The Farmer Takes a Wife
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Jodi O'Donnell
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Chapter One
Maura Foster plunged her hands into the small section of moist Iowa soil she’d loosened with her trowel. Black as cinders, springy as rising bread dough, the loam clumped between her fingers and chilled her wrists in a sensation she’d long missed. She closed her eyes and sighed as if sinking into a warm bubble bath.
Maura chuckled. She always went a little crazy this time of year, but the fever was especially strong this spring, though with good reason. After two years of going without, she’d have a vegetable garden again. And flowers, more than just in window boxes or blooming in clay pots on a minuscule patio.
“This year,” she told herself, “I’ll have flowers—bleeding hearts, impatiens, columbine, bluebells, bachelor buttons, everything.”
Oh, and snapdragons. Davey would want those in their new garden. She wondered if he’d outgrown the darling habit of calling them “snackdragons,” as he’d done when he had been three.
Remember that, Wayne? You taught him how to wedge the tip of his tiny index finger into the lip of the top petal, his thumb into the bottom, and make the flower “snap.” Remember?
Maura remembered as if it had been yesterday.
As always, the pain that came with that memory throbbed in her chest. Seeking diversion from the still-acute sorrow, she opened her eyes and gazed around the large yard, at the black plot for her vegetable garden from which Hank Peterson, her landlord, had already taken up the sod. The blocks of turf were already decomposing grass-side down in the compost heap Hank had constructed in the far corner of the lot. Along the fence separating her yard from her new neighbors grew hollyhocks and lilac bushes that would bloom later in May. And at the front of the lot, beneath a black walnut tree, stood her house. Hers in the sense she leased it and had an option to buy it someday. It was a small place, a cottage really, but big enough for her and her son. Big enough for their future together.
Finally a real home. Maura’s fingers sank more deeply into the damp earth. Yes, it’s been a long time, Wayne. Two years of apartment habitation on the outskirts of Soldier Creek—on the outskirts of life, it seemed—during which she’d existed in a state of perpetual worry. Over Davey, over money, over living. She realized, though, that two years was actually very little time in the scheme of things.
And yet it was an eternity in which to live alone, without the husband she thought she’d spend the rest of her life with.
She could still see him so clearly: lean and lanky, with a shock of straight blond hair, the front cowlicked in a way he’d passed on to his son. Even now she found it hard to believe Wayne was gone, killed in a freak accident at the co-op. Grain dust had spontaneously ignited—perhaps a wrench striking metal had produced a deadly spark in the volatile air, they said—and had blown up. The concussion had taken out windows in a blockwide radius, and killed Wayne Foster.
Startled out of her musings by the appearance of two Red Wing boots planting themselves next to her, Maura looked up. The morning sun blocked out the features of the person standing beside her. She shaded her eyes from the glare but still could make out only a tall figure, a man, weight relaxed on one leg, one hand propped against a hip, the other dangling at his side. The frame looked familiar, its dimensions once known to her.
Wayne?
Maura blinked back the moisture filming her eyes from squinting into the sun. She gave her head a shake, disoriented. She’d been focusing so intently she was seeing ghosts. Besides, this man was built nothing like Wayne. Even in silhouette, he was broader through the chest and shoulders, sinewy rather than lean, though slim through the waist, hips and thighs. More than that, a physical, quite unspectral energy radiated from the figure that towered over her.
A shiver of alarm swept over her, so brief it had passed before she recognized it, like the nip in the spring breeze. Have a care, Maura dear.
The man moved out of the path of the sun. Nate Farrell stood in front of her, a questioning brow raised at her expression. “Maura?”
“Oh, Nate!” She gave a nervous laugh at her hallucinations. “I thought...” She shook her head again. “I was sitting here dreaming so hard I didn’t know who you were for a moment.”
“Dreaming?” Nate dropped to his haunches in front of her, elbows on his knees. He removed his green-and-white billed cap, its front advertising a seed-corn hybrid, and held it loosely between his clasped hands. Rays glinted off his burnished mahogany hair, shot through with traces of silver at his temples. Though closely cropped, it still curled attractively against his head.
“What does somebody up to her elbows in dirt dream about?” Nate asked in the imperturbable, thoughtful way Maura recalled as being so like him, though it had been a long time since she’d had a private conversation with him. He had a reputation for being remote, contained and therefore unapproachable. That was probably what had disturbed her a moment ago.
Maura smiled at his manner and at her ridiculous overreaction. It’s just Nate Farrell, she told the whisper of warning in her head.
She mirrored his serious expression, which was nonetheless unsettling in its intensity. “Oh, I dream about the usual things. Tomatoes and squash, carrots and onions,” she answered. “You know.”
As intended, she made him smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners as his somber air dropped away. Lit with mirth, Nate’s eyes became the most gorgeous blue-gray she’d ever seen, and twice as disconcerting as when solemn. They stood out in his handsome face with its high cheekbones, narrow nose and the Farrell chin, clefted in a fascinating manner that she hadn’t had the inclination to note in the opposite sex in many a blue moon.
You’ve been too long without a man, Maura thought wryly. At his smile alone, she felt a flutter of pure attraction brush her cheeks and make them glow.
“I’d say your dreams are a tad bizarre, Maura,” Nate responded.
“Well, I’ll admit to going quietly but divinely mad right now.” She lifted her fist and let a trickle of the clumpy soil sift to the ground. “It’s going to feel so good to work the land again, my land.”
He glanced around at the fifteen-by-twenty patch that had been prepared for tilling. “You sure this is enough land to satisfy your urges?” he asked.
“Urges?” For one moment, she wondered if he’d detected the direction of her unruly thoughts. Then she grasped his meaning. “Oh, my gardening urges. Yes, well, I’m a Master Gardener now,” she said, her air of importance tempered with a smile. “I can’t have an ordinary, run-of-the-mill garden patch, now can I?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Nate answered. “What in tarnation is a Master Gardener?”
“Well, don’t tell Davey—he thinks it means I’m one step down from being a ninja or something—but I’m working with the university extension service to teach home horticulture in this area.” She watched an earthworm wriggle from the soil under her hands.
“Really?” He looked surprised as he scrubbed the edge of his index finger against his notched chin. “I didn’t realize you had such an interest in gardening.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve always loved it.” Maura nodded, the flat-brimmed coolie hat on her head bobbing. “And I’ll love talking about it and teaching others.” She jabbed her finger into the dirt and nudged the earthworm toward its new hidey-hole. “I hope to hold workshops for children at the new library, too. Workshops like—” she pointed to the shiny, red-brown worm “—’The Gardener’s Friend.’”
Nate chuckled. “Did the city council realize they’d be getting a Master Gardener and librarian rolled into one when they hired you?”
“No. Think they’ll mind?”
“I think they got a bargain.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Maura laughed. “I’ll remember that when raise time comes around.”
The smile faded from Nate’s face. “It’s good to see you doing so well, Maura,” he said quietly.
“Thanks. I’m very excited about my job. And this house.” She wrinkled her nose in faint embarrassment as she realized how she’d been rattling on to Nate, who was really not much more than a casual acquaintance. Yet he seemed truly interested.
“You should be, you’re getting back on your feet and making a new start.”
“Yes, I think I finally am,” she said candidly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt able to look ahead, you know....”
She let her voice trail off, reluctant to reexperience the circumstances that had caused her so much pain. Glancing up, she found Nate scrutinizing her, as if their conversation indeed held much more weight than just small talk. She looked away quickly. He was so intense it was disturbing.
But he’s always been that way.
With that thought, Maura remembered a time when she’d seen this man at his most intense yet least contained. Out of control. The unconscious recollection of that episode had produced her apprehensive reaction earlier, she realized. It had been a long time since she’d thought of the incident, almost as if she’d purposely banished it from her mind.
For the truth was that Nate Farrell and his intensity had made an impression on her once—a definite and adverse impression.
Nate broke the silence between them. “So now your green thumb’s prickling and twitching like a divining rod,” he remarked so offhandedly she wondered if she’d imagined the look in his eyes.
Was he teasing her? She cast him a sidelong glance. His face revealed nothing, neither mirth nor earnestness. “You farm your own family’s land, Nate. Surely you understand the feeling.”
He shifted his weight to his other leg. “Well, I don’t exactly wallow in the spring thaw, but I’ll admit to feeling restless to get out in my fields each year. There’s something satisfying in plowing that winter-crusted surface, turning it over and seeing how it pales against the rich color underneath.” She watched in fascination as he changed again, his blue-gray eyes losing their laser sharpness and becoming suddenly tranquil, as she knew hers often did when her mind’s eye pictured the fruits of her labor.
He does understand, she realized.
Then abruptly Nate snapped out of his daydream, shot her a self-conscious look and cleared his throat. “Of course, you probably heard, uh, about the way I’ve been plowing.”
Maura opened her mouth, then shut it again as she saw a flush creep across his cheekbones. Yes, she had heard that Nate, now fully in charge of the Farrell land, was implementing techniques and planting alternative crops that went against the grain of some of the more traditional ways of farming. In fact, he had been subjected to rather impassioned criticism for it. “Organic hippie stuff” or some such, she’d heard them describe his new methods. And they’d been calling him “Crazy Nate,” those who indulged in that sort of thing. She had no doubt his reserved, off-putting personality had fed the fire.
Maura herself made it a point to ignore gossip, but a small town invariably provided the fertile ground for such goings-on. Folk were generally well-meaning, yet it remained that anything or anyone different was scrutinized, whether it was a body’s business to do so or not.
A surge of respect for Nate rose in her, for having the courage to break out of the mold. The feeling was followed closely by a sense of kinship with him. Wayne had never experienced this deep commitment to the land, the respect for an invaluable resource. He’d never understood how her feelings went far beyond the economic concerns of producing vegetables for their table or a feminine desire to pretty up the yard. It was a need to give as good as she got, a personal thing understood at a gut level by those who shared it, incomprehensible to those who didn’t.
It struck her that in the coming months she, too, would be introducing some relatively innovative ideas in gardening to the townspeople. And if he’d been labeled Crazy Nate, likely she’d end up being Mad Maura.
She opened her mouth once more to express such a sentiment, but Nate had already risen, knees cracking. Again he studied her with that exceptional intensity and looked as if he wished he’d never started this conversation with her. It dawned on her that she had no idea why he’d even stopped by in the first place.
Then another warning, one she recognized this time, sounded in her head: That boy’s looking for a wife. It was her father’s voice, and he was talking about Nate.
What had made her think of that? she wondered. Maura shot Nate a nervous glance as her cheeks grew warm with a confounding heat, as if he’d heard the message as loudly as she had.
But Nate’s expression was ever distant as he fit his cap on his head with a tug on its bill, palm anchoring it at the back. He reached a hand down to help her up. “Seeing as how you’re itching to poke seeds into this ground, we’d better get it tilled, don’t you think?”
“We?” She took his hand and scrambled to her feet. “I thought Hank was going to till the garden for me.”
“He was, but he looked a little, ah, perturbed when I saw him up at the lumberyard this morning, so I volunteered to help him out.”
Maura watched Nate walk to the driveway and wheel back the rented industrial-strength Rototiller. He squatted and began filling the machine’s tank from a gas can.
“Hank, perturbed?” She had never seen the easygoing Hank in any posture except perfectly relaxed. Things just didn’t bother him. “He should have told me if he was too busy. I don’t mind plowing the garden myself.”
Nate lifted his eyebrows. “Ever till a patch of land that’s never been turned?”
“No.”
“It’s a little taxing.”
“Oh.” She’d noticed that Nate almost always spoke in understatement and so took his observation to mean it was very taxing to till virgin soil. But if he were implementing different methods in plowing in his farming, the aspiring horticulturist in her wondered why he wouldn’t suggest using those methods in her garden. Maura almost asked, but something told her Nate would be decidedly closed to that topic at the moment.
He replaced the gas cap and wiped his hands on a rag. “Helping you put in this garden wasn’t what was bothering Hank. When I saw him, he had Jonas busy measuring out a bunch of two-by-fours, mixing up paint and counting out nails so fast I thought someone’s house had burned down. Seems Hank’s in a little bit of a hurry to finish off Cora’s basement as a den for himself.” Nate stood and hooked two fingers around the wood pull on the starter cord. “I guess for an old bachelor like Hank, it’s kind of hard to get used to living with someone after having unlimited privacy for so long. I imagine he feels like he needs a little space right now.”
“I imagine,” Maura said drolly, “being married to Cora Lawsen would be a strain on even the most sociable of men.” Hardly a harridan, Cora Lawsen Peterson nonetheless was used to having her way.
Everyone had been surprised when the sixtyish Hank had proposed last fall, married Cora this spring and moved into her severely organized home a month ago. He’d left vacant the little house he had lived in alone for years, and he’d been glad to put it into Maura’s capable hands. He’d even agreed to make certain improvements at little or no cost to her. The vegetable garden was the first of these projects.
Maura nodded her head. “You just keep on helping Hank out, Nate. I don’t want him deciding life with Cora isn’t to be borne and coming back to take my house from me.”
That brought out his smile again, in devastating force. She would have to take care, she realized even while she grinned at Nate, glad to be back on relatively easy footing with him again.
Nate started up the Rototiller in a cloud of exhaust fumes and was soon making slow progress through the dense loam. Watching the machine buck and lunge even in Nate’s capable hands, Maura understood how difficult it would have been for her to till the garden the first year, and how great a favor he was doing her by taking charge of the chore.
She helped him by picking rocks out of the turned soil, then spreading the expensive bagged peat she’d purchased. It would be a while before her compost heap would provide much economical organic matter for fertilizing the garden, and Maura was anxious to get her garden in. Even now in early May, it was nearly too late to put in cool-weather crops like lettuce and spinach.
A few hours later, Nate had tilled and re-tilled the ground, breaking up the larger clumps and working in the peat. Even with the crisp spring breeze, he’d removed his shirt and was perspiring freely. Maura pitched in wherever she saw the opportunity but often could do nothing more than make sure his way was clear and offer drinks of cold water when he paused to rest.
Yes, she reflected after some time watching him, Nate Farrell was one finely built man. She openly studied his muscled back as he drove the Rototiller in one direction and studied his chest less openly when he plowed a row toward her. The contained strength that was so much a part of his personality was physically evident in the way he handled the tiller, in his stance, which seemed as firmly set as a steel pylon. As she recalled, years ago he’d been quite a source of speculation among the teenage girls in Soldier Creek with his strong, silent, and therefore mysterious demeanor. She could see why even today he remained the subject of feminine conjecture, if Lou Ann’s Beauty Parlor was any gauge.
Maura felt that same memory creep up on her, a memory that, she now realized, she’d held at arm’s length for many years, though she couldn’t say why she had done so. Likely because it would have served no purpose to dwell on a man who’d touched her young life so briefly. Not when she’d married another man.
With a start, Maura found Nate watching her as she stared at him. She turned away self-consciously, busying herself with spreading more peat.
Honestly, she had to corral her wandering thoughts and quit ogling him like prime show stock! Quite obviously, Maura reflected, she was coming out of her two-year-long stupor.
“Mama?”
Maura looked up. Davey, her son, stood at the partially open screen door on the back porch. He blinked owlishly, looking even more owlish in the black framed glasses he’d worn since the surgery to correct his crossed eye.
As always, Maura thought the glasses made him look unusually vulnerable. And, as always, it wrung her protective mother’s heart. Those plastic lenses had become almost a shield of security for him, and he removed them only when sleeping.
“Hi, honey. Did you have a good rest?” She knew better than to intimate that he had napped, since big boys of five did not “nap.” Normally Davey didn’t, but with the excitement of the move over the past week, he had been cranky as a bear this morning. She’d suggested after breakfast that he might benefit from a little quiet time in his room. Five minutes later she’d found him passed out on his bed.
Clearly still groggy, Davey nodded in answer to her question and started down the steps and across the yard to investigate.
Nate paused in his work, running a bandanna over his shiny face. “Durn, Maura, if I’d known he was sleeping, I would’ve come back later instead of making all this racket.”
She turned to him, her back to Davey. “Don’t worry,” she assured him in a low voice, “he was still dead to the world when I checked him half an hour ago.”
Davey had reached her side, and he leaned his head against her thigh, yawning. She laid her palm over his forehead and brushed back his hair, a bright gold so like Wayne’s. The cowlick sprang up like a cock’s comb.
Maura noticed Nate’s face lost all trace of its usual reserve as he smiled at the boy. “Just waking up, pardner?” he asked.
Davey nodded, squinting up at the tall man much as she must have earlier this morning.
“I don’t think you know Nate, honey,” Maura said. “Mr. Farrell farms south of Soldier Creek when he isn’t helping us out with our garden patch.”
Davey continued to stare at Nate thoughtfully. He scrunched his nose in a habit he’d acquired that pushed the bridge of his glasses infinitesimally upward. “I know,” he said after a moment, “you’re Crazy Nate.”
“David Wayne Foster!” Maura exclaimed. She shot a mortified glance at Nate, whose face again became a mask of detachment.
Where had Davey learned such a name? It must have been from that Tommy Lee, who’d lived in the apartment across from theirs before they moved here. She’d disliked the seven-year-old from the first and suspected the only reason he’d even deigned to address five-year-old Davey was that no children his own age would tolerate his bullying and mean disposition. And Davey, too shy to seek out friends of his own, had naturally been drawn in by the older boy. She’d tried to limit Davey’s time with Tommy, but obviously she’d not succeeded.
Thank God she wouldn’t have to worry any longer about Tommy’s influence on her son, but that didn’t help her now.
Too embarrassed to meet Nate’s eyes again, Maura gave Davey a reproachful frown. “You know it’s wrong to call names.” She tucked her chin in an I’m waiting pose. She shouldn’t have to remind him how to rectify the situation.
To her relief, Davey possessed the good conscience to lower his eyes and redden in sincere shame. He pulled away from her, standing on his own.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Farrell,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.” He hesitated, shuffling his feet, then added, “I know I don’t like it when someone calls me...calls me Four Eyes.”
Maura said nothing as tears stung at the back of her own eyes. She could guess also who’d called him that, though Davey had never mentioned it to her.
She glanced up to find Nate’s understanding gaze fixed on the boy. He smiled. “Then why don’t I call you Dave and you can call me Nate?”
Davey’s face transformed itself at the suggestion. It seemed he was to be forgiven and treated like a man all at once. The ultimate, in his judgment. His brown eyes lit up, and his mouth formed a hesitant smile. He nodded. “Okay, Nate.”
“Okay, Dave.” In that way males have of deprecating emotion, Nate reached out and tugged on the forelock that spouted from Davey’s forehead in a golden geyser. The seriousness her son wore like a habit departed as he grinned and wagged his head abashedly.
He’s starved for male companionship, Maura thought, not for the first time in the past few months. She could almost see the bond forming between her son and this man as it did when kindred souls encountered each other. And these two were peas in a pod: serious, intense to a fault. Davey had always been somewhat so but had grown more and more solemn over the past few years. Maura had worried about it more times than she cared to count. She’d hoped it stemmed mainly from his father’s death, but lately she had begun to understand this trait governed her son’s personality and always would.
And because of that fledgling comprehension, Maura suddenly had a glimpse into Nate’s nature.
Still waters run deep. In both of them.
She caught Nate’s eye and smiled her gratitude for smoothing over the difficult moment. She couldn’t imagine he was used to dealing with little boys and their fragile egos, yet he’d handled the situation marvelously and likely at cost to his own ego.
Crazy Nate. How difficult it must be for him to realize the label had reached even the ears of a five-year-old boy. Maura fervently hoped Nate wasn’t bothered by the talk in town, though she could tell to some extent he was, even with that sturdy personal armor of his.
She glanced at her watch. “Look at the time!” Rubbing her hopelessly grimy hands down the front of her equally hopeless jeans, she gestured with her head toward the house. “Go on in and change your shirt, honey, while I finish up with Nate. Your appointment at Lou Ann’s is in half an hour.”
The smile disappeared from Davey’s face. His lower lip grew, making him the perfect image of his father when he was being stubborn. Wayne Foster would never be lost to her as long as she had his son.
“I don’t want a haircut,” he said stoutly.
“Now, Davey.” Maura cast Nate a chagrined look. He probably thought her the worst mother in Soldier Creek to be raising such an obstinate, ill-mannered child. “We talked about this. I don’t do a very good job of cutting your hair anymore, now that it’s gotten so...thick, and you need to have someone who knows what they’re doing give you a good cut. Lou Ann cuts my hair,” she added, though the example was a lame one. Her long hair rarely needed more than a trim of the ends, nothing like what a little boy with a silver-dollar-sized cowlick required.
“But I don’t need a haircut,” Davey negotiated.
“Yes, you do. I thought we’d have a Maid Rite sandwich at the café afterwards,” Maura said on another tack. Bribery, no less! But why was Davey being so stubborn?
A thought struck her. “I know Lou Ann and all the other ladies fuss over you, honey. You won’t have to sit and wait for me. We’ll get you in and out in no time, I promise.”
She saw this assurance had not the least bit effect on the boy. She was trying to come up with another argument when Nate spoke up.
“You know,” he said, giving Davey a measuring scrutiny before turning to Maura, “Ernie up at the barbershop usually does a pretty good job for me. Think he could handle a bristle brush like Dave’s?”
Maura gave him a measuring look of her own as she tried to suppress a smile. Now, why hadn’t she thought of that? Probably, she reasoned, because she felt as much reluctance at entering that bastion of masculinity as Davey did for invading Lou Ann’s Beauty Parlor. Wayne had always gotten his hair cut at Ernie’s, and she’d bet every man in town did. It just hadn’t entered her mind to think Davey would find flowered cutting capes and pink chairs an intolerable affront to his developing male sensibilities.
She turned to find her son gazing up at her with undisguised longing. “I suppose I could take you to Ernie’s,” she said slowly, picturing the scenario quite clearly, having passed by it innumerable times: the usual collection of grizzled farmers in Osh-kosh work pants, sweat-rimmed, seed-corn caps on their heads, hashing and rehashing the weather from their posts near the plate-glass window; Ernie sitting high up on his barber chair, legs crossed and a goodly amount of pale, hairy shin showing between stocking and pant leg as he read the Des Moines Register for what was surely the third time that day. In her mind’s eye she saw behind him, reflected in the mirror, ancient bottles of Lucky Tiger hair tonic and jars of Wildroot lining the shelf under faded advertisements for Clove, Teaberry and Black Jack gum.
The setting reeked of inviolable, age-old maleness. No wonder the option hadn’t immediately popped to mind.
Again Nate must have sensed her dilemma. More for Davey’s benefit than hers, she presumed, he smoothed his palm conspicuously over his nape. “You know, I was thinking I needed a little trim myself. How about I take Dave with me to Ernie’s?”
This, Maura noticed, sent her son into silent fits of anticipation that she tried to ignore while judging the fairness of the situation.
“I couldn’t ask you to do so much, Nate,” she protested. “You’ve already spent quite a bit of time helping me.”
“It won’t take long, and I don’t mind, Maura. I’m just about done here. And wouldn’t you rather keep working on your garden?”
Maura’s eyes rested wistfully on the wheelbarrow of old bricks Hank had obtained for her to edge her garden. Feeling herself wavering, she glanced back at Nate. “It seems such a personal thing, though, taking a little boy for his first barber-cut. And then taking him to the café, too. I don’t want to impose on you.”
He shrugged, and Maura watched the movement ripple the muscles in his strong shoulders and upper chest. She’d noted earlier the nice sprinkling of hair across that expanse of skin, and now she swallowed with difficulty before jerking her gaze upward. She met Nate’s discerning eyes, the color of the irises blooming on the sunny side of the house.
Maura reddened. It really had been too long if seeing a man’s chest produced such a reaction in her. What must he think of her, staring all the time?
He fixed her with one of those spellbinding, intense looks. “It’s no imposition.”
“Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll be good,” Davey offered hopefully.
She broke eye contact with Nate only to find her son giving her an equally intense look. Over a haircut, for pity’s sake.
Such a serious child. She would rather he spend time in the company of someone less like himself, who might encourage him by example to lighten up. But she could see her son wanted a man to take him to Ernie’s. And though this man was practically a stranger, Nate was still preferable to a mother in this instance. The thought produced a sudden ache in her, a feeling of frustrated inadequacy, for she knew there would be many more such instances in their lives as she raised her son without a father. She hated to think she wasn’t equipped to handle those situations alone.
And yet she had been searching for ways to promote Davey’s independence, nearly as much as she’d sought ways to achieve her own.
She ruffled his blond hair tenderly. “I know you’ll be good, honey. All right. Let me get my purse, and I’ll give you some money.”
“You don’t need—” Nate began, but Maura cut him off.
“No, I insist. It won’t take me a minute.”
She rinsed her hands under the outdoor faucet and hurried to locate her billfold while Nate finished up with the tiller and wheeled it back to the garage for Hank to pick up and return to the rental place in nearby Newton. He was soaking his bandanna under the spout and freshening up when Maura returned a few minutes later.
As she bent to tuck a ten-dollar bill into the breast pocket of Davey’s shirt, Maura eyed its somewhat grimy state. For Lou Ann’s, she’d have made him change it. But she suspected at Ernie’s he’d likely be in the main. And as for the crowd at the café...well, her son usually managed to wear some part of his lunch on his shirt anyway.
She straightened as Nate ambled over. “There’s enough money for a haircut for Davey and a Maid Rite at Myra’s for both of you.” Embarrassment for both her and her son’s behavior that morning still lay uppermost in her mind, what with Nate being so considerate, and she put a hand on his arm. “Nate—” She hesitated, not wanting Davey to overhear her.
Once again Nate sensed her quandary. He gave Davey a gentle push toward his pickup truck parked on the street. “Go on, pard. I’ll catch up in a minute.” He watched the boy trot off, then turned back to Maura. “Yes?”
She could think of no way to apologize for her own indiscretions but needed at least to make amends for Davey’s. “I wanted to tell you that Davey never heard that...name from me. You know that, don’t you?”
He stooped and picked up his shirt from the grass. “I know, Maura.”
“And he will be good with you. He’s really a very cooperative fellow. It’s just that it’s been a little tough for him lately, for us both.”
“I know, Maura.” His blue-gray eyes told her that he did. She wondered if many people ever saw what she did right now, that underneath Nate Farrell’s reserve existed a wonderful warmth. But then she knew that, had felt that warmth once, though briefly. And she could see it now, when he dealt with Davey, and it touched her. One learned a lot about a man from the way he treated children, the elderly or animals. More than could be learned through years of acquaintance—or from an isolated incident long ago.
She gave him a shy smile. “He likes you.”
“I like him,” Nate answered simply, then shook his head. “I can’t believe you were going to take that kid to the beauty parlor!”
The sight of his smiling face, so close to hers, brought another glow to her cheeks, which she covered with gruff orders. “Well, don’t let him forget his manners. And don’t let Ernie put anything slick on his hair.” Anxiously she glanced after the boy, who’d bent down to pick up something in the yard. Davey stood and examined it, chin on his chest and stomach thrust out, making him look as if he still had a baby’s paunch. Again a swell of maternal protectiveness rose in her.
She turned back to Nate. “Maybe I should go with you.”
He made a small sound of exasperation. “Maura.”
“I mean, it is his first real haircut.”
“I’ll have Ernie tie up a lock of Davey’s hair in a pretty blue ribbon if you like.”
She caught the twinkle in his eye and laughed. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just an awfully personal favor, Nate. And you’ve really done enough for me already.”
Nate said nothing, but he slid on his shirt, buttoned it and stuffed its tails into his jeans, all the while holding her gaze with his. “I guess if I want to do a personal favor for you, Maura Foster,” he finally said in his quiet manner, “I’ll do it.”
Did he have to look at her that way? As if he wanted to find her soul through her eyes? Maura had a sudden presentiment—or was it that memory again? Something told her that, if he chose to, Nate Farrell could get anything he really wanted with that unswerving focus. In his own time, in his own way.
Nate turned to follow Davey. When he reached him, he stooped and considered, with as much earnestness as the boy had himself, the object Davey held up. Even from several yards away, Maura saw the whole aspect of Nate’s face change, soften, as he said something to Davey, who nodded, pocketing the bit of flotsam.
Yes, there was something undeniably touching seeing a man in this context. Touching...moving...and, she realized, completely thrilling. A rush of awareness hit her all at once.
Nate picked that exact moment to straighten and glance back at her. She felt he read in her eyes every wayward thought she’d experienced that morning.
And that he remembered, too.
