Not on Her Own

“Thank you.”

“I would have called…but I couldn’t find a listing for you.”

“I haven’t bothered with a landline yet. I have a cell phone.”

“You really need a landline. Our E-911 system doesn’t pick up the location of cell phones. A woman like yourself, living alone out here…” Brandon trailed off. His attention dropped to her bare left hand. “I mean, I guess you’re living alone out here.”

Was the deputy trying to hit on her? She suppressed a smile. “It’s just me and Theo.”

“Theo?”

“My cat.” She pointed to the window. “The Siamese?”

Brandon’s gaze followed her gesture toward the long and lanky white cat peering out the windowpane.

“That’s a Siamese?” he asked. “I thought they were brown.”

“Flame-point. They’re white, with apricot ears and paws and tail. Everything you’ve heard about Siamese? Well, multiply that by ten and you’ve got your typical flame-point.”

One of Brandon’s eyebrows arched. “He doesn’t seem to think too much of me.”

“It’s me he’s mad at. I’ve had to keep him cooped up until I could get the windows fixed. Now he’s got the run of the house and he’s plotting his escape back to New York.”

“New York? I thought you said you were from Oregon?” Brandon treated her to intense cop-like scrutiny. What was this, an interrogation? Did he think she was lying?

“I grew up in Portland, moved to Bend when I was a teenager. But New York was my latest stop.” She retrieved the putty knife and scraped the blade against the ladder. “Here.” She handed it to him. “Since you’re here and you offered, I’ll take you up on it. Can you do me a favor and clean the rest of that putty along the top edge?”

Brandon hesitated before agreeing and clambering up the ladder. The move let Penelope see that his jeans fitted snug over a well-formed backside. The faded denim was as much an improvement over his browns as the T-shirt. “I’m kind of surprised you got the house set down on a foundation so quick,” he observed as he deftly wielded the putty knife.

Hmm…skills and looks. Not a bad combo, not bad at all, she thought.

“It was part of the bargain with the movers. They’re the ones who put me in touch with a roofer. Once you move a house, the roof has to be replaced as soon as possible, and this one especially. The whole interior has hardwood floors. I didn’t want them damaged.”

Back down on the ground, Brandon inspected his work and was apparently satisfied. “So the house was what? Built in the thirties? Forties?”

“Mid-thirties, despite the Depression. Want to take a look inside?” For a moment, Penelope couldn’t believe she’d offered. He was a complete stranger. And a big one at that.

But her gut told her this guy was okay. Open, honest face. Nice brown eyes. A lot of smile lines.

“Sure,” he told her.

Inside, Penelope pushed away doubts, say, thoughts of how harmless Ted Bundy had looked to his victims, as she showed Brandon through the house.

They ended in the dinky kitchen with its 1960s atrocity of a kitchen-remodel. Brandon stared, his uncertainty about what to say plain on his face.

“It’ll get better. I’ll rip out the cabinets, restore a lot of the old look,” she rushed to assure him.

“It’s…the whole house is…rough,” he said finally.

“Yeah. But it’s got great bones.”

“And you’re planning on doing this yourself? You must be handy with a hammer.”

Brandon Wilkes scored more points with Penelope because his expression was one of admiration; not a drop of disbelief or condescension tempered it.

“I know my way around a toolbox. It’s the big stuff that’s hard for me. I know how to do it, but when you’re a shrimp like me…”

He didn’t even offer a short joke. Another point.

“Well, I’ll be glad to offer some free labor if you need it. Let me know. If I can’t, I’ll point you in the right direction.”

“Great! Maybe you could suggest someone who could help put up a barn or a shelter?”

He frowned. “Like a pole barn?”

“Pole barn?”

“Yeah, just a barn with poles for framing and then the exterior sheathing is fastened to them. Usually has a metal roof.”

“Sounds about right. How tall can they be?”

“How tall do you need it?”

“Um…” She did some mental calculations. “Twenty feet at least, plus any extra I could get from the pitch of the roof.”

“Whoa. What are you putting in there?”

“My work. I’m an artist. A sculptor. I do outside sculptures for businesses and corporations.”

“You mean, like statues and stuff?”

“Uh…not exactly.” Penelope opened the flap of a cardboard box still waiting to be unpacked on one of the dingy Formica countertops. She pulled out a small model of her latest project. “Like this.”

Brandon stared at it, the same befuddled expression on his face that he’d had when he’d tried to think of something to say about the kitchen. After a long moment, he blurted, “What is it?”

Penelope slid a finger along the narrow ribbons of stainless steel. “I call it Love at Infinity. See the infinity symbol here? And how it wraps around these two vertical pieces?”

Brandon pointed to the highly polished surface. “There? Yeah, I see the infinity symbol. And the wavy vertical lines are supposed to be, what?” He screwed up his face as he examined the piece.

Penelope laughed at his underwhelmed expression. “You’re not a fan of abstract art, are you? Those two pieces represent man and woman.”

“Doesn’t look much like a man or a woman to me, but…” Brandon shrugged. “I don’t know much about art. So you’ll build this bigger?”

“Much bigger. This tall section here tops out at just under twenty feet.”

“And people actually buy things like this?”

Penelope chose to let his comment slide. What had she expected anyway? He was a completely different breed from the usual artsy crowd she ran with. “Yes, yes, they do. Matter of fact, the commission for this one will bring me fifty thousand dollars.”

Brandon whistled. “That’s a lot of money for three pieces of stainless steel.”

“Not just any three pieces of stainless steel. You have to know how to build it.”

“And have somewhere to build it. I don’t think a pole barn would work. Not tall enough. But I’ll be thinking. Where do you plan to put the barn?”

“Out behind the house. Maybe with big sliding doors on casters or wheels. It won’t look right with the house, but…” Penelope shrugged and set the sculpture down. “My work’s what pays for the house, and I’ve got to have a studio. So I guess I can’t complain.”

“You know, this kind of house looks out of place in the middle of a field.”

The comment took her by surprise, for one, that he would understand the aesthetics of a bungalow and its setting. For another, the sudden change in topic. “Well, yes, I guess so,” Penelope said. “But I couldn’t afford to be picky. Besides, I’ll plant some fast-growing trees, and in a few years, it won’t look the same.”

She could have sworn he winced. What was so bad about trees?

“You know…I was planning—” Brandon started, then broke off.

Penelope waited him out. He started again. “At one point, this land belonged to my uncle. Well, to me and my uncle. Did you know that?”

“No. No, I wasn’t aware of that.” She folded her arms and waited some more. Alarm bells sounded in her head.

“Yeah. Murphy—your grandfather—I don’t know how to put this politely. But he and his brother-in-law hatched up a tax scheme to put a squeeze on Uncle Jake, and my uncle was forced to sell this section of his land.”

“Really.” Didn’t sound a bit like the story Grandpa had told her. Penelope’s thoughts raced as she tried to predict where Brandon was going with this conversation.

“Yeah. Really.” A sharp edge bit at Brandon’s words. “This land—where you’ve got your house sitting—it’s the best cropland of the whole tract…of Uncle Jake’s old tract, I mean.”

“Uh-huh.” What was this guy’s agenda? Maybe her gut had steered her wrong after all.

Brandon rubbed his hands together, shuffled his feet on the scratched finish of the hardwood floor.

“I was…I came here today to see if you’d be up to making a trade. This plot of land for another. The one I had in mind is a much better site for the house. It’s got maples and sweetgums, lots of shade for the summer.”

“But I’ve already got the—”

“And we could, um, throw in the cost of moving the house…and maybe, the foundation. The cost of moving it shouldn’t be that much.”

She’d been wrong. This guy was a nut, albeit a cute one. He actually thought—

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, yeah. I’m inclined to that way of thinking…or that maybe there’s some sort of treasure buried here.”

His face heated up. “Nope. No treasure. This—it’s only that I’m more than a little attached to this land. Maybe it’s just that it is such good land. Or maybe it’s because of the way my uncle lost it. I don’t know.”

“I’m really sorry. I can’t imagine how you must feel…but I’m really happy with my land. And I don’t even want to think about moving this house again. I’ve got two months to get my sculpture built and delivered.”

Brandon looked as though he might argue. Then his jaw tightened and he stuffed his hands in his back pockets. He stood there for a long moment before moving stiffly toward the door leading to the hall.

“Well. Guess it was worth a shot. Though why I ever thought any granddaughter of Murphy would understand where I was coming from…”

She heard his footsteps echo off the empty rooms, and then the front door shut with a loud thud.

CHAPTER THREE

“T OLD YOU that girl was moving fast. Here, have some more rice and peas.”

Before Brandon could stop Uncle Jake, the man had dumped a clump of sticky rice and some field peas onto Brandon’s chipped stoneware plate. A cook Uncle Jake most definitely wasn’t, not that he could afford better food.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been busy these past couple of weeks, Uncle Jake. Not only have I been working my regular nightshift, but we’re short during the day, too.” Brandon tried but failed to keep the defensive note out of his voice. If only he’d come up with the land swap idea sooner, before she’d re-roofed the place, maybe then she’d have been more receptive.

“I know. You’re always busy. That sheriff of ours keeps you bustin’ your chops. Hardly ever see you these days.”

Uncle Jake flopped back in his chair. After a moment of silent concentration, he attacked his own second helping of rice with gusto.

Brandon knew that look. He’d seen it often enough since he and his mom had moved in when Brandon was a skinny ten-year-old and his brother was an even skinnier eight-year-old.

“You’re thinking I was wasting my time, aren’t you?”

The old man looked up from his dinner plate. “Well…folks don’t want to split up their land, especially not a woman who’s got a house set down.”

Brandon snorted. “Not much of a house if you ask me.” But then, with eyes that would see it like a stranger would, he saw his uncle’s dining room, with its stacks of books and newspapers, its yellowed white walls and the vinyl rug curling up in one corner. Shoot, Uncle Jake took up more time repairing his pigpens than he did his own place. Since Brandon’s mom had passed away three years ago, Uncle Jake had sure let the place go. The house wasn’t much of an improvement over Penelope Langston’s bungalow.

“I won’t lie, son. It’s that ‘no-never’ that gets you every time, the idea that I won’t ever see a plow of mine on that land now.” Uncle Jake paused in his eating, his rheumy old eyes far away. “I still remember the day I signed the papers to buy that land where she’s put her house. I knew it was good for growing, and I couldn’t wait. I didn’t even have a tractor of my own yet, ’cause I’d spent every penny I’d saved just for the downpayment. So I borrowed my daddy’s old Massey Ferguson and broke ground that same day.”

Brandon had heard the story a hundred times at least, but he didn’t interrupt. A man had a right to grieve, after all. When his uncle finished, the two of them sat in silence.

“An artist, you say?” Uncle Jake asked suddenly.

“Yeah. Big metal abstract pieces. She wants to put up a barn to work in.”

“You and the FFA kids gonna help her?”

He did a double take at his uncle. “Why should I help her put more things on that land that I’ll have to tear down when I finally get it?”

“Son, it is obvious you don’t know much about women.” Uncle Jake took a swig of his iced tea and scarfed up the last of the peas.

“Oh, and you, the lifelong bachelor, are an expert?”

His uncle grinned and waggled his eyebrows. “Why you think I never married?” But then he sobered. “See, with a man, you could have offered to swap my field, I mean her field, for that section with the hardwood, and he would have considered it. But a woman? Nope. She’s got an idea in her head about how things are going to be. She’s picturing this dream…house’ll be here, the picket fence, there, the flowers over yonder…Takes something big to dynamite that picture from a woman’s head.”

Brandon thought back to how elated Penelope had been that first day. She’d even used the word “dream.” Maybe Uncle Jake was right.

But he couldn’t just give up on this.

“How serious can she be?” Brandon asked. “How long can she last? Whoever heard of a sculptor living here, anyway?”

“There’s that fellow that does chain saw carving. He makes a living at it.”

Brandon snorted. “He’s retired from the military. Of course he’s not starving.”

“But this one’s got grit.”

“Huh?” Brandon saw the frown on his uncle’s face and quickly amended the “huh” to “Sir?”

The frown cleared. “Want some apple pie? I bought a frozen one from the store.”

Brandon’s stomach leapt in anticipation of actual, edible food. “Where is it? I’ll get it.”

“Fridge. Bottom shelf.”

As Brandon retrieved the pie—burnt on one side, but still an improvement over the rice and peas—he prompted his uncle. “What do you mean, she’s got grit? You’ve never met her, have you?”

“Nope. Been here a week now, and she ain’t introduced herself. If Geraldine hadn’t been doin’ so poorly, I’d have gotten round to going over there, being neighborly…”

Brandon dug into the pie and tried not to smile as his uncle digressed into a long and sorry tale about his prize sow.

“So how do you know she’s got grit? Penelope, I mean.”

His uncle looked startled by Brandon’s change of subject. “You said it yourself. She’s got that place livable. She’s doing all the work herself. And if she’s doing outdoor sculpture, she’s got to be handy with a welder. That’s a girl who ain’t afraid of hard work.”

“How do you know about sculpting?”

Uncle Jake waved a hand at the crammed bookshelf on one wall of the dining room. “Some book I read sometime. I forget what. Talked all about it.”

“She didn’t say anything about welding.” But Brandon didn’t argue the point.

“She pretty?”

“What?”

“I say, is she pretty?”

An image of tanned legs and dark curly hair spilling over bare shoulders shot into Brandon’s mind. “I guess you’d call her pretty.”

“Well, then.” Uncle Jake beamed. “Maybe she’s got a fellow somewhere who wants her back. Or maybe she’ll get bored with country boys and head on back to the big city for what she’s used to. If she sells out at a decent price, we could get that land back.”

A woman like Penelope was attractive enough to have a long list of guys interested in her. Brandon pushed the plate of pie away and wondered why his uncle’s idea didn’t cheer him up. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to have to wait for Penelope to give up and get lost.

His uncle began clearing the table. Brandon fell into step, not saying anything in response to his uncle’s idea.

“What are you so quiet about?” Uncle Jake asked. “Did I say something?”

Brandon dropped the plates into the sink. “No, sir,” he replied in a voice he injected with a good measure of cheerfulness.

“Look, Brandon, you gave it your best shot, that land-swapping idea. And there’s nothing wrong with hoping she’ll give up and go on somewhere else. But you’re not dreaming of any devilment, are you?”

“Devilment?”

“You know, revenge on Murphy. Stealing that land back. Something like that. If I can get my land back fair and square, that’s okay. It was my fault I didn’t keep that receipt. I should have known better. You pay in cash, you need to be double sure you keep the proof you paid. And yeah, Murphy and Melton took sore advantage of me. Melton is a lying dog, saying I didn’t pay that tax debt.” Uncle Jake slammed the refrigerator door shut. “But I’ll tell you like that doc told me when I had my heart attack over all this. You got to move on, or it will kill you. Toting a grudge will eat you alive.”

Brandon said nothing. Let Uncle Jake think what he wanted. He didn’t want to admit to Uncle Jake he’d been thinking about how pretty Penelope was or how many lucky guys she had at her fingertips.

No, Brandon wouldn’t be one of the guys on Penelope Langston’s list. She wasn’t the right sort of woman. Couldn’t be. Not when she was standing square in the middle of the road to what Brandon was after.

P ENELOPE JABBED the calculator’s keypad with the ground-down eraser on her pencil. She’d figured her money three times—and all three times it had agreed.

She’d come up short.

She clenched the pencil, unclenched it, then clenched it again. She glanced over at the single sheet of paper that had laid waste to her plans.

I regret to inform you that we must cancel the commission we’d agreed upon and surrender to you the ten percent deposit already paid. I trust that this comes to you before you’ve ordered materials…

What a day. First that crazy deputy calling Grandpa a thief, and now this. The writing hadn’t changed, not in the thirty seconds that had passed since Penelope had last read it.

Fifty grand. Gone up in smoke.

She’d been counting on that money. She’d emptied her checking and savings accounts to pay for the land and the house. Her grandmother had matched her dollar for dollar. An art investment, Grams had called it as she signed the check with a flourish. Penelope had borrowed more money for the studio and renovating the house. That money was spent, and Penelope had borrowed still more money for the studio…

Her brain refused to process anything beyond how this could have happened. She’d played by the rules. She’d got an agreement. She’d done her financial homework.

And yet here she was, caught on the tracks with a mortgage payment bearing down on her—and no way to pay it.

Two months. She had two months before the first payment was due. Penelope said a silent prayer of thanks that she’d taken up the mortgage company’s offer for delayed payments.

Theo wound around her legs and yowled for attention. She ignored him. Think. She had to think.

If this company didn’t want her sculpture, somebody else would—she’d just have to get out there and sell it. And in the meantime, she’d have to come up with a way to survive without touching the borrowed money in her checking account.

Penelope had survived before. She’d eaten mac and cheese from scratch-and-dent sales and taken on untold numbers of jobs to pay the rent—bartending, car washing, waitressing, even a short stint at a Cineplex, selling popcorn until the smell nauseated her.

One thing she wouldn’t do: breathe a word to her parents. She’d learned the hard way that if they even suspected she was going through lean times, they’d be wiring money to her checking account or asking the landlord to check her fridge for food.

She hated the way they’d held her failures over her head as a way to persuade her to join the family business.

Real estate. Land, land, land. Buying, selling, leasing, commercial, residential, option clauses. She’d grown up with it, and it numbed her. When Grandpa Murphy had told her about this land, had suggested she try to buy it and keep it in the family, it had seemed the perfect solution. This property had been the only land she’d ever gotten excited about. Land far enough away that her parents couldn’t lie and say, We stopped by on our way to—

A knock on the front door cut into Penelope’s conflicted thoughts. She frowned and made her way up the hall to the living room.

A glance out the windows told her it was Brandon Wilkes. Her mouth tightened. Wouldn’t he be glad to know about her commission being canceled?

Penelope threw open the door. “Yes? What do you want now? Me to move to the moon?”

Brandon blinked. “Uh, well…I guess I deserved that. What with my crazy offer. I just—” Brandon broke off. “I came by to apologize. I was taking out my disappointment on you. If…er…if you need a hand with anything, all you have to do is let ’em know at the sheriff’s department. I work mostly nights, but they’ll find me during the day.”

He turned to make his way down the cinder blocks she’d stacked up as impromptu porch steps.

“Wait!”

Brandon paused, turned to her slowly.

“Are you simply being polite? Or do you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“Your offer.” Penelope’s mouth went dry. “To help.”

“Sure, I mean it. What do you need?”

A wave of uncertainty swamped her. What did she need? A stiff drink, for starters. A sale for a project she’d already ordered the materials for. Any way to save money.

“That barn you were talking about,” she said. “The pole barn. Can you help me build it?”

CHAPTER FOUR

“M E ? H ELP YOU build a barn?”

Brandon’s lowered eyebrows and his shocked expression told Penelope all she needed to know.

“Forget it. Just forget it.” Her hope turned into a leaden lump of disappointment in her stomach. She turned for the door.

He added, his voice heavy with incredulity, “Let me get this straight. You want a pole barn? And you want me to help you?”

“Well, you needn’t be so snippy about it. You were the one who mentioned the pole barn. You sounded nice the other day, before you got all bent out of shape about my grandfather—” She choked off the words, not able to repeat his accusation. Her grandfather a thief. Right. That was about as true as the fraud charges they’d railroaded him with in this federal indictment.

“Yeah, before I got all bent out of shape about your grandfather being a crook. I take it you don’t know him that well.”

She bristled. “I know him better than you do. He is my grandfather, after all.”

Brandon’s lips curled in disdain. “Well, you must see him in a whole different way than I do, then. Maybe with both eyes closed.”

She gasped. “I don’t have to listen to this!” Penelope headed for the door. She tried to turn the knob, but a tanned hand with long fingers wrapped over hers. She jumped at the contact and looked back over her shoulder.

“Hold it!” Brandon was so close, she could have kissed him. If he wasn’t such a jerk.

I don’t have time for this, not with a man who thinks my grandfather—I’ve got a financial disaster raining down on me…

Before she could protest, Brandon stepped back. “Sorry. I didn’t want you to go stomping off into the house. Not before I had a chance to, well, show you something.”

“Who says I’m interested?”

“Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking. It’s out here, behind where you’ve put your house.”

Penelope narrowed her eyes and assessed him.

What the heck. What could it hurt? “Let me get my cell phone,” she said. If he turned out to be as big a nut as she suspected, at least she could fire off a 911 call.

Phone in hand, she returned to the porch. “Okay. I’m ready for show-and-tell.”

He struck out down the porch and led the way to the back of the house. She had to double-time it to keep up with his long strides over the uneven field. Brandon didn’t speak, though, not until he reached a fence splitting her acreage from the neatly harrowed field next to it. The contrast, her untended land adjacent to the cultivated field, couldn’t have been more stark.