After the Ashes(19)

He didn’t bother to hide his disbelief. To his credit, he hadn’t interrupted her to tell her she was crazy. He let her finish first.

“You might want to try some local crops.” Like tumbleweed and dust devils.

She must have noticed the tug at the corner of his lips, because she lifted her chin slightly. “Thank you for the advice, but I’m sure the seeds I brought from home will do fine. I’m known to have a green thumb.”

He leaned on the hoe. Why bother stopping her? She was hopeless. Let her ruin her pretty hands and fry that milky white skin of hers trying to make the New Mexico desert the blue hills of Kentucky. She didn’t have enough gloves for the job. He remembered the pink satin ones she’d worn to his hotel. The soft leather she now wore was a bit more practical, but not much.

“You got a lot of gloves, don’t you?”

She neatly folded the items and tucked them in her pocket. Her sad smile made him hate the tone he’d used.

“I had a pair to match every outfit. I had to part with the gowns but my hands are too small. The gloves didn’t fit anyone else.”

He stared at her bare hands for a long while, not liking the turn of his thoughts one bit. There were a few thing he’d like her to do with those small hands, and not one of them had anything to do with farming. He studied the horizon, wishing he’d never brought the subject up in the first place.

He straightened, then took off his shirt and handed it to her. “I guess I’d better get to work if I’m going to earn my breakfast. I’m starving.”

“Oh.” Her face flushed and once she stopped staring, her gaze fluttered everywhere but on him. “Aren’t you going to burn?”

“This won’t take that long.”

“Oh,” she said to the red dirt splattered on the cream stucco wall. “I’ll call you when breakfast is ready.”

She headed around the house, her skirts and the ribbons of her bonnet sailing behind her in a trail of lavender. Lavender was the fragrance she wore, but it smelled just like Lorelei on her.

Braddock propped the hoe’s handle against his bare chest while he rubbed his hands on his thighs. A grin tugged at his face. He should probably quit thinking about the way she had watched him peel off his shirt. Still, imagining the flush on her cheeks spreading across her pale breasts made the job at hand a lot more palatable.

The first hard jolt into the soil reverberated up his arms and banished his lustful thoughts. He needed gloves but wasn’t about to destroy his one good riding pair. He adjusted his grip on the hoe and tried again. He would need a shovel to till this ground. Not that he had ever really planted anything before. Growing up, he had played around at helping in the garden at his parents’ country home, but he certainly didn’t know what he was doing. And apparently neither did Lorelei.

He should tell Lorelei her project was hopeless. But she’d just break her back doing what he refused to. The look in her eyes when she talked about her mother’s roses told him she wouldn’t give up. Experience had already shown him she was blind to what she didn’t want to see. Even when believing the impossible would be the death of her.

Braddock shielded his eyes with his palm and scanned the horizon. Still no sign of Langston. At least the man was smart enough to recognize a lost cause. Anyone who would break his back trying to hoe a desert must be either married or insane, or most likely both. Braddock had seen too many good men pour their souls into an indifferent, hostile earth with nothing to show for it but heartache and hungry mouths to feed. He’d be doing Lorelei a favor if he stopped acting like her plans had half a chance.

The rich smell of freshly brewed coffee drifted out to him. He turned but caught only a glimpse of Lorelei walking in front of an open window, then back again. A soft, breathless song followed her movements. He stood perfectly still, straining to hear what this misguided woman felt there was to sing about it. She wasn’t singing. She was was humming. Even worse. He didn’t recognize the tune but it sounded like some sort of Irish jig.

He tossed down the hoe and walked to the barn to find a shovel.

***



Lorelei patted the soft earth around her mother’s favorite rosebush. The sky blushed a peach tinted sunset, and she could almost imagine how Corey’s ranch would look when everything bloomed.

Keeping her mother’s cherished shrub alive through the dusty trip west was worth the effort. With the rock border in place around her garden, she could picture the green, heavy stalks of a summer harvest. For the first time in a very long time, she looked forward to life instead of dreading death. Not wanting painful memories to spoil her perfect day, she let her gaze drift to Braddock.