The Sugar House Page 14

  “Thanks, Charlie.” Strangely relieved by what passed for the man’s acceptance of his presence, Jack couldn’t help smiling himself. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “You bet you will,” he replied, looking up the hill at all the acres they still had to cover. “Rather be workin’ outside than sittin’ cooped up in. Never should have let my son talk me into selling the farm and movin’ in with his family,” he muttered. “Man can’t be happy with nothin’ to do any more than he can be happy having nothin’ to do but work.”

  Giving the collar of his insulated suit another tug to ward off the cold, he turned to snowshoe his way toward Emmy’s house, where he’d left his transportation. As he did, Jack felt his own brow pinch. He had no time to wonder at the man’s grumbling, though. Since the sun had dropped behind the hills, the temperature had dropped right with it.

  Emmy had already returned to her task. With the pale light fading, he needed to return to his, if for no other reason than to keep himself warm.

  They had checked the ice-coated main line first and found it broken a hundred yards up the hill. While Charlie and Emmy cracked ice away and repaired that line, he had continued on up, found another break for them to fix, then started checking the maze of lines in the section leading into it.

  Fallen branches had taken down some of clear lateral tubing in places. Other trees had lines that had been pulled away by the weight of the ice. The good news was that not every tree or line had been damaged. But then, Emmy probably had close to fifteen hundred trees on her land and he had barely checked a dozen.

  They’d hadn’t even covered half an acre. With nineteen and a half acres yet to go, he could only imagine how daunted Emmy had to feel by what lay ahead of her. The thought that she would be tackling the job with only the help of a rather disgruntled old man had him diligently moving on to the next tree. He suspected it would never occur to her to give up, though. So far she hadn’t even balked. Shying from a task or responsibility simply wasn’t her nature.

  It apparently wasn’t her nature, either, to let a challenge go undefended when she felt that challenge was wrong. Her defense of her father when he’d told her of his affair had been swift and immediate. Considering how she’d felt about her dad, he’d pretty much expected her reaction. What he hadn’t expected was the way she’d stepped between him and Joe Sheldon. Literally. Even when he’d pulled her back, she stepped right in again, as determined as a mother bear protecting her cub.

  He still couldn’t believe she’d done that.

  He glanced toward where she waded through the snow, checking each inch of the line on her way to the next tree. She’d barely taken a break since they’d started that morning. She would have to soon, though. With the light now a dusky gray, he figured they only had another ten minutes before they had to quit.

  Emmy figured fifteen—though she would have worked in the sugar bush through the night, had it been possible to work in the dark. It had taken so long to repair the main line that they’d barely started checking the others.

  Intent on those repairs, she’d disregarded the fact that she’d started shoveling snow at eight o’clock that morning. She hadn’t allowed herself to focus on the fatigue starting to pull at her, or on how much work there was to be done. As she did with anything she had to get through, she’d focused only on doing it. One tree at a time. One line at a time.

  The temperature had dropped back below freezing, turning her fingers numb inside the thin gloves she wore because it was too hard to work with the narrow tubing in thick ones. From the way Jack had zipped his parka to his throat, she knew he felt the cold, too. His undershirt and turtleneck were still draped over the chair in her kitchen, and he’d spent more time with his gloves off than on.

  He’d worked even longer than she had. He’d been shoveling snow that morning even as she’d climbed out of bed.

  As if he’d felt her watching him, he looked across the swath of snow separating them and nodded in the direction of the sugar house. Reluctantly she nodded back and watched him grab the rope on the sled holding their supplies to take it back with them. The wildlife had a good enough time gnawing on the lines without leaving a roll of it for them to turn into a chew toy.

  The light of the bright half-moon rising over the hill relieved the encroaching darkness as they made their way through the trees to the sugar house. While Jack pulled the sled inside to store it overnight, Emmy checked the gauge on the tank with her flashlight.

  Jack knew the moment he saw her expression in that pale circle of light that there wasn’t enough sap to make it worth firing up the arch.

  “The temperature had already started to fall before you got the main line repaired,” Jack reminded her. It was also possible that there were too many breaks in the smaller lines to get sap to the main one, he thought. There just didn’t seem to be any point to mentioning what she already knew and was probably already worrying about.

  “Come on,” he coaxed, taking her hand to lead her to the door. Personally, he wasn’t the least disappointed that they didn’t have to spend the next heaven-only-knew-how-long boiling and bottling syrup, then boiling water to clean everything up. He was tired. He was hungry. “Let’s get to the house.” With her hand in his, he felt her shiver. “You’re cold.”

  “You must be, too. Half of your clothes are in the house.”

  “So, get the fire going when we get there. I’ll stay outside with Rudy while he does his thing, then bring in more wood.”

  Emmy had given up on telling him he didn’t need to help her. She had no intention of reverting at the moment, either. She hadn’t realized how much it could mean to have someone anticipate what she might need, or to share chores she normally tackled on her own. Jack had been doing it all day. And all day she had been enormously grateful he was there.

  Since the battery on the house generator refused to hold a charge, she needed to buy a new one. Unable to buy a new one until the roads were open, they remained at the mercy of flashlights, oil lamps, the woodstove and the living room fireplace. After stoking the woodstove and putting the chowder she’d taken from the freezer that morning on to heat, Emmy headed into the living room to start a fire in there. Between the two heat sources, the house would soon be warm enough to walk around in without shivering.

  Flames had just leaped from tinder to logs when she heard Jack walk up behind her. “Rudy’s food dish was empty so I filled it. He’s got his nose in it and his tail’s wagging.”

  A faint smile tugged at her mouth as she turned where she sat on the hearth. “He hates being cooped up in the house when I’m outside.”

  “I have the feeling he does just fine in here on his own. The stove kept the kitchen warm. He has his bed and his toys.” Tugging the denim at the top of his knees, he crouched in front of her. “How about you?” he asked, searching her face in the growing firelight. “How are you doing?”

  She could have said she was fine. It was what she would have said to anyone else who might have asked, because it wouldn’t do any good to admit that she was feeling a tad panicked at the prospect of losing her production. But Jack already knew she was worried. She could tell by the way he watched her.

  “I’m just glad it isn’t worse. And it could have been,” she told him, truly grateful for all that had been left unharmed. “The ice storm of ’98 lasted for days. The ice was so heavy no one could even get into their sugar bush to make repairs. The damage out there isn’t nearly as bad.”

  Jack reached for her hands. He didn’t know too many people who would have considered the state of her sugar bush and looked at what hadn’t happened rather than all that had.

  “Then, come on.” He tugged her up, drawn by her dauntless spirit, pushed by a need for food. “If I’m going back out there in the morning, you need to feed me. Let’s eat in here. It’ll be warm by the fire.” Her hands felt like Popsicles in his. They felt small, too, and soft despite the cold, their bones fragile beneath the brush of his thumb over her wr
ist.

  The feel of her skin against his reminded him of a hunger of a different sort. As tired and vulnerable as she looked, as easily as she allowed his touch, it would be so easy to draw her hands around his neck—and pick up where they’d left off that morning in the hallway.

  Since his reasons for letting her go that morning hadn’t changed, he ignored the stirring in his body and reluctantly let her go again. Wanting a distraction, he picked up the brass hurricane lamps she’d left on the coffee table and headed for the fireplace to light their candles. “You can tell me about Charlie.”

  As if conscious of his thoughts, or maybe remembering those moments in the hall herself, she quickly turned to clear the rest of the table. “What about him?”

  “He mentioned something about having let his son talk him into selling his maple farm.” He had also mentioned that a man wasn’t any happier with too much time on his hands than he was having no time at all. Jack figured he fit pretty well into that last category himself. He’d just never thought of himself as that unhappy. Certainly not as unhappy as Charlie seemed to be. “Why did he do that?”

  Emmy put everything from the table back on the unfinished mantel, telling him as she did that Charlie had done it because he hadn’t thought he’d had any other choice at the time. On the way into the kitchen to put bread in foil and heat it on the woodstove, she explained that Charlie had needed a hip replaced a few years ago but had balked at the surgery.

  It got to where keeping up the fifty acres of land became too much for him with a bad hip, she confided, heating milk for cocoa. Since his son, Mark, who taught and coached at the high school couldn’t help him, Mark and Mark’s wife had talked the Moorehouses into selling the farm and moving in with them because they were closer to the center of the community. The Moorehouses sold the operation and their home to the oldest Bruner boy who’d recently married and wanted a big sugaring operation of his own. The one his carpenter father ran was more of a hobby farm and nowhere near large enough to support a family.

  “So what happened?” Jack asked as she dished up their bowls of chowder and they carried them and the rest of their supper back to the warmth of the blazing fire. “I noticed a little limp, but he gets around like a man half his age.”

  Watching him absently scratch Rudy’s ear when her dog curled up under the table, Emmy sat down on the sofa beside him and handed him the bread she’d wrapped in a plaid cloth napkin.

  “The limp is from his gout. The bad hip was on the other side. He finally had it replaced after he fell off a ladder because it gave out on him.”

  “What was he doing on a ladder?”

  “Picking apples,” she replied, sounding as if that were simply Charlie. “He didn’t break anything, but he could have. He said Mrs. Moorehouse made him so miserable telling him how miserable he was going to be if he couldn’t get around at all that he finally gave in and had the operation. He says now he wishes he’d done it ten years ago. Then he’d still have his farm.”

  Her mug sat on the table in front of her. As she reached for it, Jack studied the lines of her pretty profile. She was easy to look at, easy to listen to. When the past wasn’t interfering, he was also finding her easy to be with.

  “Why didn’t he do it sooner?”

  The golden light of the fire seemed to catch in her hair when she glanced toward him. “You should know that. You lived here.” She spoke the reminder as he leaned forward to spoon up a steaming chunk of potato. “There are still a lot of people around who don’t trust anything they haven’t lived with pretty near all their lives. Especially the older ones. To them, modern is ‘newfangled,’ and anything like that takes a long time to get used to. It took him a decade to get used to the idea of walking around with a bionic body part.”

  “You’ve lived here all your life, but you’re not that way.” Between bites of the warm and welcome meal, Jack considered her reliance on her computers and the updated sugaring equipment she would buy when she could afford it. “You don’t sound much like the other locals who were born here, either.”

  He knew for a fact that he’d never heard her use newfangled before, and she’d didn’t tend to drop her gs from her ings the way many of the older folk around there did.

  He’d actually worked hard on that one himself. Nothing set a person apart to a flatlander like the dialect and colloquialisms of the rural country. As important as it was to preserve those regionalisms, it had taken him only a few weeks after they’d left Maple Mountain to realize that in college and in business, he would get farther faster if he sounded like the talking heads on network television news.

  He wondered if that was who she’d studied, too.

  “I don’t mind if visitors think Maple Mountain or my B and B is quaint,” she admitted, dipping into chowder herself. “I even play up that aspect for business. I just don’t want the people I do business with to think I am.

  “Here,” she said, handing him more bread since his was already gone.

  Absently thanking her as he took it, he slid her a sideways glance, told her that quaint wasn’t a word he would ever use to describe her, and turned back to his supper.

  Curious about the absolute certainty in his voice, she wanted to know how he would describe her, then canceled the thought when she considered his basis for comparison. Doing what he did for a living, the women he worked and socialized with were undoubtedly smart, savvy and far more sophisticated than she could ever hope to be. Sitting in the middle of her “quaint” little house, looking like something the cat had dragged in and grown bored with, she decided there were some things she was probably better off not knowing. At least not just then.

  She focused instead on the fact that Jack’s bowl was almost empty. The sandwich she’d hurriedly thrown together for him for lunch had probably worn off hours ago.

  She brought him more chowder, poured more cocoa. He had worked hard. They all had. But Jack had been the one to move the heaviest branches, the one to clear away the deepest snow, the one who’d pitched in as if there had never been any question about whether or not he would help.

  He needed a stocking cap, she thought as she returned to her supper, thinking of how chilly it would be in the morning. She’d already asked Charlie if Jack could borrow a pair of snow pants to help insulate him from the morning and evening cold, but she should have Jack leave his jeans and socks outside his door tonight so she could wash them and leave them by the woodstove to dry overnight.

  It was the least she could do. Except, possibly, to tell him how much she appreciated his help.

  With her hands wrapped around her mug, she murmured, “Thank you, Jack.”

  He leaned back from his now empty bowl. “For what?”

  “For all you did today. I don’t know what Charlie and I would have done without your help.”

  He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, reached for his own mug. “Less.”

  “I mean it,” she murmured, unwilling to let him minimize his contribution. “I’d still be out there shoveling snow from the sugar house and hauling in wood if it hadn’t been for you. We wouldn’t have made it into the sugar bush at all.”

  “You’d have checked the sugar bush when Charlie got here.”

  “I need to be ready to boil when the tank fills. It wouldn’t do any good to repair lines and have the tank fill if I can’t get in to boil it.”

  “So, it’s a chicken-or-egg thing? What…?” he asked, when she looked at him as if he’d just turned as dense as the sugar bush in September.

  “I’m trying to thank you,” she explained, not sure he’d caught that. “I’m glad you’re here, Jack. I really appreciate all you did today.”

  She was glad he was there.

  At her quiet admission, Jack skimmed back a strand of hair that had long ago loosened itself from the piece of gathered green fabric holding her windblown ponytail. She allowed his touch as easily as she had when he’d taken her hands before. She would allow his kiss, too, he thought, trailing his fi
nger along her jaw. He could see it in her eyes when they met his once more.

  “I’m glad I’m here, too,” he told her, and avoided the temptation of her lovely mouth the only way he could think of without leaving the room.

  Setting down both their mugs, he took her by the shoulders as he leaned back against the corner of the sofa. Coaxing her toward him, he tucked her back to his chest and folded his arms around her. He was glad he was there, he thought, liking the way she relaxed against him. He had actually enjoyed the mind-clearing physical labor the day had brought, too. It had given him something productive to do after the local law enforcement had jerked around with his blood pressure. “So, you’re welcome. And thank you, too.”

  Her voice sounded as quiet as the crackle of the fire gleaming off the table’s dark, shining wood. “For what?”

  He focused on the comfort of that fire, the warmth that had taken the chill from the room, his bones, and the feel of her resting so trustingly against him. Even thinking about how well her slender little body fit his seemed safer than thinking too much about what she’d done. He didn’t want it to matter as much as it did. “For what you said to Joe.”

  “Oh,” she murmured, and apparently decided to let it go at that.

  He thought about asking why she’d done it, but he had the feeling she didn’t want to look too closely at her obvious defense of him. He just hoped that what she’d done wouldn’t cause her any trouble.

  Not sure how he’d straighten the situation out if it did, thinking he’d worry about that later, he murmured, “Say ‘you’re welcome.’”

  A small smile slipped into her voice. “You’re welcome,” she murmured.

  The temptation to kiss her grew stronger. The thought that she had come so willingly into his arms made it grow stronger still. But his sense of fair play battled the desire stirring in his blood. If he kissed her, he wouldn’t want to stop, and he wasn’t prepared to deal with any more uncomfortable feelings where she was concerned.