The Baby Bump Page 9

Ike told himself he couldn’t be falling for her. He just couldn’t. She almost kneed him in his privates in an effort to scramble off him.

  But damned if she didn’t look adorable. Still dirt-smudged. Still rattled. But there was still passion in her eyes, an earthy pink in her cheeks. Women liked him. Women had always liked him. But she sparked something different for him, something dangerous, something compelling. Maybe because she responded to him as if he were the only man in the universe—at least her universe.

  “You’re not looking happy,” he murmured.

  She was still straightening, tugging, smoothing. Sunlight streaming from the windows glowed on her face, put fire in her hair. “I’m definitely not,” she agreed.

  “You mad at me?”

  “No. I’m mad at me.”

  Her voice was still cross, but he relaxed. “I like that answer. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to apologize or grovel.”

  She stood up, pushing a hand through her hair as her gaze swept the tea shop. As awful as it was, Ike could see there were patterns to her messes. One mountain was trash. Paper piles were separated into taxes and receipts and similar records. A trash barrel held broken pottery. Unbroken tins and tea containers were temporarily shelved together.

  “I don’t suppose you know how to fix a broken antique cash register?” she asked, as if they were in the middle of a completely different conversation.

  “If it’s old, then it’s not electronic. If it’s just a mechanical problem, there’s a slim chance I can.” He uncoiled, stood up. He’d seen the cash register gaping open, just hadn’t bothered to wonder why. But now he tested the drawer, and shortly discovered the obvious. Something was caught behind it. He leaned over, tried to reach in. “We’re going to need a tool. Knife. Screwdriver. Fork. Something long and thin.”

  She went on a search, came through with a long-handled spoon.

  He took it and she said, “Just be a little careful with it, okay? It’s sterling silver.”

  He rolled his eyes, gave her back the spoon.

  “It was all I could find!”

  “Think ruler. Tape measure. Fly swatter...”

  She found a ruler. He swore. She played cheerleader. He considered asking if she wanted to talk about it... It seemed fairly monumental to him, nearly making love in the least romantic place on the planet, no foreplay, no warnings, just a kiss leading to Armageddon. But then he figured she’d bring it up if she wanted to, needed to.

  Eventually—by half killing himself—he managed to figure out the problem. Two acorns. Some shredded paper. Some unmentionables. “You had a mouse make a nest back there.”

  “Ew.”

  “That’s an elegant way to put it.” He tested the drawer two more times, making sure it closed and reopened cleanly again.

  “Ike...it’s not easy for me to ask a favor from anyone.” She’d thrown out the debris he’d unearthed in the register, pulled hand sanitizer from her pocket and liberally used it on her hands—then offered it to him.

  “Well, I like the idea of your asking favors from me. Then you’re in my debt. That’s always good.”

  She chuckled, but there was a carefulness in her tone. “I need...well, I need someone with me next Thursday. I have to talk to Amos Hawthorne, on the tea farm, about the tea farm. We set up a time. But since I’m not his favorite person...”

  “How could that possibly be? When you’re so cute and smart and so easy to get along with?”

  A ball of wadded-up paper hit his forehead. “All right, all right, so it might be my fault that Amos isn’t too fond of me.”

  “Because you went behind his back and sicced his wife on him?”

  She glared at him. “That could be part of it. But the point is that he’s coming to talk on Thursday afternoon. Three o’clock. And you may have patients, I realize. But if you’re free, I’d appreciate your being here.”

  “You feel you need protection? That he might strangle you?”

  “Well, I’m hoping it won’t come to that. I’m going to practice being meek and agreeable. But just in case I can’t pull it off...”

  “You’d like backup.”

  “Yes. If you can. And if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Well, this is an easy yes. No sweat. I’ll be here a few minutes early.” He was amazed at the workings of the female mind. At least her female mind. He’d probably have paid gold for the chance to be there for her. And extra platinum for her asking him, specifically him, to play a hero role for her. Casually he mentioned, “You’re using me.”

  “I know. I know. It’s not nice.”

  “That’s okay. Feel free to use me whenever you want.”

  She looked as if she was about to reply when his pager went off. He was tempted to throw the damn thing in the river. Every time they got into an interesting conversation, he was interrupted.

  “I have to go,” he said. En route to the door, he managed to swoop an arm around her waist and peck a fast, soft kiss on her forehead. “Be good. But only when I’m not there, okay?”

  She bristled up, but he just laughed. And dug in his pocket for his truck keys.

  Chapter Seven

  Ginger paced in front of the farm office at the speed of a Derby contender. Ike was late. He said he’d be here by three on Thursday, and it was three minutes after three.

  She’d been ready for Amos Hawthorne’s arrival since before lunch. Not that she was nervous, but she couldn’t eat anything but a few soda crackers with weak tea. She’d pitched and tossed clothes because she couldn’t find a pair of pants that buttoned. She’d still had a waist until that morning! Suddenly the pooch had appeared.

  The pregnancy had been on her mind every other second for weeks now—she wanted to make decisions, forge plans, positively hated procrastinating about anything so serious. It was just that Gramps’s issues were more immediately overwhelming. He was the crisis. She couldn’t be the crisis until she had time to be the crisis.

  A truck turned in the drive. An old pickup, which made shards of anxiety twist in her stomach—it wasn’t Ike, but Amos, and she’d so counted on Ike being here first. Clouds clenched and darkened in the west. Since it typically rained a ton in the fall, another shower wouldn’t be unusual, but she needed at least an hour with no rain. She needed to win over Amos. She needed the darned farm taken care of so she could go back to the rest of the crises in her life.

  She needed an awful lot to go right over the next hour.

  Amos pulled into the drive, stepped out. She had the old golf cart with the canopy top all charged up and ready to boogie—which he’d asked for. It was the easiest transportation around the acreage. “Thanks so much for coming,” she started to say.

  Amos greeted her with a scowl darker than the sky. “My wife sent you a pecan pie, seeing as she thinks the sun rises and sets with you. Just so you know it’s from her and not from me. I don’t appreciate your going round my back to my wife, missy.”

  “Please thank her so much for the pie. And I’m seriously sorry, Amos. I know what I did was wrong.” Her voice was sincere. She was willing to eat as much crow as Amos wanted. If he’d just help her.

  “Yeah, well, when I say no to something, I mean no. The only reason I came is because I thought about it, and realized it was your grandfather that fired me, not you. So I’ll fill you in on how things are. Explain some things I know you don’t know. Then you can do whatever you want with the information. I’m out of it.”

  “I’d appreciate any help you could give me.” She’d practiced that contrite voice, hoped she sounded subservient and meek.

  “Well, let’s go.” He motioned to the golf cart, took the driver’s side, took off the minute she was seated. His first stop—his priority stop—was in front of the major field of tea plants. “All right. What do you see out there?”

/>   She looked. She’d seen the view a million times. Green as far as the eye could see, that unique rich green of tea plants. Nothing looked dead. The field exuded an exuberantly fresh and unique smell.

  “It looks healthy to me,” she said carefully.

  “Then you never looked real close, did you.” Amos didn’t phrase it like a question.

  “I wasn’t ever looking from your eyes, Amos. But it’s true. I have no memory of what the fields looked like in October.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you how it looked when I was managing the place. The top of that field should look absolutely even. Floor-even. Table-even. There shouldn’t be a branch or a leaf of a limb sticking out anywhere. This is a mess.”

  She gulped. “I guess my first impression was that the plants looked healthy.”

  “They are healthy. Those plants will live another few hundred years. Never had trouble with them,” he said fondly. “One of the nice things about tea is that you never have to use chemicals like insecticides. No insects anywhere around here. Nobody knows why. Some say that the insects don’t like the natural caffeine in tea. But whatever. If you’re good to a tea plant, it’ll last centuries and more.”

  “You love them, don’t you, Amos?” He was starting to calm down, at least a little.

  “You think I worked all those years just for a paycheck? Of course I love it.” He started driving again, but slowly, pointing out this and that. “You see a bald eagle over head, you know it’s one of the farm’s. Bald eagles like it here. There’s always at least a pair nesting by the irrigation ponds. When the young are born, they bring them to the tea plants. The plants are so close, the trunks so gnarly, that no predator can get in there. The mama can go out hunting, knowing her babies are safe.”

  “Gramps showed me a nest one time,” Ginger murmured. “I thought those babies were about the ugliest, scrawniest hairless critters I’d ever seen.” She hoped to coax a smile, but Amos took off again, his posture stiff as steel.

  “You know how many tea plantations there are in the United States?” he demanded.

  She shook her head.

  “Three. There’s one way bigger than ours, right in the Carolinas, a lot bigger name than we have. They make great tea, sell it all over the world—but that’s all right. What we had here was our own little taste of paradise. We never wanted to be big, just wanted the best tea in the universe. The best tea is all in the plants. Nurturing them as if they were babies, giving them the perfect food, just the right amount. You have to know every plant as if it was a kid of yours. See any bad behavior, you have to stop it in its tracks. But you have to love it, too.”

  She looked at him, suddenly realizing that she’d misunderstood the situation completely. She never had to win Amos over. It wasn’t about her. It was about the land. And her grandfather should have given Amos a serious piece of the land a long time ago.

  “Amos,” she started to say seriously, but then stopped. From the corner of her eye, she saw a pickup—a white charger of a pickup—turning from the far, long side of the field. Her heart thumped even before she could identify him. So he was a little late. He’d said he’d come and he had.

  He was the lover she couldn’t have—which she’d known from the get-go. But tarnation, he did stir her blood like a burst of light after a long dark storm.

  Ike, being Ike, took his time getting out of the truck and ambling toward them. He shot her a look—but to Amos, he extended a hand. “How’s the gout doing, Amos?”

  “Could be better. Could be worse. I’m not complaining.”

  “Good to hear. And the wife?”

  “I thought that cough was going to never stop. The medicine you gave her helped a smidgeon, I have to say.”

  Faint praise, Ginger mused. Still, it was obvious that Amos trusted Ike. She could see it in the way he shook Ike’s welcoming hand, how he stood taller, how a hint of a smile showed up.

  Before they’d stood there two minutes, though, Amos drew a line in the sand. “So, Doc, I assume you showed up because you’re riding shotgun for Miss Ginger here?”

  “Well, I’d have to admit to that...except the truth is, I don’t know anything about your business, the tea, the land, any of it. So I’m likely to keep my mouth shut.”

  Amos turned back to her. “Well, I’m not through telling you things you need to know.”

  “I’m listening,” she said, and added “sir” with all the Southern feminine syrup that she’d grown up with. The sky started spitting rain. It wasn’t a lot, wasn’t even a drizzle, more like a slow drool with a plop landing here and there. Just enough to make her hair frizz and her neck feel sticky.

  Amos abandoned the golf cart and led a walk around the acres that would have exhausted a marine. The greenhouse. The pump. The supply barn. The irrigation setup. The warehouse where the harvest was brought in, first to the withering bed, then to the rotovane, then to the oxidation bed.

  “What’s wrong in here?” he asked her, the same as he had, at every stop.

  The answer was always the same. Her. She was the one who was wrong. Her lack of knowledge was adding up to a college degree in ignorance.

  “What’s wrong,” Amos prodded her, when she failed to express the correct answer, “is that the machinery’s just sitting here. Not turned on. This place should be busy and noisy, the last harvest of the season. The greenhouses should be filled with cuttings started during the growing season. There’s nothing right happening anywhere on the premises.”

  She felt a hand at the small of her back. Ike. Who hadn’t said a word or offered a question or anything else. He was just...there.

  “Amos,” she said carefully, “are you trying to tell me the only solution is to sell the property? Is it all so far gone that it can’t be brought back?”

  “That’s your business and your grandfather’s. Not mine.”

  “I would still value your opinion.”

  “Well, you could sell the place. But not for tea. Not going to find anybody who knows about tea. And as far as selling her for general real estate...she’s a pretty piece of ground, so I guess some developer might look at it. In this market, though, I’d doubt you’d get value for your money.”

  She gulped. So far she hadn’t heard any good news. “All right. So the next question. Is it possible to make it viable again? To bring it back.”

  “Well, sure. But it’d take a trunk full of money.”

  “How much money?”

  “Honey, I don’t know.”

  “But I’ll bet you have a general idea. I suspect you’d know more than the bank would about a problem like that,” she added.

  “Well, that’s another for-sure. People wearing suits don’t understand land. About no one understands tea.” He pulled a bag from his pocket, looked at her as if silently asking her permission.

  She had to shake her head. The bag held chewing tobacco. She was about positive if he started chewing, she’d hurl...and then this whole afternoon would be for nothing. “Please just throw out a general figure. What you think it’d take to bring it back.”

  “Well, it’s gonna take a year of no profit to bring it where it should be again.”

  “I understand.”

  “You’ll have to pay for the work. And a lot of the work has to be done by hand when it’s been let go to this point.”

  “I understand.”

  “She could make a good profit. She always has. When you make the best of something, there’s always a market for it. But your grandmother had the gift, and she’s gone. Your grandfather did his time, but you know he hasn’t got the judgment of a rock any more. And then there’s you.” Amos shook his head. “You couldn’t do this, missy. You’re too soft. Too much to learn. You’re too much a city girl.”

  She almost bit his head off. She wanted to. She could. She knew perfectly
well when she was being insulted—and she knew exactly how to lose her temper because she did it so often.

  But damned Amos. He was telling the truth. It wasn’t a truth she wanted to hear, but of course, he was right. She couldn’t possibly handle the farm herself. And there was no one else.

  Ike spoke up for the first time in a blue moon, his voice casual and easy. “Amos, could you just throw out some kind of dollar figure to Ginger? Just ballpark. Just something that would give her an idea what kind of money it might take to turn this around.”

  Amos looked at Ike, not her. “I don’t know, I’m telling you. I mean I’ve seen some figures. I know what some things cost. I know what I used to be paid. But I can’t guarantee—”

  “Aw, Amos. We’re not asking for a guarantee. Just a ballpark number. If you were running the place, what would you think it’d take to put the land back on firm footing?”

  Amos scratched his neck. “Well, I dunno. But I’m saying a hundred grand easy. That’d be the drop in the bucket. But I’m guessing it’d be more like two.”

  “Two hundred thousand?” Ginger echoed. All right. It wasn’t as big as the national debt, but it might as well have been. For a second, only a second, her eyes squeezed closed. Who knew? Who could possibly have known that she could conceivably feel this sharp-sad sinking feeling of loss?

  She’d never dreamed of being part of the working tea farm. Neither had her grandparents. Neither had anyone. She was just trying to find solutions for her grandfather’s situation. That’s all. But realizing her family could lose it all brought on a heartsick so sharp she could hardly swallow.

  She heard a buzz, realized it was Ike’s cell. She felt his gaze on her face, hawk eyes, assessing...but he turned around to answer the call.

  He flipped the cell shut in less than a minute. “I’m sorry, Ginger. It’s the one problem with being the only doctor in town. It’s sort of a twenty-four-seven thing.”

  “You have to go,” she said.

  “Yeah. Seems a five-year-old had a fall from a jungle gym. Sounds like the child’s fine, but the mother’s a wreck and a half.”