A Place to Call Home (Harlequin Heartwarming) (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

P
ENELOPE
SEETHED
as she sat between Uncle Jake on her left and Brandon on her right. Her thoughts raced.

Why did Grandpa put me in that position?

Didn’t Brandon think me capable of showing my own grandfather out?

If it were anyone but Brandon, Grandpa wouldn’t...

Brandon, for his part, let a smug smile play at the corners of his mouth. He was happy,
happy
that he’d strong-armed an old man.

If Grandpa had left when you asked him...

Uncle Jake interrupted the silence and Penelope’s tumultuous thoughts. “Got something I want to show y’all.”

“We’re running out of time, Uncle Jake,” Brandon pointed out, “especially with you driving.”

“Won’t take a minute, and it’s on the way. And then, if you’re in such an all-fired-up hurry, I’ll swap with you and you can risk body and bone. Besides, this way is almost a shortcut to the interstate.”

Five minutes later, the truck bumped down a washboard dirt road. Uncle Jake pulled to a stop at a grove of pine trees. He opened the truck door. “Well, c’mon. Y’all are in a hurry, right?”

Muttering under his breath, Brandon slid out and offered Penelope a hand. She wasn’t sure she wanted it. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted him to touch her again.

But she took the hand he offered and maneuvered her way to the ground.

“Watch that hole,” he warned and, instead of letting go, guided her around it. The contact of his skin on hers reminded her too much of their kiss. But the easy, impersonal way he let her go once the hole was negotiated hurt more.

Rounding the truck, Brandon asked, “What’s so important for us to see?”

“This here,” Uncle Jake answered. He pointed his sun-spotted hand at an old tractor, with strange metal wheels, stuck between two pine trees.

“Uncle Jake! We could have seen this anytime. I’ve seen it before,” Brandon protested.

“Ah, but you need to hear about it.”

Penelope succumbed to curiosity. “This tractor’s been here a while if two pines grew up on either side of it. That’s what happened? Someone abandoned the tractor and the pine trees grew up around it?”

“Exactly!” Jake beamed his approval, much like a teacher to a prize student. “See, this ol’ thing’s flywheel got busted. Farmer who owned it didn’t have the time or the money to fix it, so he just wound up kicking the tar out of it, which helped his frustration a smidge, but that’s ’bout all.”

Uncle Jake walked over and slid a hand along the hood of the tractor. “He could have asked his neighbors to help. But his pride got in the way, like pride is wont to do. And so first one thing and another happened. Life had a way of getting away from him, and when he finally came back to fix the tractor, these trees had grown up.”

“What did he use for a tractor?” Penelope asked. The surreal arrangement of antique tractor and two pines on either side of the driver’s seat appealed to the sculptor in her.

“Not important.” Uncle Jake waved away the question. “The important thing is—why didn’t he cut the trees down?”

She met Brandon’s gaze and saw the same aha-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that in his eyes that she was feeling.

“I give up. Why not?”

“Simple.” Now Uncle Jake patted one of the trees. “These pine trees were just doing what pine trees do—growing up. And the man realized that it was all his fault anyway. Instead of kicking the tires on the tractor, he could have dispensed with his pride and asked his neighbors for a hand. Why cut down two pine trees that didn’t mean no harm? So here it sits, this monument to human stubbornness and to how a problem ignored just gets worse. You leave something to be fixed later, and you’ll come back to see it stuck between two pine trees.”

Penelope instantly got Uncle Jake’s meaning, and from Brandon’s glum expression, she could tell he did as well. Her earlier anger dissipated. “You’re a regular Aesop, Uncle Jake.”

“I been told that.” He hitched up his overalls with more than a glimmer of pride. “Now that I’ve said my piece, let’s get y’all to that airport.”

* * *

U
NCLE
J
AKE
’
S
PARABLE
had left Brandon silent all the way down to Savannah. Penelope had attempted to draw Brandon out a couple of times, but he’d answered her questions with a distracted yes or no. Then he’d gone back to staring out at the miles of pine trees blipping by on
I-16.

When Uncle Jake had hefted her carry-on bag out from behind the truck seat, he looked as though he was going to say something to Brandon. Penelope waited, but in the end, Uncle Jake just shook Brandon’s hand, gave her a hug and bade the two of them goodbye and good luck.

They spent another near-silent forty-five minutes waiting on their flight to Atlanta. Brandon had bought them some lunch at a fast-food place, but beyond “Need some ketchup?” or “Can I get that straw for you?” he didn’t say much of anything.

It unnerved Penelope. Was this the way it was going to be the whole time?

On the airplane, he tightened his seat belt, checked it again and then glanced around. She saw more than a little panic in his expression.

“Hey.” Penelope slid her fingers through his. “Remember? Hand-holding therapy?”

Brandon squeezed her hand in response with fingers damp with sweat. “I told you I hate flying. I cannot imagine what possessed me to get on this plane.”

“It will be okay,” she assured him, deciding that now would not be the time to remind him he had at least two more plane changes ahead of him.

The plane began meandering down the taxiway, then made the turn and started gathering speed for takeoff. Brandon shut his eyes tightly.

“It’s worse if you have your eyes closed,” she whispered. “Just look at me.”

And he did. Though his hand was still damp and his jaw was clenched tight, he gave Penelope a level stare. She smiled at him, and he returned a green-around-the-gills grin. The plane grabbed at air, bounced with turbulence that Penelope would never have noticed if Brandon hadn’t been so nervous beside her. His gaze darted around wildly.

Penelope reached up and touched a finger to his chin. It brought his attention back to her. “Hey, trust me,” she whispered. “The worst part’s almost over.”

“Uh, if you say so.”

Then the ascent smoothed out, though the climb was still steep. Brandon’s breathing eased and his death grip on her hand slackened.

“Feel better?” she asked.

“Amazingly enough, I do.”

“Good!” Impulsively she pressed a kiss to his jaw, which made him jump.

“I’m sorry.” Penelope drew back.

But he held on to her hand and laid his other one on top of hers. “No. It’s fine. It surprised me, that’s all. I’m a nervous wreck from this flying business. I must have completely missed out on Uncle Jake’s genes.”

“His genes? I don’t understand.”

“You didn’t know? He flew a fighter plane in World War II, loved flying. He was offered a job flying for an airline when he came home. But he loved farming even more than flying.”

He frowned and stared down at his knees, which were jammed into the tight space coach afforded them. Penelope patted the knee closest to her with her free hand. “I like your uncle. He’s unexpected, in a lot of ways. That country-bumpkin act is a mask, isn’t it? His send-off was much better than my grandfather’s. I’m sorry you felt you had to get involved.”

He raised his gaze back up to meet hers. “I suppose I should apologize. Murphy didn’t look as though he was going to listen to you. It made me mad, him not respecting you enough to—”

Whatever he would have said, he didn’t finish. Brandon abruptly said, “Let’s forget it all. The land, Murphy, the fence, every bad word you and I have ever said to each other. For this trip. Let’s just have a good time.”

She waited for him to explain the sudden truce he offered. When he didn’t, she nodded and smiled. “Sounds good to me.”

* * *

T
HEY
LANDED
in Portland in a steady downpour that Penelope had trouble negotiating in her economy rental car. The headlights illuminated a dark city just saying goodbye to another fall day of rain. Penelope missed the sunshine and blue skies she’d left behind in Georgia.

“So we’re, what, driving over to the coast tonight?” Brandon asked.

“Yeah, it’s still—how do you Georgia boys put it? A ways away?” She cast him a quick smile. “Like I said, I couldn’t get us a later flight out tomorrow, so I decided we do this now. I wanted you to see the Pacific.”

“And how do we get to Bend?” Brandon shifted in the tight confines of the Corolla. “We’re driving?”

“No. I was going to, but my worrywart mother thinks we wouldn’t get there in time for the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night. Something about bad weather over the mountains. So we’ll stay at my grandmother’s tonight, then head back here to Portland to catch a flight to Redmond.”

“Oh, joy. More planes. If there’s supposed to be bad weather, wouldn’t we be safer with our feet on the ground?”

Penelope laughed. “Obviously you haven’t driven along a mountain pass in bad weather.”

“My gut is telling me to avoid any plane if at all possible, but I defer to your judgment. I’d hate to get stuck in a blizzard in the mountains.”

“Wouldn’t be a blizzard, not this time of year. Well, I guess anything’s possible. But still it can be nasty.”

Brandon yawned and leaned back against the headrest. The yawn reminded Penelope of how tired she was. “So your grandmother. Is this Murphy’s ex-wife?”

She jumped at Brandon’s mention of her grandfather and felt a swirling amalgam of guilt and irritation when she recalled how she’d left Grandpa Murphy.

Penelope shook her head. “No, Granny Lou lives near my parents in Bend. You’ll see her at the wedding. And actually, Grams—my dad’s mom—doesn’t live in her house anymore. She’s in a retirement home in Bend. But she still has the house in Tillamook, and we can stay there. If you don’t mind.”

“Hey, I’m just along for the ride. What’s she like, anyway? Do you take after her?”

“You’d like her. She’s a lot like Uncle Jake—full of stories that always have a moral. She and my grandfather ran a farm for years, until he passed away. It’s beautiful.”

“Yeah? She farms? And you didn’t inherit her green thumb?” Brandon teased.

“It was a dairy farm. Milk cows, now, I know a little something about. And butter and cheese. But growing stuff beyond my vegetable patch? Nada.” She laughed. “A total dunce when it comes to planting for market. I think that’s what’s so interesting about seeing you farm my land—how you tend it, coax things to life on it. Those strawberries, you’ve put a lot of work into them.”

Brandon was silent. A look his way told her that he was back to staring out the window. What had she said to plunge him back into moodiness?

“It’s hard for me to think of it as your land,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“You said, ‘seeing you farm my land.’ I’ve always seen it as my uncle’s and—maybe, one day in the hopefully very distant future—mine.” Brandon turned back to her. “I know, I said no talk about any of that. But it’s never far from my mind.”

“You’re never going to see the loss of it as anything but my grandfather’s fault, are you?” Penelope tightened her grip on the wheel.

“No. I’m sorry, Penelope. But no, I’ll always blame Murphy.”

And then Brandon went back to staring out the window.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T
HE
RAIN
HAD
SLOWED
to a drizzle by the time they’d made the long drive across to Tillamook and out to Penelope’s grandmother’s farm. For the most part, Brandon had feigned sleep as a way to avoid having to talk with her. And to get a chance to think.

Now, as the car slowed, he sat up and peered through the evening’s darkness. He could see a gate blocking the driveway and a paint-peeled Langston Dairies sign on the fence beside it.

“Need me to get out and open the gate?” he offered.

He must have startled her, because she jumped. Penelope gave him a decidedly unfriendly look. “It’s a combination lock, and a stubborn one at that. I’ll probably have more luck with it.” She reached in the backseat and got her yellow rain slicker. Then without another word, she pushed open the car door and slammed it behind her.

Brandon watched her in the beam of the headlights as she bent over the lock, rain drizzling down on her. At first, he swallowed his discomfort and his natural inclination to help a woman out.

As the minutes wore on and Penelope seemed to have no success with the lock, the urge to step in became harder to ignore.

When he opened the car door, Penelope lifted her head. “Wait in the car!” she called. “I’ve almost got it!”

Brandon hesitated for a moment more. Then he yanked the thin poncho he’d bought at the airport over his head and sprinted for the gate. “Here, you’re getting soaked.”

She looked up at him, eyes blazing. “I said I could get it!”

“What’s the big deal, me helping you?”

“Maybe I don’t want to take any more help from you. Or maybe I’m insulted that, once again, you think I need rescuing.”

“But you do.”

“No!” She dropped the lock, which banged against the metal gate, and straightened. The hood of her slicker fell back, leaving her dark hair uncovered. When Brandon tried to put it back on her, she blocked him. “Don’t pretend to be nice to me, Brandon, not after giving me the silent treatment the whole car ride over here. Your niceness is...I don’t know, Southern manners, a reflex, because you must not trust me or like me. I don’t even know why you came along for this trip. I don’t know why I wanted to show you the ocean.”

“And if you hadn’t wanted to, we wouldn’t be standing out here in the rain, arguing over who’s going to figure out the lock,” Brandon told her. “You’d be in your nice warm bed in Bend by now.”

“Which is where I should be!” She turned back to work on the lock. “
Arrgh!
Why won’t this combination work?”

“Are you sure you’ve got the—”

“Yes, I’m sure. If you want to be useful, go get the flashlight I keep on my key chain. I think my keys are in the console of the car.”

He backtracked to the car through the mud and got the flashlight. Back by her side, he held it over the lock’s face and yanked it back when she would have grabbed for it.

“How are you going to hold the light if you’ve got both hands on the lock?”

“With my teeth, of course.”

“Okay, so you’ve proved that you’re superhero tough. Can we just get this lock undone? I’m tired and wet and cranky.”

Penelope glared at him. “
I
didn’t ask
you
to get out in the rain, so don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.”

She didn’t seem to expect an answer, and he didn’t give her one. The rain pelted him on the back, cold and hard through the cheap poncho, as he held the flashlight. Watching her fiddle with the lock was killing him by inches.

He gritted his teeth and held the light and got soaked for his trouble. But then, like the sun parting the clouds after days of rain, Penelope smiled. The lock popped open in her hands. She looked up at him in complete, childlike wonderment.

“I did it! I actually got it!”

Even though he was soaked to the skin, he couldn’t help smiling back. “So you did. Now, will you accept a little help to get this gate open? It looks as though it’s on the heavy side.”

Her smile didn’t dim.

Together they pushed the gate back, then dashed for the car.

Now, aided by a dim security light, Brandon could see the house take shape in the darkness as Penelope drove. He squinted for a better look. Two-story clapboard, stark and plain, in a yard that looked maintained but lacked that extra something indicating someone’s TLC.

He reached into the backseat for his garment bag and Penelope’s overnighter. The thing weighed a ton, but he bit back any complaint. Otherwise, she’d start a whole new argument over who was going to get her bag.

Thankfully the house proved far less of a challenge to get into than the gate had been and Penelope had them in out of the rain before they got any wetter.

She flipped on the lights as she went, revealing a house that was comfortable in a sensible sort of way. Brandon could see gaps in the furniture and on the walls. He hazarded a guess that the best pieces were in someone else’s home now.

“Mom said she had the caretaker leave us some bread and milk, basics for breakfast, but if you want anything beyond that, we’ll have to forage in town.”

Brandon glanced out the window, where the rain was coming down in sheets now. “Nah. That last burger we grabbed at the airport will do me.”

“Okay, kitchen’s that way, the satellite’s cut off, so no TV. Bedrooms are upstairs.” Penelope reached for her bag, but Brandon gripped it tighter.

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I know how heavy that thing was this morning. You want to be my bellboy, that’s okay by me.” She led the way upstairs.

Halfway up, Brandon spotted a child’s crayon drawing on the wainscoting, carefully framed with picture molding. He stopped to examine it: a typical kid-scene of a house and cows and a family, made untypical by the energy of the colors and something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. In smaller marker-print at the bottom right, an adult had added, “Penelope, age four.”

He called after her, “You did this?”

Penelope halted at the top landing. “What? Oh, that. Yeah. I can’t think why Grams never bothered to paint over it.”

“You’ve always been an artist, then.”

The observation seemed to catch her unawares. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Brandon turned back to the picture.

The house in the picture was obviously this house, and the picture was scribbled directly on the wall. Uncle Jake or his mom would have skinned him alive if he’d colored on walls. But someone—her grandmother, maybe—had thought enough of Penelope’s talent to cherish it and nourish it.

“It’s really good for a four-year-old. I was still doing scribbles then.” Brandon realized too late that he was speaking to empty air. Penelope had vanished.

He took the stairs two at a time and headed for the door that was open and the sniffle that was coming from it. Brandon found her sitting on the bed, her face screwed up in an effort not to bawl.

“Hey, what’d I—” He dropped the overnight bag by the door and the garment bag on the bed and knelt in front of her. “Did I say something?”

Penelope shook her head in an abrupt jerk. “I—I’m tired, I think. And Grams isn’t getting any younger. Maybe I’m banging my head against a brick wall. But she—she’s always believed in me, you know? She was the one who gave me part of the money for the house, said it was an investment. In my career. She’s always...”

“But you’ve never mentioned her. You always said ‘the bank.’”

“I did borrow money from the bank. But Grams loaned me money, too, so I didn’t have to borrow quite so much at such a high interest rate. Why? What difference does it make?”

Brandon sat back on his heels, trying to suss that out for himself. It did make a difference, somehow.

Penelope chewed on her thumbnail and stared off into the distance. “I hope Mom hasn’t told her I lost the commission. She’d be so disappointed that I’m welding farm implements for a living.”

He slid a palm against her cheek. Dark ringlets, still damp, brushed against the back of his hand. “If she’s the kind of grandmother who framed a four-year-old’s scribbles on a wall, she wouldn’t. She’d be proud of you for finding a way to make your dream a reality.”

Penelope pulled away from him. “Why am I telling you all this? If I fail, you win. You get to pick up the land for a song. Half the time, I suspect all your politeness and good manners are just a salve to ease your guilt. I think that’s why you’re so kind to me, when you
are.
”

“That’s not true. I’m kind to you because I want to be.” That wasn’t strictly true. He hadn’t been kind very often, and when he was, it was in spite of
not
wanting to be.

“I could believe that. I could. Except for the way you talk about Grandpa.”

He laid a finger against her lips. “Shh. Don’t. I’ve already made that mistake tonight. I’m starting fresh with my promise. Let’s pretend the world ends at Oregon’s state line. Just for tonight.”

“But we can’t, can we?” Penelope started to stand, but he pulled her back down.

“I can try. We have our moments,” Brandon said.

“We do. But I can’t take it, Brandon. I can’t take the guilt that comes from enjoying being around you. Simply being here with you feels like I’m a traitor to—”

“The promise?” he interrupted.

She made a sound in the back of her throat and closed her eyes. “Silly. This is silly.”

He ran his hands along her arms, up to her shoulders, along the graceful arc her neck made, and into her curls. Brandon pressed his mouth to her temple, slid his lips down along her cheek. She turned her mouth into his kiss, her lips searching his out. He kissed her and drew back.

Penelope looked up and met his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but this time she was the one who silenced him with a finger to his lips. No, there’d be no more talking, no risk of hurt feelings or wounded pride. For them, it seemed, Penelope had decided the world did end at the Oregon state line.

Brandon kissed her finger, opened her palm and pressed a kiss there, too. He saw those hands of hers in a million different memories—building her barn, petting Theo, welding his tractor for him, holding his hand on the airplane.

Without saying a word, he released her hand, slipped her raincoat off her shoulders and tossed it aside.

He kissed away one last tear tracking down her face, followed it as it slid down her cheek to her jaw. She leaned into him as he pressed his lips to hers again.

“You’re sure we can forget about Georgia for a while?” Brandon whispered.

She nodded, the very slightest dip of her head.

Penelope drew a fingertip along his face. “The question is,” she whispered, not taking her eyes off him, “are you?”

Brandon swallowed the guilt. “I want to.” There, that was honest. But did that honesty go far enough? Could he really keep that promise? He captured her fingers in his, opened her hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. He looked up, met her steady questioning gaze. “For you, I’d want to forget every bad thing in the world. And for now, for this trip, I’ll give you my very best effort.”

She closed her fingers tightly against her palm, as if she were holding onto his kiss. “Okay. I believe you. And I’ll try, too. Now beat it, buster. I want to show you the Pacific tomorrow.”

The warmth of Penelope’s smile speared into him, making him ache to be able to forget Murphy and the farm. He would try. He owed the both of them that much.