Unexpected Love (White Oak-Mafia #2)

by Liza O'Connor

  “Tom Barkman will be by at noon today to drop off our computers. I need him to see the mounds.”

  She turned, concern written on her face. “Shouldn’t you determine if the mounds are authentic first?”

  “He’s got connections with the University of Minnesota.”

  “Which is needed why?”

  “They have a lab capable of carbon dating.”

  She forked the lean ham slices out of the skillet and started the eggs. “So exactly how does carbon dating work? Does one little carbon bring the other a bouquet of flowers?”

  He chuckled. God, he loved her playful sense of humor. “Do you really want to know?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, if you’re dealing with carbon-based items such as soil containing dead plants, you can use carbon-based dating if it’s not older than sixty-two thousand years.”

  “So this will be young carbon dating?”

  “The mounds should be within the time frame that has been proven to be highly accurate using carbon dating when compared to other means.”

  “Like tree rings?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So how do you do this?”

  “We’ll combust a small amount of plant remnants, preferably wood, but other plant residue can be used as well. The Carbon-14 is collected and then measured.”

  “So it has a constant change in strength?”

  He nodded. “A plant gets C14 during photosynthesis, then when it dies, the C14 has a radioactive component that starts to degrade at a fixed rate. The lab will have to make a small adjustment for isotope fractioning—”

  She turned to him, but he waved her off.

  “Never mind. Even my eyes glazed over when they explained that part.”

  Grinning, she shook her head. “I wanted to know if you wanted two or three eggs.”

  “Three…it’s going to be a long day.”

  “Give him mine,” Helen called out from her chair. “I’m not hungry.”

  Tess lost her smile, and her eyes turned glassy. “Grams, would you like oatmeal and blueberries?”

  “Still not hungry,” Helen replied.

  Abandoning her cooking, Tess went to her grams.

  Noticing she’d failed to turn off the burner, Steel got up and hurried to the stove. While he was mostly clueless, he knew how to turn off burners and collect toast from the toaster. He sorted the food onto three plates, then carried a plate to Helen. When Tess looked up at him, her eyes screamed with misery. He gave a jerk of his head, suggesting she go back to the kitchen.

  She kissed her grams and did as he asked.

  He put the plate on Helen’s lap. The old gal glared at him.

  He held his hand up to silence her scold and spoke softly. “I know you’re not hungry, but for Tess, you need to eat.”

  She sighed, then frowned as she studied the plate on her lap. “Are you expecting me to eat with my hands?”

  Tess was clearly listening because a second later she scampered over and delivered a napkin, knife, and fork. She smiled from ear to ear as she presented them to Helen.

  Tess’s smile was so contagious the old gal gained one as well.

  “Thank you, sweetheart.” She then frowned at Steel. “I can’t eat if you two plan to stand here and stare at me. Now go back to the kitchen and leave me alone.”

  Tess tried to give him her egg, but Steel refused. When he noticed she didn’t have any ham, he placed a slice on her plate.

  “I don’t like ham,” she insisted as she sent it back to his plate.

  “Then why did you cook it?”

  “Grams likes it, and I thought you might prefer some honest-to-god meat.”

  Fate was damn cruel, putting the perfect woman before him but creating barriers so they could never be together. But then fate had never seemed to like him.

  He thought back to the helicopter flying toward him and his crew. But for the need to change a damn spark plug, the correct helicopter would have arrived first and everyone would have lived.

  He paused mid-bite as he considered another possibility. Or it could have been attacked before they ever got off the ground or in the air, killing everyone. It did no good to wish things were different. He stopped with the self-lectures when he noticed Tess studying him intently.

  “I’ll go straight to the mounds. I’m sure you have your own plans with the trails.”

  “Do you need help?” she asked.

  He sighed and shook his head. How could he tell her she couldn’t be near those mounds until he proved they were authentic?

  “Oh…I understand,” she said softly and then grinned. “Honestly, I’ve got so much to do. Sam will be returning our lumber today, and I’m going to extend the swamp boardwalk so it returns walkers to the lower forest…since we’ll be closing the old Indian trail up the cliff.”

  That was a great idea, but one that required more than one person. “Once you get the lumber where you need it, may I suggest you return back here and start sketching out what you’ll need in skills for our rangers? Then when Tom arrives around noon, feed him and bring him out to the mounds. Once you’ve delivered him, return here and see if you can grasp how to use the project planning software. Tom won’t give us people until we give him a project plan.”

  Instead of being outraged, Tess glanced at her grams and then smiled with gratitude. “I’ve already had my class in project planning, so hopefully it will be similar to the software I used.”

  He looked up. “Thank you, God.” He then stood. “I have managed to skirt doing that crap up ’til now, but Tom is holding my feet to the fire. No employees until we get him a plan.”

  “I’ll have you a plan within the week,” she promised.

  They geared up and headed out. When they came to the fork where they would split, she dropped her pack then dug about, retrieving his lunch and hers. “Take them both in case you need more energy to get home.” She then handed him a gun. “I grabbed this out of your drawer. You can shoot, can’t you?”

  He nodded, trying to repress his grin.

  “I’m serious. I don’t want Grumpy eating you just because I failed to teach you how to shoot.”

  “I served in the British Army as a marksman.”

  She smiled for a second but lost it. “If he starts charging, don’t try to scare him. Shoot him right between the eyes. I can’t risk losing such a nice boss.”

  Before he could reply to her disturbing advice, she’d already turned to head down the trail.

  “Hey!” Steel called out.

  She stopped and faced him, her head tilting to the right.

  “What’s going to keep Grumpy from eating you?”

  “My excellent climbing skill, my hatchet, and a very loud helicopter.”

  He tried to hand her back the gun, but she stepped back like he had the plague. “Grumpy likes the mounds…so you need it more than me.”

  “All right,” he said, “but keep yourself safe…and don’t forget to be back at the house to receive and feed Tom.”

  Her eyes turned glassy. “I will. Thank you.”

  Her response confused him until he realized she believed he asked her to stay home so she could care for her grams. Shame lambasted him. He should have thought of that first and foremost.

  Tess needed time with Helen.

  ***

  Tess sprinted to the swamp, hoping to finish this chore as fast as possible and get back to Grams. The speed of her grandmother’s decline frightened Tess. Yesterday, she had saved them from Grumpy, and today she evidently didn’t have the strength to get out of her chair.

  How long had she been hiding her pain?

  Tess slowed as guilt overwhelmed her. God, had she been so wrapped up in herself she had failed to see Grams was hurting? She’d been less than cheery, but Tess had attributed that to Jonas’s betrayal and probable departure from this earth.

  She found it ironic that Jonas, the consigliore of their family, taught her father to be the monster he is, and that
beast killed him the first time Jonas had failed to deliver on an order. Jonas’s betrayal to Grams had ensured she’d never trust anyone connected to her family…or any mafia again. He’d always seemed such a friendly and kind old fellow.

  The men in her family had no honor. They were just thugs in suits.

  When she reached the swamp, she pulled out her cell phone. This was one of the few places where she could get service due to a tower across the Mississippi.

  Sam answered on the first ring. “Coming up now. I called your landline, and Helen said you’d be at the swamp. Where do you want this stack?”

  “I’m not going to build this until we hire staff, so can you stack them on this high ground where I’m waving at you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How many bundles do you have?”

  “Six.”

  “Is that all?”

  Sam chuckled. “Helen made me promise to answer incorrectly. She wanted to make sure you’d challenge me. You passed with flying colors.”

  “Thanks. So how many are there?” she asked.

  “Eight, and before you question the count, they are bundled by the copter’s weight limitation, not the standard. Once I drop this one, you can run the numbers. While Helen will be pleased as punch for you challenging me, I give you my word, I will never cheat you. You are my best customer.”

  He had to mean “most profitable” because she knew for certain he had higher volume customers. Now that they’d be processing more lumber, she’d need to reassess what they were paying.

  When he set down the first lot, she counted the stack of lumber twice. While she waited for the next drop, she pulled out her notebook and made notes on the square footage she expected from her tree and what eight deliveries, if all the same as the first, would add up to. She was pleased when they were very close.

  Once the fourth delivery was made, she grew antsy about her Grams. “Sam, just deliver the others. I’ll finish the count later. Right now, I need to check on”—she paused, knowing Grams wouldn’t want her illness to be general knowledge— “if the State Parks’ guy has arrived at the cabin yet.”

  “You go on. I see a car driving up. We’ll settle the bill later.”

  Hearing Mr. Barkman was on his way, Tess took off at full speed. By the time she arrived, Grams stood outside with her gun in her hand.

  “Is that damn bear after you?”

  She bent over, gasping for her breath. “No…but Sam said a car was driving up the road. Has Mr. Barkman not arrived?”

  “No, he hasn’t,” Helen stated and gripped Tess’s arm for support as they entered the house. “Is Sam already done with his delivery?”

  “No…he’s got four more.”

  “Well, call him up and ask him to swing by the road on the way back, and if there’s a bear on the road blocking a car, to hover above it until it moves. Tell him there’s a hundred-dollar bonus for doing so.”

  “That’s too much.”

  Helen snorted. “You really want Mr. Barkman eaten?”

  Tess rushed to the phone and made the call. Sam refused the bonus, but promised he’d clear the road of the menace to Iowa’s finest state park.

  Her gratitude lasted less than a second before she wondered if he wasn’t just kissing ass because he heard there’d be more lumber needed now.

  Grams had clearly noticed her change in mood. “Did he refuse?” She struggled to push herself out of the chair.

  “No, he said he’d do it, and he didn’t need a bonus.”

  Grams relaxed and closed her eyes. “So what’s the puss about?”

  Tess threw herself on the couch and explained her worry.

  That earned her a weak wave from Grams. “You know why I’ve always paid Sam such a high price for my own lumber?”

  “Because no one else can deliver it by helicopter and place it exactly where you want it?”

  “There’s that. But it’s because when I first called him and told him I was looking for a new lumber yard to cut my wood, he questioned me in great detail as to what I needed done. He didn’t make grunting noises when I mentioned the poor condition of the roads around here. He just let me talk and then opened the possibility of taking out the trees and bringing back the lumber by helicopter.”

  Grams grinned. “Before I could even ask how much that would cost me, he explained he was a licensed pilot and used to do it for a living. When his wife had a baby, he decided it was too dangerous and opened a lumber mill to serve the local area instead.”

  “So why did he offer to do it for you?” Tess challenged.

  “Turned out the baby wasn’t his, and the wife ran off with the real father once he’d sunk all their savings into a lumber mill. But all he told me was that things had changed, and he really needed the business. So he provided me a detailed breakdown of the cost he anticipated and then added a ten percent profit.”

  Tess grimaced, glad she hadn’t yet tried to trim his price. That was a terrible profit for one damn tree. Then a thought occurred to her, “Were all those detailed costs real?”

  “I’m not going to scold you for mistrusting people because there are more liars and cheats in the world than I wish to know. Fortunately, I’d done my homework before I called Sam, so I knew the costs of everything but the helicopter. And with a few calls to certain people, I discovered he had undercharged me given they had upped his insurance premiums when they learned he was using it to haul trees.”

  “So you’re saying Sam is a good guy, and I shouldn’t be giving our future, more substantial work to anyone else.”

  Helen breathed in deep, but a faint shudder at the end sounded more like pain. “I’m sure Tom will insist upon competitive bids, but give Sam a shot to match, and double-check the others bids. Make sure they don’t have added expenses in the small print. That’s what McAlister did. His stated cost was much lower since he planned to take the wood out by truck. Unfortunately, in the tiny print, it stated I’d pay a thirty percent penalty for any poorly maintained roads they had to travel…only it said it in such a convoluted manner that not even Jonas caught on to it. McAlister refused to release me from the contract, so Jonas took it to Judge Thorton, and when he read the section, he voided the contract since he couldn’t make heads or tails of it either.”

  “So Sam writes a better contract?”

  “He didn’t require one. He just gave me a detailed list of expected costs and his ten percent profit. I’ve had him revise the costs before every tree. We argued over the increase in the helicopter insurance. He didn’t want to add it, but I asked him how many other people were having their trees flown in and lumber flown back. Turns out I was the only one, and that was a huge cost increase.”

  “How did he plan to pay for that?” Tess asked.

  “He intended to take a loss on my business because I was a nice lady and I’d really helped him out that first year. I also had Jonas help him with his divorce. So I had to yell at him that he would charge me the full cost of his helicopter insurance or I’d find someone else. Otherwise, he was going to go out of business, and I really liked his service.”

  “He does come at once,” Tess agreed.

  “Yes, and make certain you put that in the requirements, because I assure you no one else will.”

  The red light blinked by the hall door.

  “That must be Tom,” Helen said. “Just check the monitor first. I’m not up to dealing with relatives today.”

  The monitor showed Tom sitting in his car mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. Tess silently cursed Grumpy and ran upstairs.

  When she exited the top cabin, Tom remained in his car. She opened his car door. “Tom, good to see you. Let me help you with the computers.” As she gathered up the boxes, Tom eyed the edges of the forest. Getting him out of the car was not a problem. The man literally ran to the porch and did not calm until they were inside with the door bolted.

  “You look as if you encountered a giant black bear,” she teased.

 
“Yes. It had to be over six hundred pounds and possibly rabid.”

  “I hadn’t considered that possibility. It’s the consensus of bear experts that he’s just unhappy because there are no female bears to be found. I asked Sam to check the road and scare him off if he was blocking you.”

  “Blocking? If only. He was…well, let’s just say you are probably correct about him being in dire need of female bears.”

  She tried her hardest not to laugh, but the image in her head of Grumpy trying to hump Mr. Barkman’s Range Rover was too funny. The best she could do was turn her face away and cough to hide the laughter.

  “Tess, I apologize. I should have kept that detail to myself. But thank you for sending the helicopter. While honking my horn had no effect, the thumping sound certainly did.”

  Containing herself, she led him downstairs where her Grams stood by her chair, greeted him, and invited him to sit.

  “If I may use the restroom first,” he suggested with a tone of desperation.

  “Certainly. You remember where…” Helen smiled at the disappearing man. “I guess he does.” She sat down and breathed out deeply again.

  While he was gone, Tess shared the story of Grumpy humping the Rover. It only brought a faint smile to Grams’ thin, tight lips.

  “What can I make you for lunch?” Tess asked.

  “Whatever you want,” Grams whispered and closed her eyes.

  Sensing her pain, Tess said, “Perhaps you should take a painkiller.”

  “I did. It should kick in soon.”

  Pressing her lips to Grams’ forehead, she then whispered, “I love you.”

  That earned her a soft pat of the hand and a faint smile.

  She was seconds from bursting into tears when Mr. Barkman returned.

  “Did Tess tell you I was taken hostage by a giant bear?”

  Not wishing for him to see her tears, she hurried to the kitchen and stuck her head in the refrigerator.

  Helen spoke from her chair. “I do apologize. However, the Minnesota Bear Sanctuary has assured me they will be here today. Hopefully, I won’t have to shoot the damn menace before they arrive.”

  “Do they know the size of this creature?”

  “I told them six-hundred pounds. If they believed I exaggerated, they’ll have to deal with that problem on their own. I paid my donation, and it came along with a six-hundred-pound bear.”