Stay (Dunham series #2) (34 page)

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30: The Sacred Grove

Eric dropped into bed the next Saturday night,
exhausted, having worked harder the past ten days than he’d ever
worked in his life; having slept naked with a gorgeous woman in her
bed; having showered with same gorgeous woman and dressed her and
made her come with his mouth. Not once had he been able to spare a
minute to truly make love with her, to seduce her the way he
enjoyed, to spend the time and care she deserved.

Vanessa snuggled up against him and fell asleep with
a sigh, leaving Eric awake with his thoughts.

He’d learned almost everything he needed to know to
run that place except for the cooking. He’d ended up hiring six
people, firing two more, rearranging shifts, finding a decent
headhunter and lining up interviews for concierge, and getting out
the payroll.

He’d contracted a painting crew to scrape and paint
the rails, posts, trim, eaves, and shutters of every building on
the property. The veranda got a new coat of floor paint, to
boot.

He’d learned how to clean, gut, and fillet fish
against his will; how raccoon tasted when served at Whittaker
House, also against his will; how to cook and eat crawdads (“No, I
won’t suck the heads, Vachel”)—yet again forced to prove that he
wasn’t, as Vachel informed him, a pussy.

Eric had finally balked, with great vehemence, at
going with Vachel to get the crawdads.

I went to law school so I wouldn’t have to stick my
hand in mud and get my fingers chopped off by a bunch of fucking
micro lobsters. I am not touching those fuckers until they’re
cooked, and even then I’m going to use a fork like civilized
people. With drawn butter. You do that here, right?

He’d read the entire Little House series and
understood how a twelve-year-old girl could suck up the kind of
courage Vanessa had claimed from them. He found it charming that
she would arrange her dreams, her whole life, around one woman’s
fictionalized memoirs classified as children’s literature. He’d
even gone to the home and taken the tour when he found himself with
a free hour. In a roundabout way, he owed his life to that woman
and he hoped that wherever she was, she’d heard him say, “Thank
you, Mrs. Wilder.”

He’d read an essay Mrs. Wilder had written on what
real independence meant, how a farm wife was actually a
businesswoman and needed to value herself as such, and her
philosophies on the return-on-investment of time in agriculture.
The nuances of her essay had escaped him at first, but as the week
rolled on and he watched Vanessa work, he began to see the kind of
independence she had that he didn’t. Every morning, he’d awakened
to hear Vanessa reciting her to-do list under her breath as she
dressed, prioritizing, rearranging, and abandoning items.

However much Eric appreciated Mrs. Wilder, though,
it was her daughter’s work that had punched him in the gut. Rose
Wilder Lane, one of the first thinkers of the libertarian movement,
gave Eric context for his beliefs: the ones old man Jenkins had
pounded into the juvenile delinquent with a preternatural talent
for management, the ones that had taken on new meaning over Eric’s
freshman history and political science classes.

“Vanessa,” Eric had said Thursday morning,
interrupting her morning ritual. She stood in front of him naked,
her hair up in a towel, but he’d awakened with too much on his mind
to care about sex. “Do you read Rose?”

“Oh, sure,” she returned as she began to dress,
stepping into panties and capris, then bra and pink tee shirt. “But
she’s more conceptual. I need day-to-day guidance and that’s what
Laura gives me.” She plopped down on the bed to put on her Keds.
“Rose and Laura,” she grunted as she tied her laces, “didn’t get
along. In some places, you read that Rose was completely out of
control and others you read that Laura was manipulative and
controlling. It’s kind of like they spent Rose’s whole life in this
big catfight. I don’t know what to believe, but I’m not sure it
makes any difference. I want to dismiss Rose because it tarnishes
my view of Laura, but I can’t. Not really. I mean, the Little House
books wouldn’t have happened without Rose’s editing and some people
think she edited them so heavily she may as well have written them
herself, so . . .
That
was a hard pill to swallow.”

Vanessa stopped and looked at Eric. “Don’t you know?
Rose is one of the three women credited for starting the
libertarian movement. I mean, if you think about it, it’s pretty
amazing that an entire political philosophy based on unfettered
liberty has no fathers. Just mothers.”

“No, I didn’t know,” Eric murmured, now embarrassed
by how much he didn’t know about his philosophy’s history. They
didn’t teach that stuff in political science classes, and it got
lost in the day-to-day politicking. “Who are the other two?”

“Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand. They were all
contemporaries and they were all fans of each other until they had
a falling out, but . . . ” She shrugged. “You get women like that
in the same room and let them talk for a while, they’re going to
come to blows eventually. That’s why I don’t take the
Rose-versus-Laura debate too seriously. If their issues went that
deep, I think it was because they were both free spirits and
stubborn to a fault.”

“What was the falling out?”

“Rand and Paterson had the falling out. Rand— She’s
such a drama queen, I swear. I just can’t take her seriously— Rand
was livid that Paterson wouldn’t let go of the idea of a creator
deity and just kind of flounced out of her life.”

“What do you think?”

She grinned. “I grew up Irish Catholic and Mormon,
reading Laura, then went to an Irish Catholic university. What do
you
think I think?” Then she’d turned and pointed out her
window to the manicured fields beyond, bounded by forest, and all
barely tinged in the peach shade of sunrise. “Look at that. In its
raw state it looks chaotic, like it could’ve just sprung up out of
nothing, but when you start looking at the patterns and
arrangements of a forest, of the scales of a fish— Sebastian taught
me about the Fibonacci sequence in nature and art, and ever since,
I see it everywhere. So I just don’t know how anybody could think
it wasn’t created. I don’t find Rand . . . ” She paused and
gestured as if searching for a word. “ . . . applicable to my life.
She was a pure idealist and
not
a nice person. Paterson,
now. She’s helpful, but still conceptual. Rose encoded her
philosophies in the Little House books, but Laura was more about
doing and then explaining the practicalities of how and why
afterward, in her farm newspaper articles. That’s really all I
reference now.”

Eric had to think about that, because it was so
simple, yet so profound. “And you just . . . do.”

Vanessa nodded. “I have too much to do to debate
philosophy. It doesn’t mean I can’t; it means I’d rather do
something else with my time that’s more productive.”

“Like Laura did.”

“Right.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird we both came to the same
philosophy independent of each other?”

“Not really,” she said thoughtfully. “We might have
had different catalysts and motivations, but we had essentially the
same influences. And it’s not like we agree totally, either.
You
find value in being a public servant and I don’t get
that.
I
find value in maximizing my profits while protecting
my resources as well as I can. You don’t seem interested in
profit.”

“I am, too,” he protested. “I do have a business,
you know.”

“Well, yeah, but you’re not dedicating your life to
that business. You’re dedicating it to being a politician.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Vanessa shrugged. “Politics—
Politicians
get
in my way and I resent that. I had to work way too hard to get my
golf course approved. It’s my land. I paid for it. I pay taxes on
it. I employ people—who also pay taxes—on it. I take care of it.
This county makes a lot of money off me, so why can’t I do what I
want with it?”

“Think about it, Vanessa. It’s because of
politicians like me that you got your golf course. We work to keep
the politicians you don’t like out of your way.”

She stared at him for a moment. “Well,” she
murmured, turning away, her mood visibly darkening, “I can’t argue
with that.”

“Vanessa,” he said, swinging out of bed to catch her
before she went down the stairs, “what did I say? What’s
wrong?”

“The same thing as it’s ever been for us, Eric,” she
answered wearily before she left the cottage with a slam of her
screen door. He sighed with the knowledge she was right and dressed
for that day’s work.

Sunday morning, Eric awakened to find himself alone
in bed, alone in the cottage. As he had every morning for the past
week when he’d awakened to crises that needed tending, he threw on
shorts and tee shirt and tennis shoes. He walked down the driveway
to the mansion, past the garage, only to find it empty of one
purple Prowler.

He stopped short.

“She went to see Laura.”

Eric turned to see Vachel in buckskins, walking out
of the orchard, filthy, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Six
o’clock in the morning: Vachel’s normal bedtime.

“What does that mean?” Eric asked when Vachel drew
abreast of him.

“She goes out to Rocky Ridge Farm. I don’t know what
she does there. Usually she takes cookies to the ladies in the gift
shop, but it’s too early.”

“Then how do you know that’s where she went?”

“She was crying. She goes there when she’s upset.
Night.”

Eric grabbed his car keys, fired up his engine, then
headed up the highway to Mansfield proper. He roared through town
and out to Rocky Ridge Farm. There, in the lot across the highway
from the gravel drive sat one purple Prowler.

He parked and headed toward the museum. With one
vault, he was over the gate, then jogged up the hill. At this time
of morning in May, the grass was soaked in dew and the air was
chilly. The woods surrounding the farmhouse-museum-gift shop
complex fluttered with the sounds of birds and other woodland
creatures, the breeze drifting through the leaves to rustle
them.

Eric hesitated to disturb this peace and, in fact,
it stopped him from going farther. It was different from the peace
at Whittaker House, where Vanessa’s cottage was removed from the
day-to-day noise of business but still part of it. This was
complete.

If he had not had business to tend to, he would have
found a solitary place to meditate and pray. “Oh, Vanessa,” he
whispered, understanding now.

As quietly as he could, he walked around the
farmhouse and went into the woods, methodically tracking her,
following a path that didn’t exist.

There, kneeling in a small grove, her hands fisted
on her knees. Her head bowed.

Shoulders quaking.

Eric’s heart stopped.

She gasped when he dropped to the grass beside her.
He watched her red, tear-stained face as she tried to find words,
but what came out—

“I wish you hadn’t come,” she whispered.

“Vanessa,” he croaked, shocked, hurt.

“I don’t want you to go.”

Eric’s mind spun, totally unable to make sense of
any of this and said the first thing that sounded halfway
reasonable. “I’ll come back.”

“No, you won’t.” She sniffed. “You
shouldn’t
.
You have your life. You’ve worked hard for your life and you’re
going places. When you go home, you’ll see it with fresh eyes and
be grateful for it. Grateful it’s not as hard as this, not constant
crisis management and hard work—some of it backbreaking. I’ve been
thinking about what you said about politicians like you and you’re
right. You’re important.
Governor
Cipriani.
President
Cipriani. It’s just— Here, it’s— This isn’t where you need to be.
You have so much to give to the world, things it needs. Leadership.
Philosophy. Sacrifice. Protection for people like me, while I . . .
cook for rich people.”

“Vanessa—”

Her lips tightened and she shook her head. Eric
leaned in to her then and touched his mouth to hers, tasting the
salt. She opened her mouth with a soft sigh, wrapped her arms
around his neck, and pulled him down into the wet grass.

Vanessa kissed him with the hunger of a woman long
denied, her hunger matching his. With her soft curves pressed
against him, a wave of violent need rushed through him—not the need
of sex or love, but something deeper—the need to connect with her
here in the woods of the Ozark mountains, early on a spring
morning, the sounds of wind and water and wildlife their only
music.

He pulled away from her a bit and she opened her
eyes to watch him warily, but her expression softened when he
pulled her soft pink tee shirt out of her shorts. She sat up a bit
to help him pull it off her, and then he simply looked at her bare
torso.

Caressed her breast confined by nothing, the nipple
puckered in the chill.

She released a ragged breath when he licked it,
sucked it into his mouth gently, rolled it around on his tongue
like a sorbet and tasted her, earth and Vanessa and soap. She
clutched him to her.

“God, you’re beautiful,” Eric whispered reverently.
“Wild, like the Ozarks.”

She dug at his shirt, then the rest of his clothes.
Kissed him feverishly between the shedding of each garment. He
unbuttoned her shorts and slid them down those long curvy legs.
Once they were both nude, he dug his hand in her hair, pulled her
close for a harsh kiss and rolled onto his back, taking her with
him until she straddled him.

Eric released a ragged breath when she took him in
hand, guided him into her.

Draped herself over him and kissed him again,
connected in the most primal way. He wrapped his hands around her
buttocks and her breath hitched when he thrust up into her a tiny
bit, and she met him.