Conor's Way (41 page)

Vernon clamped his cigar between his teeth.
"Peachtree is five hundred acres. I'll give you three dollars an
acre."

Fifteen hundred dollars. Christ, that was a
fortune. If it were truly his land, Conor would take the money in a
heartbeat. But it wasn't. His name might be on it now—Vernon would
probably know better than he— but it wasn't his land. The question
was, how did he get out of this with his ribs intact? Stalling was
definitely in order. "'Tis a fine and generous offer you've made,
it is, indeed. I'll have to be talking with my wife about it."

To his surprise, Vernon laughed. "Talk? Boy,
I don't know how they do things in Ireland, but here, we tell our
women what to do, and they do it."

Right. Clearly, stalling wasn't going to
work. He couldn't make a run for the house and that fine Henry
rifle. Conor glanced at the men who surrounded him, and he braced
himself for another round of trays and bedpans. He looked Vernon in
the eye and hoped to hell he'd come out of this with all his teeth.
"Sod off," he said pleasantly.

The men moved to seize him, but the sound of
another wagon rounding the house stopped them. Olivia drove the
wagon right into their midst, forcing Vernon to jump out of the way
or get run over.

"Hello, boys," she greeted them as the girls
jumped down from the wagon and ran to Conor. "Mighty fine day,
isn't it?"

The girls surrounded Conor, and he figured it
was the first time in his life he'd been rescued by a woman and
three girls.

The other men looked over at Vernon, who
shook his head and turned to Olivia, tipping his hat. "We just came
by to offer our congratulations."

Olivia braked the wagon and smiled. "Why,
Vernon, that's right nice of you. I'd ask you stay to Sunday
dinner, but I'm sure you all would rather go home to your own
families."

Vernon looked back over at Conor. "You think
about what I said," he told him, then turned and walked to his own
wagon, Elroy and the lads right behind him.

Conor waited until they had driven away, then
he said, "Becky, take the wagon into the barn and unhitch the mule,
then get him water. Carrie, you and Miranda help your sister. Your
mother and I are going for a walk."

He held up his hand to Olivia. She hesitated
a moment, then took his hand and allowed him to help her down.
Keeping a firm grip on her wrist, he led her through the garden. It
wasn't until they were in the dilapidated gazebo that he let her
go.

"It's time to give this up, Olivia."

She folded her arms across her breasts.
"Seems we've had this discussion before."

"Aye, for all the good it did," he shot back,
his voice rising.

"You seem quite out of temper today. Must be
all that whiskey you drank last night."

"Whiskey has nothing to do with it," he
shouted. "I'm always out of temper when men come to beat me up. And
don't you be changin' the subject."

"Then don't tell me what to do with my
land."

Exasperated, he glared at her. "Damn it,
woman, don't you understand? You can't win."

She glared right back at him. "And don't
swear at me. I am winning. We've been fighting this battle for four
years, and Vernon still doesn't have my land. I am winning."

He rolled his eyes. "You've won nothing but a
wee bit of time. They can wait you out."

Olivia shook her head. "But they can't. Oren
told me Vernon's been getting some pressure from his father-in-law,
who's one of the major investors in this railroad deal. That means
they're running out of time."

"Perhaps, but that only means that Vernon is
going to increase the pressure on you."

She started to turn away, but he grabbed her
shoulders and kept her there, forcing her to face him, forcing her
to face the unpleasant truth. "Listen to me. You can't fight them.
If they've bought up enough land to build this railroad, they have
a lot invested in it and they stand to make a lot of money once
it's built. Do you really think they're going to let one woman get
in their way?"

"They'll have to," she said, and jerked free.
"I'm not selling."

"Even if they threaten you and the girls? Are
you ready to risk the girls' getting hurt?"

"I told you, Vernon wouldn't hurt my girls.
Or me."

"What makes you so sure of that?"

"Because he's in love with me," she said
simply. "Always has been."

"What?" Her words stunned him, but the
violent jolt of jealousy that shot through him stunned him more. It
also made him angrier than before. "That piss-poor excuse for a
man?"

She frowned. "Don't swear, if you
please."

"'Conor, don't swear. Conor, don't drink,'"
he mimicked her, scowling. "I'll do what I like, woman. You're the
one who promised obedience in that church of yours, not me."

She scowled back at him. "Now, who's changing
the subject?"

Conor tried to remember having been more
furious in his life than he was right now, and he failed. "Vernon's
in love with you," he said again, and the ramifications of such a
situation hit him. "Brilliant. This is just brilliant. One more
reason for him to hate my guts. One more reason for him to use me
as a punching bag."

She turned away and folded her arms, staring
out at the tangle of rosebushes gone wild. "You don't have to
stay," she said quietly.

"Thank you, dear wife, but it's a bit late
for that now."

She stiffened at the endearment, which
carried no affection. "Reverend Allen didn't put any chains around
your neck when he married us," she said. "You're free to leave any
time you like."

Was she telling him to go? Uncertain, he
frowned at her back, feeling dismayed and angry and oddly bereft.
He realized he was beginning to care about her far too much, and
knowing that made him immediately rebel. "Or, maybe I'll just sell
Vernon the land."

"What?" Stunned, she turned and stared at
him.

"He offered me fifteen hundred dollars for
it. Since I'm now your husband, it seems I'm in control of the
land. Fifteen hundred dollars is a bloody fortune. We could live
quite well for a long time on that kind of money. I'd be daft not
to sell."

A change came over her as he spoke, the rigid
stillness of fear, and he knew she hadn't thought about how her
marriage would affect her property. She opened her mouth on a
wordless sound and closed it again.

Now was the time to do it, to tell her he was
going to take Vernon's offer, but he looked into her face, and damn
it all to hell, as angry as he was, as certain he was that he was
right, he couldn't do it.

She was looking at him with those brown eyes
that melted all a man's good sense and made him do things that were
stupid, things that might even get him killed. Vernon was in love
with her. He turned away with a curse. "Marriage or no, it's your
land, not mine. Do what you want with it."

He kicked the lattice half-wall of the gazebo
and put a hole in it to go along with all the holes in his head,
then he walked away. Women were the very devil.

Reverend Allen was kind enough to give Alicia
a ride home, since her husband had apparently forgotten her.

She knew why, of course. Olivia Maitland.

Alicia invited the reverend in for tea, but
thankfully, he declined. She went up to her room, pleading a sick
headache for the benefit of any callers who might happen to drop
by. She wanted time alone to think.

Vernon had always been in love with Olivia.
Alicia knew that. She'd known it from the first day she had arrived
in this dead little junction, from the first moment she'd seen the
woman in faded brown cotton walk into the mercantile Vernon had
bought with her Papa's money. She'd known by the way her husband
had looked at the woman—with anger and pain. And hunger. The fact
that Olivia was now married would make little difference.

Eight years of marriage had
given Alicia only the tiniest bits and pieces, for Vernon was not a
man who talked about his past, but she knew that her husband was
here to build an empire for only one reason: To show
them
. To lord it over
all the people who had once looked down on him, including the woman
for whom he'd never been good enough.

Alicia sank down on the edge of her bed and
wearily pulled off her hat. She fanned herself with the straw
boater and remembered wistfully how cool the sea breezes had been
at Newport and how wonderful it had been to call on her friends and
shop in the elegant stores. She gazed out the window at the rolling
countryside that seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance,
and she felt as if she were miles from nowhere. Back in Louisiana
less than twenty-four hours and she was already miserably
homesick.

Why, why, why did Vernon want to build his
empire here? When she met him, he had talked about Louisiana as if
he hated it. When she married him, she had assumed that Papa would
simply bring him into the steamship company, or the garment
factory, or any of the other businesses he owned. Never had she
dreamed that the two of them would concoct a new venture that would
send her a thousand miles from home.

She wished she could just leave him. Leave
him to his new Atlanta and his railroad and his memories of Olivia
Maitland. But she couldn't. She knew his childish boasting and his
bullying ways were only to disguise a lifetime of feeling inferior.
She loved him. But she wanted to go home.

Papa was coming down next week to look over
the railroad plans and drive the proposed route. She knew his
patience with this project was wearing thin, thanks in part to the
seeds of doubt she had planted during the weeks she and Vernon had
spent with him in New York and Newport, thanks to the subtle hints
she'd dropped to the investors at the parties and soirees. She
could only hope that her efforts had been worthwhile. If Vernon
didn't get Olivia's land by the time Papa arrived, and if Papa
could finally be made to see how miserable she was down here, and
if her hints had made the investors concerned enough to put on the
pressure, Papa might finally abandon this ridiculous scheme.

Alicia stared out her window at Vernon's
cotton fields that seemed to her like a vast white wasteland, and
she hoped so.

***

After Sunday dinner, Conor spent the rest of
the afternoon putting in the window glass Olivia had bought in
Monroe. Olivia and the girls went down to the orchard and harvested
the last of the peaches, the ones that had been too green for
picking a few days before. Long before sunset, Conor finished his
task, and when he walked into the kitchen, he found Olivia and the
girls surrounded by baskets of fruit and glass jars. The air was
thick with the scent of peaches, cinnamon, and cloves.

He would have turned around and left the
kitchen, but the girls had other ideas. They immediately drafted
him into helping. He looked at Olivia, but she said nothing, and he
decided to stay. He proved especially useful at carting in buckets
of water from the pump and placing the finished jars on the highest
shelves of the pantry to cool.

When he was not needed for those tasks, Conor
sat at the table and watched, intrigued. Olivia seemed to have the
process honed to the efficiency of a cannery and the girls as
trained as any factory workers could be. Miranda washed and dried
the jars. Becky peeled, pitted, and sliced the fruit. Carrie
filled half the jars on the table with peach halves, then poured in
the sugar syrup, while Olivia filled the remaining jars with jam.
Then she sealed each one with a two-piece metal lid. Sealed jars
were placed in two huge kettles of water on the stove to boil while
the next load was filled.

When the last jar had been sealed and placed
in the water bath, Olivia and Becky made a quick supper, while
Conor gave Carrie and Miranda some of his tallest Irish tales,
keeping his face as straight as if this were a poker game and he
had fifty dollars in the pot and nothing in his hand. The pair of
them hung on every word, just as he had done when he was a lad, and
by the time the dishes were done, he had them absolutely convinced
that leprechauns were real.

They wanted another story, but Olivia
declared it was time for them to take their baths and get ready for
bed. She held up both hands to halt the flood of protest that
followed.

"Kate told me at church today that you didn't
have your baths last night when you were supposed to," she said,
"and school starts tomorrow, so upstairs you go. You can have
another story afterward."

The girls trooped out of the kitchen, and she
glanced at Conor. "You'll tell them another story, won't you?" she
asked hesitantly.

"Aye, if they want it."