Instructions for Love (6 page)

“Sure. You can eat this?” The innocent delight of her expression made him laugh.

He pulled his knife out of his toolbox and selected a healthy stalk. “In a few weeks, it’ll be much sweeter.” Whacking a chunk off, he sliced the hard outer shell and handed her the softer white portion from inside. “Chew on the pulp, but don’t swallow it.”

Erin chewed, joy reaching her eyes. “This ought to be sold in stores. It’s great.”

He chuckled. “I imagine you can buy most anything in all your big-city stores, but cane pulp would be difficult to preserve.” He stepped back up to the driver’s seat of the truck.

She darted around and resumed her place, still too close to him. He wished she weren’t so near when she’d bent to stare at the borers. He wished her fair skin and her innocence weren’t so attractive. This wasn’t a woman he’d want to spend only a few hours with. But he could offer nothing more, to her or any other woman.

At least now she understood that this plantation was his. After he finished showing her around, she would go home. Back to that guy who’d made her so unhappy on the phone.

His peripheral vision let him see her looking tense. Her shoulders appeared rigid, her neck muscles tight. Was she thinking about that man and how she’d solve the troubles with him?

Dane sure couldn’t help with that. Crop problems he could handle. But his marriage to Anna didn’t include problems, at least none they hadn’t quickly solved. And he didn’t need to spend time worrying about this woman and her male friend that was her boss and probably her boyfriend. After she went back to him later today, Dane could return to concerning himself with work. And tomorrow he would do the same thing.

She broke the silence. “It’s all the same.”

“What?”

“These fields. You see the same thing over and over.”

He couldn’t help but smile. “Nothing’s the same out here.”

She waved her hand toward crops on either side of the road. “This all looks identical to me.”

“We aren’t looking at things the same way.”

“No.” She eyed him firmly. “I guess we aren’t.”

She turned her head from one side to the other, staring outside. At least during this ride while she searched for something unusual, she hadn’t talked as much as she’d done last night. The trip through the fields might have lulled her. Whatever caused her calmness today was a good thing. She looked more at ease, more approachable.

“Everything’s so slow moving down here.” She lifted her hand and made it sway in a sluggish motion. “The only fast-moving things I saw were cars in New Orleans after my plane landed there. But after I rented a car and drove away from the city, every thing and every person slowed.” She looked at Dane. “Especially once I reached your town.”

He tsk-tsked. “You don’t want to drive too fast around these parts. If you do, you’ll miss the stop light and be out of town before you notice it.”

A grin crept to Erin’s lips. “You don’t really have only one light in Rainbow Bayou, do you?”

“Maybe you should check it out.” Before he finished that statement, Dane was sorry he’d made it. He studied the road, wanting her to just go away. Her complaint surely included the way he drove, but he went through his fields the way he wanted, inspecting, even if he had seen the same thing yesterday. Some things out here had changed since that time. And he needed to get her back to the house so he could get to work out here, planting.

“Oh, the cottages.” Her amazed tone sounded like she had discovered a castle. “Those are the cottages Aunt Tilly told me about in her letters.”

Three-year-old Jason rode his tricycle outside the first one, and Joanie sat on the porch, watching him with a mother’s keen eye. Her husband Kenneth, who worked for Dane, drove forward from the road ahead. He pulled over near the fence and his family. Dane tooted his horn. He and Erin and Kenneth and his family exchanged waves.

“The boy was sick, and his daddy’s stopping by to check on him,” Dane told Erin. Glancing back at the family, he smiled. “Looks like little Jason’s okay now.”

“What lovely quaint homes,” Erin said. She turned to stare at the two cottages they’d passed.

Tilly and Cliff had rented the second one from Dane. He would give Erin the key to get in it once they returned to his house. Then she’d know how to get back here to retrieve Tilly’s things.

“My aunt told me they were once slave quarters,” she said.

“Yes, long before any of us were born.”

She twisted to gaze back at the cottages. “They’re so pretty. With gingerbread trim and those nice pastel colors.”

Dane liked her noticing them. He had taken his time to have those places fixed up, finding items and paint that let the houses fit in with plantation life, yet spruced up enough to feel modern. Everyone who’d rented them from him seemed pleased.

“You usually move so slowly. That was one time I wished you’d slowed more,” Erin said. “I would’ve liked to have seen them better.”

A man probably couldn’t please this woman
, Dane considered, continuing to drive at the same speed. That guy who was probably her boyfriend might make her angry, but she most likely made him furious.

Dane reached the Forty Arpent Road and turned left. Their new path took them along the slender canal. At least now she might not complain. She could see water and weeds instead of only his crops.

She stared out of her side window. “I wonder if any fish are in that water.”

“Lots of them, and quite a few big ones.”

She eyed the canal. “One jumped! Oh no, I saw a fish jump. There’s another one!”

“Sometimes they do that.” Dane smiled when Erin glanced at him, her eyebrows raised above the sunglasses she wore, her expression amazed. “They’re probably just showing off now, figuring a Yankee like you had never seen such a thing.”

Her laugh sounded pure, exactly like she appeared. This woman was wholesome. He was certain of that now.

“I appreciate any show they give me,” she said, her lips widening with her even brighter smile. Her teeth glistened white with the new angle of the sun striking her face. He was glad the dark glasses covered her eyes. He didn’t need to be searching for them, wanting to view their full expression. He didn’t need to be checking out her legs.

He stared ahead through the windshield. “Here’s somebody else making a show for you.”

“It’s a deer! No, two of them!”

Excitement shot through Dane, as it must for her, when he spotted the white fluffed tails bouncing ahead of them. The does had bounced out of the field and were darting down the grassy path ahead of them. He’d seen similar sights any number of times, and every time a deer came into view, he experienced the same childlike thrill.

But now as he turned to see Erin’s face, his heart struck harder. Her enthusiasm with her first sighting of the beautiful creatures of the wild was making him appreciate them even more than he did when he saw them all alone.

“Dane,” she said once the deer ran back into the field, and he waited for more. But she only spoke his name. She sounded breathless.

A hitch caught in his chest. He tried to look away but through her sunglasses could see her eyes focused on him. And too close to his face, just as her breathing was, as she leaned closer. His heart pounded like a sledge hammer.

“Oh, Dane,” she said with a sigh. She leaned back on her seat. “They were beautiful.”

He needed to wait until his breaths slowed before he spoke. “They always are.”

Driving farther into the newest fields he’d bought, he noticed her relaxing, her hands loose at her sides, her lips keeping a light smile. Dane focused away from her, perusing the height of the stalks, judging them to be reaching maturity. He should complete harvest long before Christmas. And then what would he do without something to keep his interest centered over the holidays?

More of the same. He’d clean up the fields and start over again. At least with cane, you always had another chance. He had seen that happen once he bought this dying plantation from his grandfather. Dane had worked on this farm since he’d been a tyke, with his dad working offshore, as he was doing right now. Dane had warned his grandfather that he needed to use more modern techniques as times changed, but his aging elder, sinking into decline with increasing bouts of dementia, refused. Dane mourned the loss of his grandfather long before death took him. Starting to purchase the property from his grandfather’s family, Dane soon realized that one year’s yield might be disappointing, maybe much of it destroyed by a late-blooming hurricane or strong tropical storm that would flatten entire fields. But with sugar cane, you could start over. Each season offered a new opportunity.

Dane clenched his teeth, the anger swelling inside him. It began in his brain and worked its way down, tightening his eyebrows and stretching deep into his neck. The muscles and tendons there tensed, and then his anguish—
no, anger
—sprouted into all of his pores.

A glance at Erin told him her eyes had shut, the same-old, same-old view of the crops probably putting her to sleep.

If only he could sleep so easily. But ever since Anna took her last breath—

Dane’s foot struck the brake. He shoved his door open, grabbed from the seat beside him and slid out.

“I was falling asleep,” Erin said, her voice pitching high and shrill. “What are you doing with that gun?”

He fired off two shots before she could rush out of the truck and reach him. Her body sank against his side. He fired off two shots and watched the rattler coil and then lie still on the dirt row.

Laci hesitated and then ran out to him. “A snake,” she said, eyeing the big lifeless reptile. Her hand clasped her chest, and she sank against Dane.

He reached an arm around her shoulder to make certain she wouldn’t fall. “You okay?”

She leaned against him, nodding, focused on the rattler. Finally she seemed to notice Jessie, the last man Dane had hired, standing on the row right beyond the rattler that had been ready to strike him when Dane noticed.

Jessie gave Dane a smile of gratitude and climbed on his tractor and started off.

Dane felt too uncomfortable with her so close. The whole day had gotten too humid, he decided once she pulled away from him. He returned to his place in the truck.

Erin climbed back in, talking. “No wonder you keep a pistol in here. I guess you see a few of those around. Not only pretty things inhabit this property.” She peered around, eyeing the dirt rows with a suspicious look and glancing at his sheathed gun back on the seat between them. She watched the cane they rode through, her face expectant. Probably she hoped they would spot more wildlife. Something to keep her entertained. Maybe more cottages or adults or kids playing in yards.

She was surely disappointed as they made their way back. Nothing of interest to her breaking the crop’s scenery. Only the sudden roar overhead that made her head jerk up to see the plane sweep down over the fields. She kept peering upward, probably wanting more noise and speed, as she was accustomed to. Well in this place, she would stay frustrated.

Hoping his mother would have left by the time they reached the house, Dane considered that the gumbo wouldn’t have taken her too long to fix since she would have found okra already smothered in his freezer. And she never came around to cook for him. Tilly had done some cooking in his kitchen these last few months, but only because she needed something to do to fill her time. She and his mother both knew he could cook up almost any dish he wanted.

And what was his mother up to, telling Erin everybody called her Mom Bea? Another question came, and Dane looked at the woman now gazing out her side window. Why had Tilly asked Erin to inspect the plantation today? Tilly hadn’t felt too ill, thank goodness. But had she and his mother cooked up something during all their little tête-à-têtes?

Dane’s stomach grumbled. She glanced at it and then his face, a grin on hers.

“Dinnertime,” he said.

Her smile could have been less appealing before she turned away. But they would eat some gumbo, he hoped without company. If his mother was still at the house, who knew what other foolishness she might come up with?

Chapter Seven

Dane appeared to be grinding his teeth, Erin noticed when they rolled to a stop at the big plantation home’s back entrance. Mom Bea’s red truck was still parked in the driveway.

Erin was pleased, even though her driver didn’t appear to feel the same way. The man yanking his key out of the truck and thrusting his door out had remained quiet during most of the trip back. The fields along the way held rows and rows of long green blades, but at least she now knew what a single stalk of sugar cane inside them looked and tasted like. She’d seen nothing to change the scenery, except the cottages she had looked for. The little boy and his mother were still outside, both of them waving at the truck when she and Dane rode past.

Dane now tromped up the cement steps.

The screen door flew open, and Mom Bea flew out. “You made it back,” she said, sounding as though she were surprised.

Erin wondered why she had the sudden thought that Mom Bea had hoped something out there would have kept them from returning. “Dane killed a rattlesnake,” she said.

“Oh, sometimes a few come out during the real hot summer,” Mom Bea said, as though rattlesnakes were nothing of concern.

They all walked through the back room that held only an old table holding boxes of dusty vegetables. Without looking back at the women, Dane said, “But I didn’t kill the gator sunning near the canal. I knew he wouldn’t bother anyone.”

Erin caught up with him in the kitchen, her pulse speeding. “You saw an alligator?”

He gave her a wry smile. “Just a little one, about a seven footer.” He headed for the stove. “Smells good. Is it finished?”

“Y’all wash up and sit down. Everything’s done,” Mom Bea said.

Erin didn’t know whether she should take Dane’s mention of an alligator seriously. She did agree with his comment about the food, her stomach moving in what felt like a jerky dance because of the rich aroma filling the kitchen and nearby rooms.