Hidden Deep (25 page)

“Well, there is no fair price for the trees on this land. They’re not for sale.”

“I’m afraid your mother disagrees. I’ll go now and let you discuss this with her when she gets home. You two kids be good.”

And there was the wink. My skin crawled. Tom Barr walked to his shiny car in his shiny shoes, got in and drove away. I looked over at Lad, feeling on the verge of tears.

“I can’t believe my mom’s considering this. Grandma will be devastated. What are we going to do?”

He came to me instantly and folded me against his warm chest. “We have to do something—that’s for sure. If he succeeds in buying the timber here, and clear cuts this land, my people will be forced to leave.”

“But… you live underground.”

“Yes, but our whole existence here depends upon the trees. Our home is supported by the living system of roots around it, and our main form of sustenance comes from those trees. We can’t survive without them. When the trees are gone, the wildlife living among them will also be gone. Our shelter, food, and mode of transportation will all be gone. We must stop the sale.”

“You don’t happen to have a big pot of gold somewhere do you?”

“No.” He laughed in a sad-sounding way. He stroked my hair while pressing my face closer to his chest. “We’re not leprechauns. And we’ve never had need of human treasure before, though now I do wish I had enough to save your home… and ours.”

“Are you going to tell your father?” I pulled back and looked up at Lad’s face.

His arrested expression told me he hadn’t considered that yet. “I’ll have to. We must prepare in case the worst does occur.” His eyes widened and then closed. He breathed out loudly. “I just realized… my father will be convinced it’s your doing. He’ll never believe it happened coincidentally right after you found out about us. He’s so determined to keep us all separate from human life, he doesn’t know about things like overdue taxes and greedy corporations. I assured him you wouldn’t talk, but he’ll believe you revealed our secret and the land is being destroyed in an attempt to exterminate us. It will reinforce every negative thing he already believes about humans.”

“And about me. Lad…” I could hardly find my voice. “We won’t just be separated. We’ll be enemies.” Hot tears leaked furiously from the corners of my eyes.

“That will never happen. No, no, Ryann… shhh… please don’t.” Lad wiped my tears with a fingertip then hugged me close to his body. “We’ll think of something. Come here.” He sat on the back porch step and pulled me onto his lap. “I could never be your enemy. All I want is to be with you. Sometimes it feels like nothing else matters.”

I nodded, wiping my wet face on my sleeve. “I feel the same way. But other things do matter. We have to be realistic.”

He shook his head in denial. “We’ll be together again soon, I promise.”

My heart wanted to believe it, but my head knew a relationship with him was impossible.
Say it. Say it, chicken
.

I couldn’t. Instead, I said, “You should probably go. Mom and Grandma will be back soon, and you don’t want to meet up with them.”

“I do want to meet them. You met my family.”

“Yes, and that went
so
well, didn’t it? What’s the point?”

His expression was wounded. “The point is—I’d like to meet these women I’ve heard so much about.”

Dang it.
Looking at his sweet face and obviously hurt feelings it was nearly impossible to say no. It didn’t make any sense to keep doing this—we were only postponing the inevitable—but I found myself agreeing.

“All right, but you’re going to need a wardrobe adjustment, unless you care to explain your traditional Elven garb to them.”

“No, that won’t help anything. I’ll wear my library clothes when I meet them.”

“Library clothes? You mean the ones you were wearing the day I met you at the pool?” I wrinkled my nose, smiling. “
Where
did you get those?”

Lad’s face reddened. “I took them off a scarecrow in a field over in the next county. I’ve always been worried that one day some farmer will spot me in them and say, ‘There’s the one who stripped my scarecrow. Get him!’”

We both dissolved into a fit of giggles. “No offense, but I don’t think those clothes will work if you’re actually going to meet my family. Dressing like scarecrow beefcake won’t accurately represent the kind of person you are.”

“I thought the idea was to
camouflage
the kind of person I am. What’s wrong? Ashamed of me?” he teased. “Don’t worry. I’ll find something better to wear.”

“No, I’ll handle it. It’s easier for me to go shopping than it is for you. I’ll pick up something for you.”

Before he left, Lad suggested we try once more to communicate in the Elven fashion. I was sure it was hopeless but agreed to make him happy.

“Focus on me, Ryann. I know you can do this.” Lad held my shoulders in the warm grip of his strong hands and placed me directly in front of him. He bent his head so our faces were close.
Dang.
I was losing focus already, before we’d even begun.

“All right,” I said shakily, “Go.”

I stared into his melting green eyes, but as before, my thoughts drifted to the times Lad had kissed me. The feel of his lips on mine, the way his breath had come in rough winded gasps when he held me close. I couldn’t stop the pull of my eyes down to his lips.

I forced myself to look back up at his eyes, but it seemed they were much closer. He was moving in toward me—no, it was me. I was inching my face closer to his, without seeming to have any control over it. Finally, I pressed upward, bringing our lips together.

Lad responded immediately and enthusiastically, a low hungry noise humming in his throat. He wrapped his fingers around the back of my head, kissing me with a fierce passion he’d never shown before. It was shocking. And exciting. We swayed together as we stood at the back door of my grandmother’s log house. I would have been content to stay right there, doing this all day, but after a few minutes, Lad pulled back and looked at me. I’d completely failed again. Why was he so convinced I could learn to communicate the way his people did?

“I’m sorry. I… I couldn’t concentrate with you so close to me. I—”

“Ryann, you did it. You
heard
me,” Lad interrupted, looking as thrilled as I’d ever seen him.

“I did?”

“Yes, I was telling you to kiss me—like I did when we tried this before. You heard the message this time, didn’t you?”

He seemed so pleased, I hated to deny it. And maybe he was right. All I could think of the first time was kissing him, too. Of course, that was what I wanted to do whenever I was close to him anyway, so it probably wasn’t a very good test. And it certainly wasn’t helping me to control my feelings for him. Or say what I really
should
say.
Chicken
.

“I don’t know. You probably should’ve picked a topic that doesn’t come as easily to me, like hockey stats or the rules of Call of Duty.”

“What’s that?” Lad asked.

Yep. Dream guy.

“Oh, I almost forgot. I have a gift for you.” Lad pulled a beautiful tooled metal flask from a leather pouch at his side and placed it in my open hand. It was lightweight and cool and covered in intricate Elven designs.

“It’s pretty.”

He chuckled. “The gift is what’s
inside
. Saol water. I was thinking you could try it in your tea recipe—a fusion of your traditional drink and mine. And the sweetness of saol water is so concentrated, the tiniest amount would equal a great quantity of sugar. Besides that, saol water has health benefits sugar can’t provide. It’s rich in minerals and vitamins, even protein. Worth a try, isn’t it?”

Actually, the anticipation of experimenting with it was the only thing making me feel marginally better about the coming separation from Lad.

He didn’t seem worried at all. “I’ll let the situation cool down and give my father a few days to come to terms with our relationship then I’ll meet you at the pool in the woods at the end of the week—Friday afternoon,” he said.

Say it, Ryann.
It took great effort but I pushed the words out. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t what?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t… see each other Friday. Maybe we should just, you know, let… go.”

Lad gripped my arm and looked down at me with a stern expression—not something I was used to from him. “No, Ryann. I
will
see you again. I’ll work it out.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but he jumped off the porch and ran to the edge of the woods. He turned around again and yelled back to me. “Friday.”

I nodded and watched his muscled back and tousled golden hair disappear into the trees. While I went inside to await the return of my mom and Grandma Neena, Lad was going home to face the consequences of “consorting with a human,” or whatever they would call his terrible offense.

No matter what he’d said, I had to prepare myself that he might not be coming back. Not Friday.

Not ever.

“Mom, a guy came by today. He said he was from Meyer Industries.”

She paused then continued unpacking her suitcase while I sat cross-legged on her bed watching. She was obviously trying to act casual.

“Oh, did he leave a business card?”

“He told me what’s going on, Mom. You can’t sell our trees. What did Grandma say?”

She pushed the suitcase aside and crawled up onto the comforter beside me. “Ryann, honey, I’m sorry. I don’t want to—Grandma doesn’t want to either—but I don’t think we have a choice. The innocent spouse plea failed, and Lee says I’m out of options. Would you rather see a few trees go, or have us lose everything, including the house?”

“Of course not, but it’s not a few trees. Mom—they’re going to clear cut the land. They’re going to take
all
the trees. Do you have any idea how bad that is?”

What I really wanted to say was that she had no idea how many
lives
would be affected by this, but I couldn’t. She could never know about Lad’s people. I had to somehow prevent this catastrophe while preserving their secret.

She pursed her lips and drew her eyebrows together, tilting her head to one side. “Calm down Ryann, you’re getting hysterical. I can’t think of any other way to come up with so much money, can you?”

“How much is it, Mom? Tell me.”

“Almost two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

“Oh my God.”

“I know.” She looked a little nauseated.

“So how much would Meyer Industries give you for the timber?”

“About two hundred thousand. I’d have to come up with the rest of it somehow. Maybe I can get a loan at the bank. Maybe I’ll talk to your father and see if he might possibly consider thinking of someone other than himself for a change.”

“How much time do we have to pay? I could talk to Daddy next weekend when he’s here to visit. Maybe he’ll be ashamed enough to do something about it if he knows that I know.”

My mom laughed bitterly. “I doubt he’s in the mood to do me any favors. And as far as I know, he doesn’t have any way to get that kind of money, but it’s worth a try. The payment deadline is four months away. We have to try anything we can at this point.”

“Please don’t sign anything with that Meyer slime ball yet, okay? I know something’s going to work out. We have to save the trees.”

“My daughter… the tree-hugger.” Mom planted a kiss on my forehead. “Okay now scoot. I need to get some sleep before work tomorrow. I’m exhausted.”

It looked like a pretty happy exhaustion to me. “You had a good time, huh?”

“Actually, I did.”

Her mischievous smile piqued my curiosity. “Hey, what’s going on? Did something happen in Atlanta this week?”

She actually giggled before answering. “I can’t believe I’m saying this. I met someone—a friend of Shelly’s husband. Well, actually, I met him a long time ago, but we ran into him at a restaurant in Atlanta, and he remembered me.”

“What? Who is he? What’s his name?”

“Davis. He’s single, employed, nice hair, incredibly charming.” She laughed, looked down at the bedspread almost bashfully and back up at me again. “He’s a senator.”

“A senator? You mean Davis
Hart
, the senator from Georgia?” I’d seen him many times on CNN student news when they played it in our classrooms. He was in charge of some powerful committee or something.

“Yes. Isn’t that strange? I worked on his campaign back in college when I was at Georgia Tech. He and Shelly’s husband Rob have been friends for years. We started talking at the restaurant, and it was like not a day had passed.”

“Wow.” I didn’t know how to react. It
was
strange. First of all, Mom had never told me she’d worked on a senator’s campaign—she wasn’t the least bit political now—she never even watched the news. But the strangest thing was her obvious enthusiasm for this guy. Her eyes sparkled in a way I’d never seen, and I’d never known her to act like this—she was like one of my friends gushing over a guy. “Well… you seem to like him,” I said.

“I do. I… haven’t felt like this in a long time. I thought maybe I never would. But he’s like no one else I’ve ever met. I think you’ll like him. He’s planning to visit in a couple weeks.”