Liz Ireland

by Trouble in Paradise

She simply had to do something to get Parker back, and avoid the terrible fate of becoming Clara O’Mara!

  Overnight, it seemed to Roy, Ellie took over the house.

  He wasn’t quite sure how it happened. Or exactly when, even. Suddenly, however, he noted things getting done that one of the three men had heretofore had to do themselves. Eggs were gathered. Cows were milked twice a day. The house was kept spotless without any of them having to lift a feather duster.

  A lot of this activity took place under Ike’s tutelage, although the farmhand liked to brag on his pupil, saying that for a fine lady she took to housework like a duck took to water. Soon she was also cooking, baking up mouth-watering cornmeal batter bread in the morning, and biscuits and flapjacks. During the long days when they harvested sorghum, she managed the evening meals, too, albeit a little less successfully. Ike, so much needed in the fields, wasn’t there to instruct her during the day. But as they often pointed out, nothing could taste worse than what they were used to cooking for themselves.

  Ellie’s new accomplishments made Roy uncomfortable on several fronts. He didn’t like the idea of a fine lady visiting them being put to manual labor. It wasn’t right, and he told Parker so. But even after they confronted her with the fact that she was a guest in their house and it reflected poorly on them to have her slaving away all day, she merely chirped that she enjoyed pitching in while she was there. She wanted to learn all she could about prairie life, she said.

  But why? Roy wondered. Could it be that she had secret plans to become a prairie wife? That possibility made him anxious; he began watching Ellie and Parker together very closely. And watching them with something that felt suspiciously like jealousy.

  The jealousy was silly, he knew—another result of his mother’s brief visit. While she’d been here, after Ellie had left them alone in the room, Isabel had told him that she thought Parker and Ellie made a nice couple. A couple! She’d even gone on to say that Ellie would make a good wife for Parker.

  The woman had the nerve to come waltzing back into their lives without so much as a howdy-do, then had the additional gall to start assigning them spouses!

  Even now he had trouble containing his lingering ire. Not that he had any cause to be worked up over any imaginary union between Parker and Ellie. Because that’s all it was—a figment of Isabel’s imagination. Why, anybody with half a brain could see that Ellie and Parker were just friendly. He’d seen none of the warmth between Ellie and Parker as he’d witnessed between, say, Ike and Ellie. Yes, she was much friendlier toward Ike. And as a matter of fact, he had to admit—objectively, of course—that Ellie was even much friendlier toward himself. Naturally, having absented herself from their lives since he and Parker were barely out of diapers, Isabel wouldn’t have noticed that.

  Parker and Ellie!

  Not that he was interested in giving up the bachelor life himself. Not at all. In fact, that was another reason Ellie’s sudden interest in housekeeping rubbed his fur the wrong way. Instead of batching it happily, the three men were now becoming dependent on Ellie’s help. Especially now, when Roy’s damn toe still smarted like the dickens and he couldn’t do half the work he was usually capable of, Ellie’s work seemed like a gift, a godsend.

  And that, too, made him uneasy. He couldn’t help thinking that a woman’s gift was usually of the Trojan-horse kind, and what looked too good to be true at first blush would actually turn out to be not such a bargain after all.

  Yet this was Ellie…Ellie who he liked beyond all expectations. Whose laughter could bring a smile to his lips even when he was in one of his broody moods. Who had a household of grown men suddenly spending Saturday nights showing her how to pull taffy. He came home from the fields at night with a quick step, which quickened a little more when he discovered the chores that he’d so dreaded at the end of the day had been magically done. Horse stalls were filled with fresh hay. Pigs were slopped and watered. Chickens were fed their thick, sticky cornmeal.

  The times he didn’t look on her being here as a dangerous affliction, he thought of Ellie as something as a miracle. Despite his uneasiness, his heart beat lighter, faster. His limp had a skip in it when he least expected it. He hummed tunes he couldn’t even remember hearing before.

  And for the first time, he felt dangerously close to making a fool of himself over a woman.

  They could only wait a few days after harvesting the sorghum to mill it into molasses, or the juice inside the stalks would go sour. So the miller, Tom Bartlett, was sent for, and two whole days were set aside for making enough of the dark syrup to sustain them through the next year.

  The morning Bartlett arrived seemed positively festive to Ellie. Their daily routine would be disrupted completely, and for a few days, the men would be around the house, tending to this special chore. A city girl, she’d never known that such a simple thing as molasses could involve such intense labor. But she was beginning to understand that most of the things she’d bought in stores and had always taken for granted were actually the products of considerable toil.

  The men had already spent several days stripping down the sorghum stalks; the discarded leaves stood in piles to be used later for animal bedding. The dark seed clusters had been lopped off and saved, too, the only part of the plant that would be used for feed, Ike had informed her.

  Now the harvested stalks were being hauled to the front of the barn, where the mill was set up. The contraption, which was powered by an orbiting horse attached to a circular sweep, ground the cane stalks between several rollers and drained the resulting juice through a muslin strainer into a barrel. Ike and Parker tended to these tasks, including spreading the pressed, discarded stalks out to dry. Nothing would be wasted.

  On the other side of the yard, outside the kitchen door, a boiler had been set up to cook the molasses, and Roy, still nursing his toe, had accepted the task of keeping the fire going and cooking the syrup.

  “I could handle this,” Ellie assured him, “if you just instructed me what to do.”

  At her suggestion, Roy shook his head adamantly. “It’ll be easier for me to do it myself.”

  “I could learn.”

  When he looked up at her, his light brown hair blowing in the breeze warmed by the smokey fire, she felt a powerful pull toward those blue eyes of his. He’d been watching her often these past few days…why, she couldn’t say. Half the time she felt something like a tug of attraction from him; other times, he seemed to view her much the way General Lee must have viewed General Grant. As if she were his natural enemy. The Yankee invader.

  This wouldn’t have been so terrible had she not found herself so attracted to him. She had tried to avoid acknowledging the strangely familiar feelings that welled inside her whenever Roy was nearby. She’d tried to keep her thoughts focussed on learning so much she would be irreplaceable to a household—maybe even this one.

  But more often than not, those blue eyes defeated her, and she found herself drifting into a girlish, dreamy reverie in which Roy was Heathcliff to her Cathy, a dashing Ivanhoe to her Jewess healer, or Byron’s Corsair to her lady in distress. Silly thoughts, unworthy of a woman mired in the reality of needing to prepare to support a child on her own. And yet the fantasies came anyway, no matter how hard she tried to concentrate on scrubbing and cooking and unfamiliar farm chores.

  How much easier it would have been to keep her head on straight if Roy were older, with unsightly warts. Or if he looked at her with disdain all the time instead of only half!

  “You’ve been learning a lot lately.” His low voice suddenly sounded as sweet as the liquid bubbling in the boiler pan.

  She tucked her shawl around her shoulders, attributing the little shiver that moved through her to the cool nip in the air. “I’m trying.”

  He grinned, then leaned down to toss another log into the fire. “Why, I wonder.”

  “I don’t like to be useless when there are things to be done.”

  “And did you come all the way out to Nebr
aska to make yourself useful?”

  “No,” she answered truthfully. His questions made her uneasy. “I needed to get away…from the past.”

  He nodded, then, surprisingly, grinned. “And now our fine New York visitor is learning all about where molasses comes from.”

  He had the darnedest way of terrifying her with his suspicions, then reassuring her with that easy grin of his. She couldn’t trust her instincts around him, and yet staying away from him proved impossible. In the mornings, he always seemed to be hovering somewhere near. In the evenings, he was always the first man back from the fields. He watched her like a hawk, but when she smiled at him, his expression would turn gentle.

  No matter how much she tried putting the idea out of her mind, Isabel’s words came back to her. I hoped that you would do for Roy…. Foolish idea. Silly! Right now the most she could hope for was to be Roy’s housekeeper.

  He skimmed foam off the top of the molasses with a wire attached to an old broom handle.

  “I’ve enjoyed learning all these new things,” she said truthfully as she watched him. Then she laughed. “It’s you I feel sorry for.”

  He raised his golden-brown brows at her inquisitively. “Me, why?”

  “Because you’ve had to put up with my failures. In a few short weeks I’ve ironed holes through your clothes, I’ve charred more food on that temperamental iron monster in the kitchen than I care to think about, food you’ve been kind enough to eat anyway, and I’ve angered the cows so with my inept milking skills that you’re lucky Beulah and Lacy don’t declare a worker’s strike.”

  Roy laughed. “Don’t go putting ideas into their heads. You spoil them like lapdogs already.”

  That was another thing she loved—all the animal life around her. Chickens, hogs, barn cats, mules, horses and milk cows. The industry to keep them all fed and milked and happy was enormous, but enormously enriching. She tried not to develop too much affection for the chickens and hogs, which she knew were doomed to be slaughtered, but Beulah and Lacy she felt free to treat like royalty. “Let me have my fun, Roy. I’ve always wanted a pet.”

  He frowned. “You’ve never had a dog?”

  He made it sound as if she’d been thoroughly deprived. “No. I was always fond of my father’s horses, of course…”

  “You had a stable in the city?”

  “Oh yes, a large one.” She didn’t add that she lived above it.

  She looked down at the bubbling, darkening mass for a moment. “There’s no dog here,” she pointed out. “Did you ever have one?”

  He nodded sadly. “Pearly. She died a few years ago, and neither Parker nor myself had the heart to find a replacement.”

  She was surprised by Roy’s somber tone, and began to wonder whether he hadn’t been the brother most loath to find another dog to take Pearly’s place. Not a bit of give in him….his mother had described Roy. But she didn’t find him so unyielding. In fact, she found his attachment to his old animal friend very endearing.

  He dipped a wooden spoon into the boiler pan and then held it out in the air to let it cool. He tested it with his finger, then licked the molasses off. “Mmm, nearly done.” He held out the spoon to Ellie. “Want to give it a try?”

  She came forward, eager to sample the fruits of the day’s labor. He handed the spoon to her, and she followed his example, licking a little of the sweet still-warm liquid off her index finger. “That’s good!”

  He grinned. “You sound surprised.”

  “I am. I never expected it would taste so like…molasses.”

  “Why? The stuff you’ve been cooking with and pouring on biscuits in the morning was made here last year.”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t there to see it start its life as a stalk in a field. You have to admit it’s sort of a miracle.”

  Instead of answering her right away, he stared down at her, his eyes doing his speaking for him. There was laughter in them, and tenderness, even. She grinned up at him, and handed his spoon back to him.

  Instead of taking it, however, his hand clasped down on her wrist, and he took a step forward. “I never was a big believer in miracles,” he said, his husky voice raising gooseflesh on her arms. “But since you showed up here, all sorts of amazing ideas keep popping into my head.”

  A light brown lock of hair fell over his forehead as he looked down at her, and her mouth went dry as she suddenly realized how handsome he was. And how strong. He was standing close enough for her to gauge fully the power in his work-hardened muscles; he was also close enough for her to smell his particular masculine scent—the same scent he’d left imprinted on the pillows she slept on at night.

  Ellie’s pulse sped. She caught a glint in his eyes that she hadn’t seen a man look at her with since Percy Sternhagen.

  That thought, and the realization that Roy’s gaze had strayed to her lips, made her mouth drop open with a gasp. Surely he wouldn’t try to kiss her here, out in the open, where anyone could see them. Oh, dear! She didn’t even want attentions of that nature—especially from a man she was hoping might be her employer someday soon!

  A muffled cry of alarm escaped her lips and she jumped backward, dropping the wooden spoon into the dirt between them.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “I’m so clumsy. I’ll just run in and get another one—”

  He held her fast for a moment. “Wait, Ellie.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll be back in just a moment!”

  “Hang the spoon—”

  She finally managed to tug away and fled inside, praying that by the time she had to go back out, clearer heads would prevail.

  Chapter Seven

  For the rest of the molasses-making, clearer heads did prevail. And even for a day beyond. All the while, Ellie grappled with the problem of trying to impress Roy and ingratiate herself to him without appearing to flirt with him. She had heard that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and she was attempting that method, hoping that in this case his heart would eventually be sympathetic to the plight of a woman who needed to support a child.

  Parker, she was fairly certain, would be agreeable to hiring her. Kindhearted Ike, if he’d had a say in the matter, would have hired her himself weeks ago. But Roy…she still wasn’t sure of him.

  She’d gone out of her way to be nice to him, but keep him at a respectful distance. She’d never known a man who could put such foolish desires in her head with just a touch or a look, but there was something about Roy that made her forget her better judgment. And her better judgment told her that the last thing she needed was to succumb again to the charms of a man with the power to use her and toss her aside.

  She turned, and as if conjured by her own fantasies, Roy appeared in the kitchen’s doorway. She nearly dropped a sheet of cookies she’d been preparing to put in the oven.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, fearing his foot might still be bothering him, or worse, that he had reinjured it.

  “Of course.”

  Then why was he here? It was early afternoon yet. Besides, he looked uncomfortable. He held his hands awkwardly behind his back.

  “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

  He stepped forward, a peculiar grin on his lips. “I wanted to be alone with you when I gave you your present.”

  She tossed her cookie sheet in the oven and wiped her hands on her apron. Present? So that’s what this was all about. She suddenly felt giddy with anticipation. “What—?”

  Just then, she heard a plaintive mewing and her heart fairly stopped in disbelief. Seeing that his surprise had been spoiled, that the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, Roy brought his hand forward.

  Cupped in Roy’s enormous palm was a tiny orange tabby kitten with round golden eyes. The little ball of fuzz blinked up at her and released a loud meow. Involuntarily, Ellie let out a high-pitched squeal of delight and ran forward to pet it. “Oh, Roy, how sweet! Where did you find it?”

  “It belongs to the barn cat. She has several kits, but this is the
only friendly one. The rest are skittery, like her.”

  Ellie grinned as he handed the little ball of fur over to her. The kitten immediately began to climb her dress up to her shoulder. She laughed. “She wants to be a parrot!”

  “Maybe you should call her Polly.”

  She shook her head, but a few springy red curls captured the kitten’s attention and he began to bat at her hair. “You aren’t really giving her to me, are you?” No one had ever done anything so thoughtful, so foolish. She couldn’t have a cat. She didn’t even have a home! And yet when she looked into those golden trusting eyes, she felt a fierce possessiveness for the little creature in her care.

  And when she looked into Roy’s warm blue eyes, their delight in her pleasure so baldly evident, she felt her legs go limp beneath her. She lowered to the floor to play with the kitten.

  He chuckled. “You said you’d never had a pet. I had to remedy that.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you. But where will I keep it?”

  “How about right here?”

  She looked up at him sharply and felt her pulse begin to race. Sending the kitten scampering after a leaf Roy had brought in on his boots, Ellie stood and turned her attention back to the cookies. To her work. “If I don’t watch out, these cookies will burn. I keep losing my concentration….”

  He walked over to inspect the ones she’d just removed from the oven. “Oatmeal. My favorite.”

  “I know.” The words came out, and she felt as if her face were on fire. “I mean…that’s what Ike told me.”

  Roy grinned knowingly. “Lately, it’s been hard for me to concentrate on my work, too. I keep getting sidetracked by my own thoughts.”

  At first her mouth felt too dry to speak. This close, his physique was very impressive, and the smell of work and the outdoors penetrated the cozy baking aroma in the air. “I often catch myself daydreaming,” she said, a little haltingly. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in it.”

  His brows raised high on his forehead. “Isn’t there?” He grabbed her hand, sending a bolt of lightning through her. “What if what you’re dreaming about is kissing a woman you’ve no right to be thinking about?”