rustic way.

  The good news was that the master bedroom was still in good shape,
and other than a thick layer of dust on the sheets, it looked like a perfectly comfortable place to sleep during our little vacation.

  “Let's relax for today,” I said, sitting back on the bed. The old springs squeaked beneath my weight. “Then tomorrow we can get started.”

  Chapter 11

  Later that night, Harold and I sat in front of the farmhouse's fireplace, snuggled up together. There wasn't another soul for miles around. Harold had broken up some old wooden crates from out back to use as firewood.

  I'd teased him when we picked up the old wood axe and started chopping, telling him he really had become my lumberjack. He'd just laughed and taken off his flannel shirt, letting the sun beat down on his bare chest as he swung the axe. I'd sat on the back porch and admired the view, then helped him carry the wood inside.

  We'd found some crates of cranberry wine collecting dust in the basement. It had a tart flavor, but I developed a taste for it after a few glasses. We were on our second bottle, sharing stories from our younger days. I kept finding out more and more about Harold that I hadn't known. We had only been together for a few weeks, but I kept being surprised by all of the stories he had to share.

  “You were really in the army?” I asked as he started telling a tale from the early days of his marriage.

  “Not for long,” he said. “It was 1992. The Gulf War was already over, and I was nineteen, married, and trying to raise my first son. Joining the army seemed like a good idea. Government benefits, a GI Bill for college, and my wife and son were able to live on the base with me, rent-free. I figured I'd do my time, then go into college as soon as I got out. It seemed like a good plan at the time.”

  “So what happened?” I leaned back on my elbow, watching the firelight bathe Harold's muscular body as he told his story.

  “I came home one day and caught my wife sharing a glass of wine with one of my superiors.”

  “Oh.” I took a big drink of my wine, a bit stunned at that revelation. “Were they fooling around?”

  He shook his head, staring into the flames. “She said no, though it was clear that they would have been, if I'd come home ten minutes later. She hadn't been very happy living there, and being a mother at such a young age had been hard on her. As far as I ever knew, it was the only time she came close to being unfaithful. Looking back on it now, I can't say I blame her. I wasn't the best husband in those early days.”

  I patted his knee. “We all make mistakes when we're young.”

  He snorted and laughed. “Well, my biggest mistake was taking a swing at the guy when I found them. I only dodged a court martial for assault because he didn't want to end up on a witness stand admitting that he'd been putting the moves on my wife.”

  “Oh my.”

  “I got a discharge,” Harold said, “lost my benefits, almost lost my marriage as well.”

  “But you worked it out?”

  A wry grin crossed his lips. “Because she got pregnant again. I couldn't bring myself to run out on her. We worked things out, made an effort at having a happy marriage. And we were happy...some of the time.”

  “Sometimes I can't remember if Sunil and I were ever truly happy,” I said. I swirled the last drops of wine around the bottom of my glass, watching the way the firelight played off the red liquid. “Even before he got involved in these schemes of his, he was always too focused on work. He wanted success, more than anything else. And to someone like him, having a wife is part of the success package.”

  “There are worse things to want in life,” Harold said. “I can't say I'd blame him for wanting the house, the wife, the successful career. I wanted that, myself. It's the way he went about it that's the problem.”

  I watched as the flames started to die down. I snuggled closer to Harold, hoping we had both learned enough from the mistakes of our youth, from the failures of our marriages, that we could do a better job this time around.

  “Do you think about the future?” I asked him. “I know we said we wanted to keep things simple. Focus on the small wants. But sometimes...”

  “I think about it all the time,” he said.

  “Really?” I pulled my eyes away from the fire and looked up at him. His deep-set eyes gazed down at me. He reached up and caressed my cheek, brushing back a stray strand of my hair.

  “Really,” he said. “I'm not exactly a young man anymore, Sharada.”

  “You're only forty-three,” I said, smiling at him.

  “More than half of my life's behind me, then.” He set his wine glass aside and put both arms around me. “Don't get me wrong, I know I've got a long life ahead of me still. And I'm not saying I've figured things out or that I'm ready to run off and get married or something. But I still think about the future.”

  “And?” I held my breath as I looked up at him.

  “And when I think about the future, I like the idea of having you in it.”

  “Good,” I said. I laid my head against his chest. What he'd said was good enough, for now. I wasn't looking for a proposal or some big, romantic gesture. I'd just needed to know that this was going somewhere. That he wanted me as a part of his life as much as I wanted him as a part of mine.

  He held me until the light from the fire dimmed to the soft glow of dying embers. We spent the rest of the night there together in the farmhouse, serenaded by the music of the whip-poor-wills in the trees and the sounds of the wind rattling the old rafters up above.

  Chapter 12

  The next day, Harold worked on getting one of the old tractors up and running again. The equipment had been sitting around in the weather for a few years, but there was nothing wrong with it that couldn't be fixed with a tune up and a few replacement parts.

  We went into town to stop at a hardware store for some supplies, then stopped for lunch at a rustic little inn that had a restaurant on the ground floor.

  While Harold was working on the tractor, I put on some knee-high leather boots, shorts, and one of Harold's flannel shirts, the bottom half left unbuttoned and the flaps tied under my breasts like a proper farm girl. I borrowed Harold's axe and strolled through the fields to do a little lumberjacking of my own.

  A lot of the farm's crucial irrigation systems were fed by PVC pipes that ran in long lines through the fields. The pipes had holes every few inches, so that when water was fed through them, it would spread out across the lengths of the fields. There were also pipes and hoses that fed tall standing sprinklers that looked like metal scarecrows peppered throughout the fields. They towered overhead, each one big enough to send a spray of water across hundreds of feet at a time.

  I stood at the edge of the field and took out my phone, then downloaded some MP3s for “I've Been Working on the Railroad,” “Whistle While You Work,” and a few other upbeat working tunes. I started the playlist and stuck the phone in my shirt pocket, then hoisted the axe to my shoulder as the music started to play.

  I sung along, a big grin on my face. “I've been working on the—” I swung my axe down, severing a pipe. “—railroad! All the live long—” I took another swing. “—day!” I grunted with the effort, letting the music help me to find my rhythm. I took a few steps down and started up again, ruining the pipe more and more with each swing. I focused on the main pipes that ran along the edges of the field, and on the joints where the damage would be hardest to repair.

  I worked up a sweat pretty quickly, working under the mid-April sun. Working in a library for so many years had given me a good amount of upper-body strength—lifting stacks of books over and over could be a workout, especially with thick science textbooks—but that certainly wasn't the same as swinging an ax over and over again. I'd only made a little bit of progress in my acts of wanton destruction when I needed a break.

  It wasn't long into my chopping when I heard the tractor engine start up. I waved at Harold from across the field and hooted. He waved back, then shifted the tractor into gear and drove over to me. The tractor crushed pipes as it ran over them, and Harold wore a childlike gri
n the entire time.

  He stopped near me and I climbed up into the cab with him. “Ready to go wreak some havoc?” I asked him.

  “You're nuts,” he told me, laughing and shaking his head. “Absolutely nuts. I love it.”

  I grinned and kissed him, then settled in behind him with my arms wrapped around his waist. We drove through the fields, letting the tractor's huge tires crush whatever was in our path.

  We stopped by one of the tall sprinkler systems, and Harold hooked up some chains to the most fragile looking parts of it. When he started the tractor up again and kicked it into gear, we dragged the sprinkler behind us until pieces started snapping off. Hoses and pipes were ripped from their mountings and dragged across the muddy fields, leaving the place looking like a hurricane had swept through.

  We spent the better part of the day destroying as much of the farm as we could. We used the tractor to tear down pieces of the pumps and the irrigation system. We used the axe to cut through pipes and hoses. We ran over an old wooden shed, knocking it down and crushing it under the tractor's giant tires.

  When we were done for the day, I did some searching on my phone and came up with some estimates. As we walked back into the farmhouse, I tallied it all off for Harold. “Between replacing the pumps, motors, PVC pipe, valves, fittings, and adding in the cost for delivery and installation of replacement parts, fixing all of the damage will probably run about $1200 per acre.”

  Harold stopped and looked around the fields. We couldn't see all of the land, soon to be Sunil's land, from where we stood. But just the nearest fields, from here to the first treeline, was the length of multiple football fields.

  “How many acres is the land?”

  I grinned. “Over 1200.” I punched up the calculator app on my phone, multiplied the numbers, and read it off to him. “If we do the entire acreage the way we did today, that's $1,440,000.” I put a hand on my hip and made a face of mock concern. “You know, it's really a shame I canceled the insurance before we came out here. Sunil is going to have to pay for those repairs himself.”