A Place to Call Home (Harlequin Heartwarming) (11 page)

Silence. “I’m not inviting your grandfather.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Your grandfather and I have not... It’s just too difficult, Penelope. He would make a hash out of everything. All he does is use people and manipulate their better instincts. I’ve warned you about him, and you refuse to listen.”

“Mom, you cannot seriously expect me to drop everything and fly out to be a bridesmaid for my brother’s total stranger of a fiancée, all because it’s his only shot at the ‘big day,’ and then not invite Grandpa Murphy?”

“You know how it is with your grandmother. She refuses to be in the same room with him. And I have to side with her on this. She has excellent reasons. And if you have any feelings for your grandmother, respect her wishes, not to mention mine. Can’t you simply trust us that we know best? Besides,” her mom said, adopting a placating tone, “he’s not really been a big part of our lives.”

“Because you refused to make him a part, Mom! How could he be? How can he now? He’s a sick old man, and this is his only grandson’s wedding day. If it’s important enough for me to be there, then it’s even more—”

“Don’t try guilting me. Your grandfather does that perfectly well. Oh. And I know you don’t have the money to buy a plane ticket. So your father and I are buying it. Don’t get all stiff-necked. I’ll talk to you tomorrow with all the details. And Penelope...” Her mother trailed off and then added with an unbending firmness, “don’t make things difficult by insisting on your grandfather being there.”

With that, her mother hung up.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

F
OR
A
MOMENT
Penelope stood there with the cell phone at her ear, listening to the silence. She could not believe her mother had hung up on her.

Her stomach churned as she closed the phone. How was she going to explain to Grandpa Murphy that he was persona non grata at Trent’s wedding? He had been trying so hard these past few weeks to make up for the years he’d not been able to be around.

With the allusions he’d made to phone conversations with her mom, Penelope had hoped that the old family feud between them, whatever had caused it, was fading.

Guess that was wishful thinking.

“Sounds like some family drama there.”

Brandon. Penelope had forgotten he was there. She realized she was gripping the phone so hard it dug into her palm. Slipping it into her pocket, she pressed her lips together and turned on him. “And it’s none of your business, thank you very much.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Anything to do with Murphy is very much my business. I like to keep an eye on him.”

“You—you—” Penelope pressed her thumb and forefinger to her eyes. Another day, another headache. “My grandfather’s right. You make him out to be some sort of monster so it’s easier for you to hate him. If you could just see him the way I see him. If you could know him the way I know him.”

Brandon chuckled, the sound bitter and hollow. “Funny. I was thinking the exact same thing. And it sounds as though, at least from your end of the conversation with your mother—it was your mother, wasn’t it?” He paused but didn’t wait long enough for her to answer. “Well, it sounds as if she had the brains to keep you away from him when you were younger.”

Penelope gritted her teeth. “Like I said, my family disagreements are none of your business.”

“But this irrational attachment you have for—”

“For my grandfather? It’s no more irrational for me to love my grandfather, warts and all, than it is for you to love your uncle, who was the actual one to cause you to lose this precious land. I don’t see you yelling accusations at
him.
”

Brandon’s face went white and he walked stiffly past her.

“Wait! Brandon, I’m sorry, that was uncalled-for.” Penelope made a grab for his arm, but he shook her off him. She stepped in front of him.

“Brandon! You cannot stomp away from disagreements every time.”

He glared down at her. “It’s better than saying what I think.”

“Okay, so I am not the most tactful of people. I know that. But you don’t have the market cornered on tact, either. You find some way of needling me every time we meet. And you could obviously see I was having a conversation that was meant to be private. I’m sorry, but it really... violated my privacy.”

“You don’t seem to be able to enforce those boundaries with your grandfather. It ought to tell you something that he comes in your house without permission, even when he knows it bothers you.”

She blew out an exasperated breath. “See? That’s what I mean. You pick up these arcane bits of information about me and then you turn around and use them against me. I feel manipulated.”

“Hey,” Brandon said, holding up his hands. “I’m just pointing out the truth. If I were manipulating you, I’d take a page out of Richard Murphy’s book.”

“You know, when you’re not running down my grandfather, you can be a really nice guy. So why can’t we just agree to disagree on this and not bring Grandpa Murphy up?”

“Oh, right, let’s ignore the elephant in the corner, shall we?”

“I only meant that, for instance, on the tractor, we had fun, didn’t we? And when I was welding... And earlier, when I was showing you and your uncle the work I’d done on my sculpture. It’s good when we find common ground.”

Brandon didn’t answer immediately. He looked off in the distance, his eyes dark and inscrutable. “Why is it so important that I like you?” he asked finally.

“Because, honestly, you’re the first person I’ve ever clashed with. Well, except my mom, but you know moms.” She laughed, embarrassed. It didn’t relieve the tension.

Penelope took a deep breath and started again. “As I was saying, I’m not the world’s most popular person, granted, but people usually don’t hiss and spit around me. I’ve never known someone who, well, it’s as though you’re constantly taking out your dislike of my grandfather on me. Whatever the trouble—”

“My
dislike
of your grandfather?” Brandon scoffed. “Honey, I don’t just
dislike
Richard Murphy. I hate his guts. And I don’t care how much he bounced you on his knee, I’ll never see him as anything but the conniving, manipulative, greedy criminal he is.”

She closed her eyes against the onslaught of his anger. This was never going to work, whatever it was that she was hoping for.

“Fine.” Penelope turned away from him, too weary to argue. “Hate my grandfather, hate me. I don’t care. I give up.”

This time it was Brandon who caught her by the elbow. He pulled her back toward him. “I don’t hate you, Penelope. I could never hate you. What makes you think that?”

She couldn’t meet his eyes. “It’s not too hard to figure out. You paint me with the same brush you paint my grandfather. And you’re right. I don’t know why it even matters what you think of me. The sun will rise, the earth will spin around, the sun will set no matter what your opinion.”

He tipped her chin up. “
Hate
is a strong word. You frustrate me. That’s true. You frustrate me in so many ways. You wouldn’t believe the ways you frustrate me.”

Penelope searched his face. “Brandon—”

“Shh. Just for a moment, let me forget who you are.”

Brandon’s fingers slid into her hair, cradling her head as he lowered his lips to hers. She put her palm against his chest, intending to stop him, but the moment his mouth was against hers, she couldn’t think why on earth she wanted to stop anything that felt this good.

He pulled her to him and she let her hand slide up to his neck, let him press against her. She could not get enough of the sensation of his mouth on hers. It was as though she was a starving woman and he’d offered her a piece of bread. But the more she had, the hungrier she became.

Brandon stumbled backward, breaking the kiss, leaving her confused and bewildered.

“What—”

“I can’t,” he said. Misery pinched his features.

“You can’t what?”

He put a hand to his face. “I can’t forget who you are.”

Then he turned and headed into the woods that separated her land from his uncle’s.

* * *

B
RANDON
CURSED
himself all the way to Murphy’s fence. How could he have been so stupid as to kiss her? Crazy, just plain stupid and crazy.

He wrestled another stretch of fence wire away from the posts with the strength only frustration could give a man.

Forget her. It’s just hormones and you need to think with your head.

A sharp prong of the wire dug into his hand, and he felt perverse relief. The pain was nothing compared to the agony when he’d kissed her.

The cut gushed blood. He got his first-aid kit out of the truck’s glove compartment. Again, he welcomed the burning pain of the alcohol as he poured it over the wound.

For a moment, while he’d held Penelope, he’d felt...what? Not just the normal urges a guy had when he was kissing a woman as beautiful as Penelope, but something else, something far scarier. He’d felt as if she was worth letting everything else go.

Worth letting Murphy off the hook? No. Never. No one was worth that.

He gritted his teeth and flushed the cut with still more alcohol. Studying it, he decided it wasn’t quite bad enough for stitches, but it would probably leave a scar.

Good. A scar will be a reminder of how close I came to forgetting my priorities.

“Brandon? Brandon Wilkes! Are you back here?”

Penelope. He set the bottle of alcohol on the truck seat so hard a little sloshed on the vinyl. He should have known she’d follow him. And now she’d see the fence, and knowing Penelope, she’d swear out a warrant for trespassing.

There goes your plan, buddy.

She came through the last of the brush between them with the fury of a tornado. “There you are! Listen, I am tired of this hot-and-cold business! First you act as though you hate my guts, and then you—”

She paused, for the first time looking around her. “What are you doing?” Her voice was small and quiet, almost overwhelmed by the woods around them.

Brandon swallowed. “Taking down the fence.”

“That I see.” The quietness was gone now, and in its place pure steel.

“You did say I could use the land.”

“But I didn’t say a thing about you taking down the fence!”

Better do some fast talking now, bud.

“Well...” In his head, Brandon ran through explanations and excuses and defenses, but just as quickly discarded them.

“Well? What?”

Unexpected shame coursed through him. This wasn’t right, what he’d been doing. If Murphy had done something similar, Brandon would have ripped his heart out.

“It’s hard to get the tractor in and out. Half the time, your car’s in the way. And besides, it’s stupid to waste time treating this as two fields when it’s really supposed to be one field.”

He could see the protest on her lips, in the angry way she stood, arms akimbo.

“You’re expecting me to believe you did this just to be more efficient?”

Brandon riffled through the first-aid box for a large square of gauze. “I don’t expect you to believe anything I say. Why should I think you’d start now? Wouldn’t it just be a waste of breath?”

A beat or two of silence was the only response Brandon got. He heard twigs snap as she came closer to him. “You’ve hurt yourself.”

“Yeah. Fence wire’ll do that.”

“Here. Let me. You’ll never bandage it one-handed.” She took his injured hand in her own, her fingers light on his skin.

She’s worth more than Murphy.

He shook his head.

“Did I hurt you?” She looked up, and all he could do was stare into her brown eyes.

“No. But it does hurt.”

Penelope took the gauze from him and began bandaging the cut, tearing the surgical tape with even white teeth.

He swallowed again as she stepped back and let go of his hand.

“I’d keep that dry. You sure you don’t need stitches?”

“You’re a one-woman superhero. I figured you would offer to stitch it up if I needed them.”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Penelope turned back and studied the dismantled fence.

“I’ll put it back if you want me to.”

Now why had he offered that? If she said yes, he’d be duty-bound to do it. If she said no, then that was permission for him to have done it, which was another nail in the coffin of his adverse possession claim.

“I don’t know what I want you to do.” Pain rippled through her words, and suddenly Brandon realized she was in as much conflict about the kiss as he’d been.

“The tractor—it would be easier,” he managed to get out.

“That’s how Geraldine got in my yard, isn’t it?”

Brandon puzzled it out, looked up through the woods and saw the figure of Uncle Jake moving around in his yard. Uncle Jake had a much better vantage point to see what he’d been doing than Penelope would have from her house.

Through the trees, he saw his uncle staring back at him, or at least in his general direction. Brandon didn’t doubt the old codger had let Geraldine loose to clue Penelope in about the downed fence. He sighed.

“I guess. I didn’t see her come by, but I’ve taken up a lot of fence.”

“If you had just asked. You’re as bad as my grandfather, waltzing over boundaries and through doors. Why is it that people won’t take my no for an answer? Not my parents, not Grandpa Murphy, not you. Especially not you! Just once, I want someone to hear me when I say no.”

She burst into tears and stumbled back the way she’d come.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
HE
R
IDE
OF
THE
V
ALKYRIES
erupted out of Penelope’s pocket as she hit the porch steps. She ignored it and rubbed away her tears to see to slide the key into her back door’s lock.

Funny. In Oregon, her parents never felt the need to lock a door. The way their house was situated high on a hill, any intruder would have stuck out like a sore thumb. But here, in the middle of Nowhere, Georgia, she was having to take the same care to lock her doors as she did when she lived in New York.

But this time, ha-ha, it was against well-meaning grandfathers.

The lock gave way, surprising Theo from his slumber on the high shelf of a baker’s rack she’d knocked together earlier in the week. He yawned hugely, inspected her for a few seconds, then curled back up into a ball.

“That was supposed to be a test for the welder, Theo. And I may have to sell it—somewhere, though who knows where. So don’t get used to that as a perch.”

Theo didn’t respond.

Right. Even her cat didn’t listen to her. Penelope went for the bottle of aspirin. Shaking two pills out of the bottle, she tried to ignore how her fingers were trembling.

The water from the tap tasted clean and cool as it washed the tablets down. She’d never had such good water straight out of a tap. In New York, a filter was de rigueur, and even water back home in Oregon didn’t taste this good. Finally she could understand why her mother pined for the water back in
her
home of Georgia.

Her mother. Penelope dialed her mother’s number. Might as well get it over and done with.

Before Penelope could even get a greeting out, her mother was speaking. “I wanted to apologize for hanging up like that. It was rude and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it.”

Penelope sank into one of the dinette chairs and propped her forehead in the palm of her hand, elbow on the table. “It’s okay, Mom. We weren’t going to accomplish any peace treaty if you hadn’t hung up, so don’t worry about it.”

She heard her mother’s long sigh.

“Penelope—”

“Mom, believe it or not, your hanging up on me is the least of my problems right now, okay? I have a horrid headache. Brandon
Wilkes is tearing down my fence, and—” What else was there to say? Something straight out of a pity party about how even her cat refused to listen to her?

“Your fence? He’s taking down your fence? Along your property line?”

“Well, he has always maintained there
is
no property line there, because he swears that Grandpa Murphy conspired in some way to force the land sale to begin with. Something about taxes and the tax commissioner. Oh, Mom, I don’t know! He hates Grandpa Murphy and won’t listen to reason.”

Her mother chuckled drily. “Hmm. Seems to be the standard reaction to my father’s shenanigans.”

Penelope’s stomach growled, forestalling the protest she was going to make. She looked up at the clock. It was after two o’clock, no wonder she had a headache. Rising to her feet, she started poking through the cabinets and the fridge for something quick.

“Penelope? Are you still there?”

“Yes, Mom. I’m here. I’m trying to score some lunch, that’s all. I had the pig to deal with, which got in my yard because Brandon took the fence down, and then I—” She paused, thinking about Brandon’s kiss.

“Then what?” Her mother waited a beat. “That’s when you discovered the fence?”

“Yeah. Something like that.” Whole-wheat bread, brown mustard, some of the sliced turkey breast, romaine and tomatoes she’d bought during her last grocery-store run. The phone still pressed to her ear, she pulled a butter knife out of the drawer.

“So you’ve confronted him about it?”

“Brandon? Oh, yeah.” Back at the table, Penelope started assembling her sandwich, the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear. “He says it’s to make it easier to cultivate the fields. One big field would be easier than two, and all that.”

“Well...” Her mother clucked sympathetically. “He’s right about that. With two small fields, you spend half your time turning the tractor around and the other half on the road getting the tractor back and forth between the fields.”

“Oh, Mom! You’re not siding with him on this, are you? I mean, you’re the one who always warns home owners to never let fences on property lines become compromised.”

“You have a plat, right? Showing the boundaries? And a rental agreement describing how he can use the land?”

“Uh, not exactly. I mean, I have a verbal one. Don’t start. I know I should have one in writing.” She didn’t want to confess to her mother that she’d let Brandon use the land for free. At the time, she’d bought into Brandon’s pitiful-uncle story, but maybe that whole thing was just an act.

“Well, get one, dear,” her mother said crisply. “In writing. And put in it that, at the expiration of the agreement, he has to restore the fence at his cost, and back to the original land line. Put in there as well that if it has to be resurveyed, he pays for those costs, too. If you want, fax a copy of the plats to me, and I’ll draw one up.”

For a moment, Penelope was tempted to refuse. But it was a sensible plan, and the best way to handle it. Her mother had expertise she didn’t have, expertise that would cost her dearly if she went to an attorney here.

And if Brandon didn’t want to sign the agreement, she’d have him prosecuted for trespassing.

“Okay. I’ll fax up a copy of my deed. It will be easier than the plat, and it will have the boundaries on it,” Penelope told her.

“Good. Now, about your grandfather.”

“Mom, could we please—”

“I want to say my piece so my conscience will be clear. I’ll have warned you the best I can, and I won’t say another word.”

“Mom, please—”

“There are things about your grandfather you don’t know, things that I didn’t tell you about when you were younger, because...” Her mother exhaled. “I don’t know why, exactly. He wasn’t really a problem when you were little because we were so far away, and far be it for my father to trouble himself to come see us. And then, well, he married that woman.”

“Mom, you don’t have to worry about Eileen. She left him when he lost everything this summer.”

“Par for the course with that family. They were crooks from the word go, even if they did clean up well. I didn’t care if my father remarried. That wasn’t the point. Your grandmother had made her own life with us, and she was happy—far, far happier than she’d ever been with him. He’s...your grandfather—”

“Mom!” Penelope interrupted more sharply than she’d intended, but it did the trick.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to hear this. To hear how you couldn’t get along with Grandpa Murphy. I can get along with him and that’s all I need to know.”

“Oh, but Penelope, you can’t. You may think you can, but it’s because he’s arranging things. Manipulating circumstances.”

Penelope could visualize her mother’s face, knitted with concern. She knew that expression. She’d been treated to it whenever she did something her mother thought was a poor choice—changing her major to art, going on to art school for her master’s, living on a shoestring in first L.A. and then New York.

Oh, and don’t forget the biggie: buying this land.

“Your grandfather can get nasty when he doesn’t get his way, honey. I don’t want to see you hurt, that’s all. All these years, I didn’t want you to know what a...”

Penelope waited for her mom to supply the insult of her choice. When the word didn’t come, Penelope prompted. “What a what he was?”

“He’s very cunning. Very slick. He’s done things.”

“What things, Mom? Tell me, if they’re so awful.”

“I don’t want to. I know he’s my father, but he can be a horrible, horrible man. I honestly don’t even like to remember it. And he’s got you so charmed that you’re never going to believe it anyway, are you? Not until you see what he really is.”

A long moment of silence stretched out. Penelope looked down at her uneaten sandwich and pushed it away. “Maybe he’s changed?” she offered.

“For your sake, Penelope, I hope so. I hope so. Listen, I’ve got to go. I love you, and I’m glad you’re coming home for Trent’s wedding. I could use some help on it. Jill’s mom has got a to-do list a mile long. She’s even got a seating chart she’s working on. A seating chart! Oh, well, I know how she feels. When you get married, I’ll want the perfect wedding for you. I love you, honey. I don’t always tell you that, but I do. And I...I hope I’m wrong about your grandfather. Maybe he
has
changed.”

Were tears clogging her mother’s throat? Penelope didn’t get a chance to ask, because her mom clicked off a second later.

* * *

A
MOCKINGBIRD
SASSED
somewhere high in a poplar tree above Brandon’s head, and a squirrel jumped from branch to branch in an oak tree. Other than that, it was preternaturally quiet in the wake of Penelope’s abrupt departure.

Boundaries. It all came down to boundaries. He gazed at the fence dispassionately and thought about Robert Frost’s poem about good fences making good neighbors. How good a neighbor had he been to Penelope?

And why, since she was a Murphy, did it matter to him?

But it did. He’d wanted to go after her, put his arms around her and comfort her, swear that no one would intrude on her space again if he could help it. He’d stood there, though, feet nailed to the ground.

Should he put the fence back up? Or take it down? She hadn’t said one way or the other. He’d hurt her and, beyond the obvious breach of trust, he’d hurt her in some deep way he couldn’t understand.

His cell phone rang, and he snatched it out of his pocket, irritated.

“Brandon?” his uncle asked.

Oh, boy. Now, as if he didn’t feel enough of a total heel, Uncle Jake was going to get in on the act.

“Yes, sir?”

“If you’re at a stopping point on your so-called sneak attack on that there fence, Becca MacIntosh has some news for you. She’s up here, wants to talk.”