Tennessee Rescue

by Carolyn McSparren

  “The better to shoot them?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t hunted anything with a heartbeat since I was ten years old, and I didn’t like it then. I’m not against hunting per se as long as the rules are obeyed, but it’s not for me.”

  The ground was still damp enough that the sharp square-ended shovels sliced through the sod and into the ground. By late June, the same job would require a bulldozer to dig six inches down. The dirt would be as hard as concrete. Even now the job was no picnic for Emma. She started digging down the short side, while Seth dug across the long side. He moved like a robotic Ditch Witch. After the first couple of shovelfuls, Emma’s arms and shoulders reminded her that she wasn’t used to this. She watched Seth and tried to emulate his efficient movements. Watching him was a pleasure. The muscles of his arms and shoulders were so cut that he seemed like a mobile anatomy figure shining with sweat.

  He wasn’t pretty-handsome like Trip, but he practically trumpeted “male” like a bull elk she’d seen monitoring his harem at Land Between the Lakes. Which had its good and bad points. Right this moment, he was apparently keeping his distance. They were simply two casual acquaintances doing a dirty job. She assumed that, in his mind, their kiss hadn’t happened.

  In hers it certainly had.

  Even when she paid close attention to her job and not the man, her shovel kept landing off the chalk line. Checking behind her, she saw that the path of her trench was more like the wriggly trail of one of those king snakes Seth waxed poetic about. His trench was perfectly straight and at a uniform depth.

  Once she nearly drove the shovel into the toe of her boot. She didn’t want to lose toes any more than she wanted to lose fingers, but the way she was going, she might.

  Shouldn’t Seth ask how she was getting along? But no. He didn’t even glance at her. Despite the chilly evening, sweat rolled down her forehead, dripped into her eyes and stung. She dropped the shovel and dug in her jeans pocket for a tissue.

  Seth peered at her from under his arm. “Something wrong?”

  He seemed ungainly all bent over. Kinda cute.

  She leaned down to grasp her shovel, caught it on the toe of her Wellington boot, flipped up the handle and narrowly avoided bonking herself on the head. Suddenly the entire operation seemed ridiculous. At the rate she was digging, the babies would be grown and spraying everything in sight before she finished her side of the trench.

  She leaned on the handle of her shovel. “I am useless. I can’t even dig a straight trench.”

  “Hey! Careful with that shovel.”

  “At least Trip never made me dig ditches,” she muttered.

  He leaned down and picked up something from the ground. “Here,” he said. “Bon appétit.” The earthworm he held out to her was a good six inches long and extremely annoyed at being kidnapped.

  Obviously, Seth was expecting her to scream and run. Forget that! She pulled off her gloves and carefully transferred the worm from his fingers to hers. “My daddy taught me to bait my own hook before I was five,” she said and put the worm back on the lawn, where it wriggled away as fast as it could. “Besides, it’s not my flavor.”

  This time he actually looked at her instead of avoiding her eyes, as he had since he’d come into the house earlier. “Come on. You could use a break,” he said, then took her shovel and laid it carefully on the ground facedown so she couldn’t stomp the handle up again.

  Boy, did she need a break, but she wasn’t about to admit it. “If you need a minute, I have water in the refrigerator. I’ll bring us a couple of bottles.” She went into the house, got the water and came back looking as relaxed as possible, although she already had blisters on her hands, despite the gloves. No doubt Seth’s hands were as tanned as old leather.

  But still so gentle, even with an earthworm.

  Or a woman? Would she ever find out? Did she want to?

  Damn straight.

  He sat on the porch steps with his back against the column. She handed him his water, then sat out of touching distance with her back against the column on the other side of the front door. On sober reflection, Seth was undoubtedly regretting last night’s kiss. The message seemed to be that he wasn’t interested in a repetition.

  Fine. No more Mr. Grabby Hands. As if she cared. Wasn’t she off men?

  She glanced over at Seth, the way he fit into those jeans, the muscles across his shoulders, those lazy gray eyes...

  How long did she plan to give up men? Every time she looked at him, the span grew shorter. Do not, she reminded herself, forget that he is a danger to my babies. He could declare they are ready to go back into the woods. He’d darned well have a fight on his hands if he tried. Yeah, right.

  He could pick her up one-handed and toss her into the branches of the water oak.

  She’d never had the nerve to make the first move toward a man she was attracted to. Her stepmother said she should always let the man do the chasing. Wait for him to call you. How many hours had she sat staring at the phone?

  How did men handle rejection? Did they put themselves out there and take the chance that women wouldn’t shut them down? They must school themselves to ignore rejection. Either that or women were so interchangeable for a man that it didn’t matter which woman he got and which he didn’t.

  Emma had never been able to be that casual. Every time her father missed a play at school or a soccer game for a fishing trip he’d taken her brother on, she’d gotten better at hiding her hurt. She knew she wasn’t being fair. He had three children. He had to keep up with all their extracurricular activities. But it took Andrea to convince him to cut back on his caseload to spend more time with them. Still, hiding her hurt and not feeling it were two different things. Even Trip’s wandering eye hadn’t exactly been a rejection. He didn’t want to lose her. He’d just wanted to add more members to his harem. And that was not happening. Ever.

  “What?” Seth asked. “Have I got more earthworms on my head?”

  “Sorry. I’m woolgathering.” More like staring at his nice, craggy face. “This isn’t getting the trench done.” She got up, leaning against the porch column for support. “Come on, tiger. Time’s a-wasting.” She was going to offer him a hand up, but he was already standing by the time she’d covered the distance between them. He nodded and stepped off the porch to get his shovel.

  She’d covered her blisters with plaster strips while she was in the kitchen, but the minute she put on her gloves and picked up the shovel, she realized they wouldn’t keep her hands from burning.

  She swore she’d have to be dripping blood before she stopped digging.

  Eventually she did discover a manageable rhythm after a few more near misses with the shovel. She might not be able to get out of bed in the morning, but she was pulling her weight. Sort of.

  She’d been on some peculiar dates, but if this counted as a date, it was weirder than when that guy took her to the wrestling match. She’d almost got them thrown out when she whispered a snide comment and the lady behind them heard her.

  That, as she recalled, was the last time he’d ever called her. Just as well, since she would never have gone out with him again.

  Trip liked to take her to fancy parties, where they’d get their picture on the society page. She had to admit that kind of publicity had been good for her career, but she really would’ve enjoyed the occasional picnic.

  “Not bad,” Seth said.

  She jumped. She’d been woolgathering again. It hit her that a picnic on the front porch with Seth held more appeal than strolling to a fancy restaurant in four-inch heels with Trip. Five-inch heels were not possible. She kept having to grab on to tables as she walked by. “What do we do next, oh, great construction engineer?”

  “We dig three-foot holes to concrete the corner posts in.”

  “More digging! You have got to be kidding.”

 
“It’s okay. We only have one posthole digger, so I’ll do it. You wouldn’t by any chance have sandwich makings, would you?” The look he gave her he’d borrowed from a six-week-old puppy. Oh, Lord, he had the softest eyes! Even the bad guy from Oliver Twist wouldn’t have been able to hold out.

  “Better than that. I made spaghetti sauce this afternoon while I should’ve been updating my résumé. I’ve got salad makings and garlic bread. I figured we’d be hungry if we did any digging. Do you drink wine? I mean, you don’t have to worry about driving home.” She pointed across the street.

  “I may not make it home if I have a couple of glasses of wine.”

  “Okay. Iced tea.”

  “I didn’t actually say no to the wine. I just wanted you to weigh the possible outcomes.” He looked down at her, and their eyes met. Uh-oh. They held each other’s gaze a little too long. In an instant her skin felt tight and the hair on her arms stood up.

  She broke away and fled to the bathroom to scrub the dirt away. When she was clean, she checked the sleeping skunks, then went into the kitchen. He handed her a goblet of red wine. Not iced tea, then.

  This was not happening. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong man.

  Any man is the wrong man right now.

  * * *

  HE DIDN’T FOLLOW her immediately. For one thing, at the moment he wasn’t all that ambulatory. He needed to relax at least one portion of his body. Emma wasn’t anything like the grandmother at the DQ, but he shouldn’t react quite so fulsomely only at The Look. He’d never had what the French called the coup de foudre—that glance across a crowded room that knocked the world out of kilter. He had a suspicion this was what it felt like.

  He watched her in the kitchen as she bent over the oven to put the bread in to warm. Those tight jeans pulled even tighter.

  He wasn’t about to experience that madness now if it killed him.

  It just might.

  She might be a city slicker and a poor little rich girl, but she could definitely cook. He liked truffles and caviar as well as the next man when and if he could get them, but he’d rather have spaghetti with Emma than truffles from a fancy chef in New Orleans.

  “You can’t possibly dig those postholes tonight. It’ll be dark in thirty minutes,” Emma said as she handed him more garlic bread. “Eat hearty. I don’t have any dessert except leftover ice cream from last night.”

  “I doubt I could stuff in another bite. I now owe you two dinners. We’ll have to drive into Somerville for anything fancier than the café.”

  “I like the café, even if Velma thinks I’m some sort of vampire. So I take it you don’t cook?”

  “My momma cooks. Clare preferred take-out pizza to cooking. Take-out anything, actually. I usually came home too late and too tired to care.”

  “Clare?”

  “Ex-wife. I figured Barbara told you.”

  “I didn’t remember her name. And you didn’t have any children, right?”

  “Putting it off to be able to buy a house in town. Clare hated living out here.”

  “But you own all that land. Don’t you have a barn?”

  “It’s falling down. Earl and I work on it some when we have the time. I no longer even bushhog the pasture. You have a barn, too. It’s in pretty rotten shape.”

  “I do not have a barn.”

  “Sure you do. And a pond,” Seth said.

  “Listen, I spent five summers up here when I was a child. I’d know if Aunt Martha had a barn and a pond.”

  “Granted, it’s a small barn in poor shape. I heard Martha’s daddy used to run a few beef cattle back there when she was growing up. The walls are concrete block and still standing, but the roof’s fallen in. She wouldn’t have wanted a kid going back there.”

  “I know there’s no pond. I begged Aunt Martha for one of those aboveground pools. She always said she couldn’t afford one for the couple of months I spent up here in the summer. She was right, of course, but kids don’t think that way.”

  Seth grinned at her. “How do you suppose those cows got water? Sure as heck no water lines back there.”

  “Buckets, I suppose.”

  This time he actually laughed. She wanted to hit him. “You have any idea how much even one cow drinks per day?” he asked.

  “Then they used rain barrels.”

  “Very good,” he said as though he were rewarding a truly backward student who’d made an intellectual breakthrough. “And when the water froze in the winter or we went without rain for six weeks every summer? Sorry, there is a pond. Man-made and fairly shallow, but it’s spring fed and never goes dry. If she didn’t want you messing around in that old barn, think how she would’ve felt if she thought you were wandering around alone where you could drown. She was right to ride herd on you.” He stared out the front window as though he’d forgotten she was there. “I wish all guardians were that careful.”

  Emma said, “She told me she didn’t own that piece of land, and I had to stay away from it because the farmer was mean and might shoot me. I was forbidden to go through the barbed wire at the edge of the backyard.”

  “So you didn’t. According to my mother, that’s a secondary characteristic of little boys versus girls. I’d have been through that fence the first night I could sneak out my window.”

  “I thought you were the big obey-the-rules guy.”

  When he didn’t answer, she turned to stare at him. His face looked frozen, his eyes empty. Finally, he shook himself and said, “That came later. I was a hellion growing up. I had to learn.”

  “Come on, let’s go check out my barn! I want to see it.”

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her back down. “It’s behind a thicket of locust trees with three-inch thorns that can puncture a femoral artery. It’s covered with wisteria and poison ivy. The pond is overgrown with so much duckweed you could fall in before you knew there was water.”

  “It’s mine and I need to see it.” She knew she sounded petulant, but she did need to see it. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her about it? After she grew up, why hadn’t Aunt Martha?

  He breathed deeply and ran his hand down his face. “Yeah, okay. Tomorrow afternoon, if I can get off a little early. You do not go alone. This time of year the water moccasins and copperheads are too slow to avoid you.”

  “Why couldn’t we fix it up to use for rehabilitating animals?”

  “Too far away and completely overgrown. You’d have to traipse out there in the middle of the night to feed. You’d fall in the pond.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Besides, my babies are not staying outside at night.”

  He didn’t bother responding. When the cage was done, the skunks would go outside the house. They had to learn to live in the wild. They needed to be released as soon as they were relatively safe on their own. Once the cage was finished, he and Emma could have what promised to be an unpleasant confrontation about where the skunks spent their nights. No sense borrowing trouble.

  “Last but not least,” he said and suspected this would be the capper, “not only are there snakes in the barn and the pond, but some great, big snapping turtles, too. They pretty much stay around the pond, where there are plenty of frogs to eat, but occasionally one of them will wander up in the yard looking for birds’ eggs that’ve fallen out of the nest. I’ll enlist Earl on Saturday after we put up the kennel, to try to net the big ones and transplant them to the river bottoms ten miles away. It’ll take two of us. Some of them weigh over a hundred pounds.”

  “I’ll never walk into the yard again!”

  He laid his hand on her arm and glared at her. “You are living in the country. Not the city. Not the suburbs. This fall you’ll have deer on the lawn, and I’ve spotted both fox and beaver. Oh, and coyote. Then there’s the occasional bobcat. Saw a puma once, but I suspect he was just trekking east. Haven’t seen him for a couple of years.” />
  She jerked her arm away. “My God! What else? Grizzly bears?”

  He grinned and shook his head. “No grizzlies. Spotted a black bear in the bottoms a couple of years ago. The only one I’ve ever seen around here. They’re generally east and north of the Kentucky border, and they’re rare even there. Our bear was simply lost. We followed it north out of our territory, where it became another ranger’s problem. It was a young male bear. No cubs to worry about.”

  “Would you have? Worried?”

  “If we’d had to. If they’d been abandoned or orphaned. Barbara would’ve taken them on until we could get them to the zoo in Memphis.”

  “So bears are fine to foster, but skunks aren’t? That’s nuts.”

  “It’s the rules, and for good reason. That’s why we bait the bottoms with rabies protection. So far we’ve never had a single case of rabies from any animal around here, not even bats. The few cases in Tennessee are in the hills east of here and in North Carolina. No incidences anywhere in west Tennessee for many years. The regulation about bats and skunks may be outdated, but it’s better to err on the side of safety. We warn the public to stay the hell away from all wild animals. If any of the critters become a nuisance, we’ll trap them, vaccinate them, and if they are clean, we’ll move them.”

  “What else am I likely to run into around here?” she asked.

  “The ubiquitous raccoons. Once a year we try to move them back to the river, but they come back when they start to wean their young in the spring.”

  “Baby raccoons are so cute.”

  “But a full-grown raccoon can tear you up. The males can weigh over fifty pounds. Actually, Memphis has more of a problem than we do. People leave dog food outside, and raccoons love dog food. Then we see the occasional possum. They really do roll up in a ball when they’re scared. You don’t want them around horses. They carry EPM, which can kill a horse. There are armadillos, of course. They can carry leprosy.”

  “Leprosy? Good grief! How about bubonic plague?”

  “Not yet. No hantavirus either.”