The Doc's Double Delivery & Down-Home Diva

by Jacqueline Diamond

  “Rosa May told me you have your own place.”

  “Yep. It’s all mine. It took me five years to get it off the ground, but now it’s hopping. Very trendy and very exclusive. Mostly because my designs are so unique. And of course it didn’t hurt to win first prize at the National Nail Expo.”

  “Nail Expo?”

  “It was in Florida this year. Thousands of nail artists from all over the country competed in a five-day nail extravaganza.”

  “A nail competition. Unbelievable.”

  “Not just any competition, either,” Claudia informed him, “let me tell you, this thing is fierce. I barely beat out last year’s reigning champion, Margaret Stone. She used special neon lights to create this fireworks effect…I won’t bore you with the details.”

  Please don’t, Ross urged silently. He already knew more about fingernail painting than he wanted to. However, there was something contagious about her enthusiasm. He found himself interested despite the subject matter.

  “Anyway, I did world-famous skyscrapers which by itself might not have put me over the top, but on my Empire State Building I did a little miniature King Kong with a little miniature lady in his hand. I hate to brag but, I must say it was impressive.”

  “I bet. So now your store is a success.”

  “Salon,” Claudia corrected. “I don’t like to say success because that sounds like I made it, and if you think that for one second, that’s when your customers start to walk away. There can be no complacency in the nail art world. Customers can be fickle. My being away for a few weeks might be enough to send them searching for someone new, which could tank the business.”

  “It must be driving you crazy to be stuck out here,” Ross sympathized. “I know I couldn’t leave the farm for any length of time without it causing irreparable harm.”

  “Well, it’s a little different. If you left, your cows might die or something. My cows will just find another nail artist. If you know what I mean.”

  He laughed at that. “I guess you’re right.”

  “So how did it happen that you became a farmer? I mean you were an FBI agent right? That’s a pretty big leap.”

  “Actually, not so big. I was raised on this farm. Then my father died and left it to me.”

  “I’m sorry about your pop.”

  “I was, too. He was a good man.”

  “You could have turned it down,” Claudia pointed out.

  Ross just shook his head. “No, I couldn’t have. This farm was my father’s gift to me, and it will be my gift to Rosa May. It’s been here forever and will continue to be here forever. There’s something special about being part of something that is so constant. Susan grew up on a farm not too far from here, and she loved the life as much as I did. I think it scared her to leave. We were married after I finished college and she followed me to Virginia when I was accepted into the FBI academy. Never complained once. When my dad died, though, we knew it was time to come home. We both knew this was the right choice for us and for Rosa May. Don’t get me wrong. I did love being an agent. And every once in a while I miss the action. Then MacCurdy calls me up and asks me for a favor and the next thing I know I’m playing host to a lady on the run from the mob.”

  “So I brought excitement to the farm. That’s a good thing, right?”

  She sure as heck brought excitement; whether or not that was a good thing remained to be seen. “I guess,” he replied noncommittally.

  “I think it’s great that you love this place,” Claudia mused. “So many people where I live don’t really care about what they do. They’re just in it for the paycheck. They never understood why I sacrificed so much to have my own place, when I could have made better money working at one of the fancier salons in Manhattan.”

  “Because the salon is yours. More importantly, it is you,” Ross concluded easily.

  “Yes,” Claudia acknowledged. She couldn’t say why, but the fact that he understood that, that he understood her, this man who was supposed to be so different from her, shifted something inside her heart. For the first time since her parents died, she felt like someone understood her. That it should be Farmer Ted amazed her.

  “Just like the farm is yours and you all at the same time,” she whispered back in recognition of their mutual understanding.

  “Yes.”

  Time seemed to stop as their eyes met across the table. Neither could say why the tension was suddenly so thick, but it existed like an entity between them. They weren’t supposed to relate to each other. They weren’t supposed to have anything in common. They were supposed to be strangers, opposites, maybe even enemies. Only they weren’t.

  “It’s a pretty chunk of land,” Claudia finally blurted out in an attempt to break the tension.

  “Thanks.”

  “But it smells.”

  He exploded in laughter. And in that minute, Claudia knew that the slight shifting she had felt in her heart before was just a precursor to the sensation of feeling herself fall in love.

  5

  “I DO NOT love him.”

  Claudia stared at herself in the mirror. It had been a few days since she realized her feelings for Ross and she had decided to take action.

  “I do not love him.” It sounded so calm, so rational. So sane. So she said it again. “I do not love him. I do not love him. I. Do. Not. Love. Him. I won’t love him today. I won’t love him tomorrow. I won’t love him on the moon. I won’t love him on the sun. Who am I kidding? I’m so done!”

  “Huh?” Rosa May asked.

  She jumped three feet in the air. High enough that she could catch a glimpse of her shoes in the mirror. A good day for that to happen because it was possible that her purple heels clashed with her red shorts. “What are you doing sneaking up on me? You could have given me a heart attack. My uncle Mickey died a similar way when Aunt Estella caught him in the closet you-know-whatting.”

  “No,” Rosa May admitted. “I don’t know whatting he was doing. I never do.”

  “And it’s a good thing, too, an innocent girl like you. Back to the original question. What were you doing sneaking up on me?”

  “I wasn’t sneaking. I heard you talking to yourself again and—”

  “What do you mean again? I don’t talk to myself.”

  Rosa May chuckled. “Sure you do. You do it all the time when you think Dad and I aren’t around. And you sing, too. Some kind of opera stuff. No offense or anything but you’re not that good. You should stick to nails.”

  “Always the critic,” Claudia murmured, only slightly embarrassed that she’d been caught singing. She was more concerned with what she’d been caught saying. “So what did you hear? And how much is it going to cost me?”

  “Honestly,” Rosa May said, “all I heard was you quoting something that sounded like Dr. Seuss, but I don’t think you got it right. If you want I can get you the book from the Sun Prairie Library.”

  “Are you sure that’s all you heard?”

  Rosa May considered the question for a moment. “Well, I heard all that stuff about you not being in love with my dad, but I don’t get why you had to say it in the mirror. Adults can be so confusing. I’ve decided that in cases such as these it’s best to let you guys work it out between yourselves.”

  She had been lifting her foot high enough into the air to get another glimpse of her shoes in the mirror to determine if the colors truly didn’t match, so she missed Rosa May’s admission and instead continued with her own warning. “Because if you think you heard anything else you’re wrong. I wasn’t saying anything in this bathroom that anyone needed to hear or to repeat. Capisce?” Claudia dropped her foot.

  The shoes could stay. After all they were Prada. And Prada went with everything.

  “Capisce,” Rosie replied, happy to use her new favorite word. “I came up here to tell you that Dad says not to forget to put ointment on your chicken pecks or else they’ll get infected, and that we’re leaving for town in twenty minutes.”

  “An
d thank you for bringing up that painful memory,” Claudia said sarcastically.

  Rosa May giggled and darted out the door.

  Claudia surveyed her damaged hands and cringed. Since her hands were her living, she felt that it was important to lead by example. After all, who would trust their nails to a nail artist who couldn’t even take care of her own hands? No one, that’s who. Lesson number three at the Brooklyn Academy of Beauty.

  “It’s a good thing they can’t see me back in the academy today,” Claudia confirmed. Naturally, she’d done her nails. She had decided on a black-and-white theme with cows and horses interspersed on each finger. She figured it would be a good way to blend in with the other locals she was going to meet today. Sort of a sign of farm solidarity.

  The rest of her hands, however, were a mess and no amount of creams was going to fix them. The blisters from her adventures in mucking were healing, but they were leaving blotchy red marks. They didn’t compare, however, to the chicken pecks.

  “Gretchen,” she whispered to an empty room in a lethal tone. If that chicken thought she had seen the last of Claudia Bertucci, she was kidding herself. Revenge ran hot in her Italian blood, and someway, somehow she would have it. Feather by feather, if that’s what it took.

  It happened two days ago.

  All she wanted were some eggs. They weren’t even for her. The Cholesterol King and his Princess ordered eggs for breakfast. “Omelettes,” they’d proclaimed. “We want omelettes.”

  When Claudia announced that they were out of eggs, the two of them laughed.

  “This is a farm,” the King said. “We raise our own chickens. You do understand where eggs come from, don’t you?”

  She was a New Yorker, she wasn’t dense. Eggs came from chickens. Then nice unknown people, to whom the world obviously owed a great debt, collected and stuffed them into clean safe cardboard containers, which miraculously made it to aisle four of her corner market back in Brooklyn. That day she, Claudia Bertucci, New York miniature nail artist extraordinaire, became one of the unknown egg collectors. Life sure took some funny turns.

  She marched through Smelly Barn Number One, as she referred to it, which she could actually do without covering her nose these days, to the chicken coop located outside the back door of the barn. Sheltered in their own minibarn, several chickens were perched on stands covered with hay. The temperature was toasty, but the girls, like Claudia, were a little cranky after having been awoken at such an ungodly hour.

  “I know girls,” she commiserated. “No rest for the weary. If you hand over your eggs, I’ll be out of here before you can cock-a-doodle-doo.”

  No such luck. So Claudia strolled down the row of chickens stopping in front of the fattest chicken in the coop. Her assumption was that the fattest chicken would fork over the most eggs, allowing her to end the tedious task as soon as possible. But when Claudia reached under the chicken’s belly for her precious cargo, the chicken raised all kinds of chaos.

  Squawking and spitting, she pecked Claudia’s hands and wrists and would have pecked her eyes out if she could have reached. In the struggle, Claudia managed to wrap her hand around one precious egg and refused to let go. She would not be beaten by a chicken. She had a reputation to maintain, after all.

  Her mission only barely accomplished, Claudia rescued herself from the chicken coop and sprinted back to the kitchen—no easy task in thigh-high galoshes—just in case the chicken had decided to pursue her. Once inside, she was greeted by the sound of more laughter, as the Cholesterol King and his Princess amused themselves at her expense.

  “You’ve got chicken feathers in your hair,” the Princess announced joyfully. “I guess you met Gretchen. We meant to warn you. She doesn’t like strangers.”

  “Did you get the eggs?” the King wanted to know.

  “Oh, I got the egg,” Claudia informed him, huffing and puffing as she struggled for her breath. She then proceeded to crack the egg over his head, dumping the precious contents into his thick brown hair. Flicking her feather-ridden hair back over her shoulder, her chin held high, Claudia had filled the sink with ice and had plunged her hands into the frigid bath until the pain subsided.

  That was the day she met Gretchen.

  Two days later and her hands had somewhat recovered. So much so that Claudia decided to forgo the ointment. After all, this was her first trip into town. They were bound to run into neighbors and she didn’t want to greet any of Ross’s friends with white gunk all over her hands.

  “There you go again,” she told herself. “You’re thinking about him too much.” Verbally denying her feelings had become a daily ritual. She had performed it every day since the day she realized that her stomach wasn’t flopping about inside her body because of nerves. And her pulse wasn’t racing because of exercise. And her blood wasn’t heated because of overexposure to the sun. She knew this because these physical reactions only occurred when Farmer Ted was in the vicinity.

  When they’d talked in the kitchen about her salon and his land, Claudia had felt something shift deep inside. As she listened to him speak, she’d heard the strangest sounds in her head. They were words that Ross didn’t say, but she heard them anyway. They spoke of his commitment to his father, his wife and his daughter. She began to understand that leaving the FBI hadn’t been as easy for him as he proclaimed; it was simply that in his mind there was no real choice. This farm was his home. More than that, it was his future.

  In some ways, by coming to understand his deep devotion to the land, she had come to understand the farm better herself. It no longer seemed like Mars to her. Now it was just the moon. Not that she was an unofficial cowhand yet. But she was learning. Ross was teaching her. Which was both a good thing and a bad thing. The more time she spent with him the more she knew that he was unlike anyone she had ever known before.

  Oh, yeah; and he had a really great behind! It didn’t hurt.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Claudia told the mirror. Her conscience was telling her to wipe that gooey-ooey expression off her face and to erase that lovey-dovey gaze from her eyes.

  Just because she was attracted to the big brute didn’t mean that he returned her feelings. It was a good bet that his only thought regarding her was wondering when she was going to be able to leave. Okay, maybe he lingered a little bit at the dinner table to have a cup of coffee with her at the end of the day, and maybe she could see him staring at her when he didn’t think she was paying attention. But that wasn’t love. He’d loved his late wife, and Claudia was about as different from her as they come.

  And maybe it wasn’t even love. Who fell in love in a few days? She’d known Marco all her life, and she’d never fallen in love with him. Claudia had always chalked up her heartless heart to stubbornness. She was too independent to make the compromises a person needed to make to be in love. Yet somehow, Ross had sneaked by the defenses she had built to keep the weak-hearted away.

  Sneaked? No, more like bulldozed. He was too big to sneak.

  Regardless, the whole emotion was pointless. Most of the time he looked at her like the cows looked at her. Like she could walk around naked in front of their eyes and they wouldn’t care. It wasn’t a pleasant look. From either Ross or the cows.

  “Claudia!” he bellowed from below.

  At least he’d ceased to use her last name all the time.

  “Whaaat?”

  Ross never could decide if it was her accent or her unique voice in particular that caused the windows to rattle every time she shouted. He decided it had to be uniquely Claudia or else no one living in the city of New York would have any windows in their homes.

  “Come on. We’re going to be late.” He wanted to run his errands in town, catch a quick lunch and be back before sundown so he could repair one of the back fences. But he was learning that it was best not to rush Claudia. The harder he pushed the slower she became. She denied it, of course; but it seemed intrinsic in her nature to defy him.

  He rose his head whe
n he heard the familiar click click of her heels on the wooden steps. White legs stretched forever until the very tips of her thighs disappeared behind outrageously tight red cotton shorts. A short black cotton shirt with a mock neck—he actually knew what a mock neck referred to now—teased him with glimpses of her belly button every time she moved. Her hair as usual was filled to capacity with hairspray, and if he wasn’t mistaken, she had silver dolphins hanging from her ears.

  When she finally stood before him, she was only a few inches shorter. When he glanced at her feet he knew why. “Are you going into town dressed like that?”

  “Why do you always say that like it’s a bad thing?” she countered. “I planned for hours to put this outfit together.” Oops, she thought. No need to share that tidbit with him. Lesson number four at the Brooklyn Academy of Beauty: beauty should appear effortless.

  Which was a crock as far as Claudia was concerned. No one could ever mistake her hair as effortless.

  “Don’t you like my outfit?” she grilled.

  Like was a difficult description. When she dressed like this, which was all the time unless she was out in the pastures, several contradicting opinions entered Ross’s mind. First—oh no, now she had him doing it—he thought about how much he liked the look of her lean shapely legs and her soft white tummy. So pale, she almost seemed to glow, but rather than appear unhealthy, she accomplished luminescence. He thought about what that skin would feel like under his rough brown hands. More times than not it kept him up at night, wondering about it, obsessing about it.

  During the day he caught himself brushing against her accidentally just to get a hint of her scent on his clothes and feel the brush of her body against his. At the sink washing dishes. At the table reaching for the salad bowl. At night on the couch when his weight dipped the cushions so low that she rolled into him.

  Then he remembered the second thought that always came to mind when he saw her. She wasn’t Susan. She wasn’t close to Susan. Her loud voice, weak arms and outrageously inappropriate clothes, should have irritated him. The fact that they didn’t, irritated him. As a rule he favored one type of woman, and if that type had an opposite her name was Claudia.