A Family For The Farmer. Laurel Blount

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СКАЧАТЬ hard enough that he staggered backward a step.

      For a second she held on to him without thinking, her nose buried in the softness of his shirt, inhaling the scent of him—wood shavings, soap, the wild tang of the pine woods that surrounded his cabin. “Oh, it’s so good to see a friendly face.” She backed up a step, still clutching his upper arms, feeling the solid strength of his muscles through the worn cotton of his shirt. She peered up into his face. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, you truly are!”

      His blue eyes, startling in his tanned face, looked bemused. He seemed at a loss for words, but that wasn’t unusual for Abel. She’d met him when she was fourteen, and he was the lanky eighteen-year-old who helped out on her grandmother’s farm. He hadn’t been much of a talker back then, either.

      “Emily,” he repeated.

      She laughed self-consciously and released him. “I know. I’m terrible, flinging myself at you like that. I just couldn’t help it.” She turned back and motioned for her twins to approach them. “Phoebe, Paul, this is Grandma Sadie’s friend Mr. Abel. He takes care of her animals.” She smiled up at him. “He and I knew each other when I used to spend my summers with Grandma Sadie out on the farm.”

      The twins approached them slowly. Their experience with men in general was fairly limited—Emily didn’t trust most men around her children. But this was Abel Whitlock, and he was in a category all by himself.

      Abel detached his gaze from her face and dropped his eyes to the two tousled blond heads beside her.

      “Well, now.” He lowered himself slowly onto one knee and considered the children soberly. “So you’re the famous twins I’ve heard so much about! I’ve waited a good while to meet you.” He fished in his shirt pocket and produced a couple of striped discs of candy. “Do you like peppermint?”

      Emily’s smile widened. She’d seen him use the same technique countless times with skittish animals. Move slow, talk low and have a treat ready, he used to tell her. They’ll come around.

      The children considered his offering warily, glancing up at their mother for direction.

      “You can take it. Mr. Abel’s a good friend.”

      “You’re big. Like a tree.” Phoebe blinked her green eyes at him as she accepted her candy. Abel’s mouth crooked up in a lopsided smile that jarred half a dozen more memories loose in Emily’s mind. How could just that sideways quirk of his lips bring back so sharply the details of her Pine Valley summers? She could almost smell the odors of drying hay, fresh sliced tomatoes and green beans processing in her grandmother’s pressure canner.

      “I am that,” Abel said, agreeing with her daughter. “And you’re sweet. Like a daisy.”

      “She’s not sweet all the time.” Paul popped his own peppermint in his mouth and held out his hand. “I’m Paul Thomas Elliott, and it’s nice to meet you. Thanks for the candy.”

      Abel shook the proffered hand. “I’m honored to meet you, sir, and you’re welcome.”

      “I’m not a sir. Not yet. I’m just a kid.” Paul cocked his head on one side, and Emily could see him weighing her old friend carefully. “But when I am a grown-up, I want to be a pilot. Of an airplane. Or maybe a rocket. I haven’t decided yet.” Emily smiled. Abel must have passed inspection. Paul was her reserved child, and he didn’t share personal information easily.

      “Good to know,” Abel said gravely. “I like a man with a plan.”

      They nodded solemnly at each other for a couple of seconds before Abel got back to his feet. When his blue gaze returned to Emily’s, it held a lingering gentleness that made inexplicable tears prick at the back of her eyes. She blinked furiously and managed to keep them from spilling over. Good grief. She was crying over everything these days.

      Abel held his hand out to her next. “I didn’t get a chance to speak to you at the funeral. I want you to know how sorry I am about Miss Sadie.”

      “You of all people don’t have to tell me that.” She took the hand he offered, feeling the dry roughness of his calloused skin. She squeezed hard, looking up into his face. “Grandma’s death is just as much your loss as mine. I know that.”

      “Now, see there!” the stocky man interjected jovially. “It’s always nice when folks get along. And it sure makes my job a whole lot easier.” He offered his own hand to Emily. “Jim Monroe. And you must be Miss Elliott.”

      Her grandmother’s lawyer. Finally. “Yes.” She took the man’s perspiring hand briefly in her own and couldn’t help comparing its flabby softness to the hard strength of Abel’s.

      “I’m late, I know. Sorry about that. I was—” the man glanced up at Abel briefly before finishing “—delayed. Whew, it’s hot as blazes out here! Why don’t we take this little reunion inside where it’s air-conditioned? The three of us have a lot to talk about.”

      * * *

      Inside the lawyer’s office Abel shifted his weight in the captain’s chair he’d been assigned, and it creaked irritably. He ran a fingertip along its polished arm, assessing the wood. Cherry, he thought absently, with a pretty, rosy grain to it.

      Any other day he’d have offered Monroe cash for this chair and hauled it back to his cabin. He’d have taken it apart, stripped off its polish and studied the grain of the wood, looking for the secrets he could carve out of it. But not today. Today he had other things on his mind.

      Abel stole a look at Emily, who was standing at the doorway of the conference room talking earnestly to her twins. She was wearing a white shirt with short, filmy sleeves and pale green slacks, and she had that bright hair of hers pulled into some sort of soft little roll at the back of her neck. She was leaning over with her slim, city-pale arms extended, her hands resting gently on her twins’ shoulders.

      She reminded him of a dogwood tree just coming into blossom in the earliest days of spring, when its flowering branches looked like bits of lace tangled in the pines. Emily had always had something of the refreshing chanciness of springtime about her, and she’d always given Abel the same fluttering, uncertain feeling in his belly that the first days of March always did. That sense of waking up after the dull darkness of winter.

      When she’d run up and grabbed him outside, he’d felt just like he had last fall when Miss Sadie’s ornery little bull calf butted him squarely in the stomach. But then Emily’d always had a knack for knocking him off balance, for making him feel clumsy and foolish, like he was wearing his boots on the wrong feet. Back when she spent her summers on Goosefeather Farm, he’d done his share of mooning over her.

      That was what happened when you put a lonesome boy and a pretty girl in the same general vicinity, he reckoned. Of course, Emily had never looked twice in his direction, not that way, and he’d never seriously expected her to. The Whitlock and Elliott properties might butt up against each other, but the families were worlds apart in every other way. Even back then, he’d had enough sense to know that much.

      All that was water under an old bridge, because once Emily heard what this lawyer had to say, Abel didn’t figure on getting another hug from her any time soon.

      “You be good for Miss Marianne, now,” Emily was telling her children. “Mind your manners.”

      “I always mind my manners,” the boy, Paul, СКАЧАТЬ