Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses) (22 page)

“This hasn’t happened before,” Sid said. “Is it a regular part of keeping animals, because if it is I’m not sure—”

He settled an arm across her shoulders. “It happens, but those mares didn’t leave their own stall door wide open, Sid.”

The implications sank in, and the anxiety that had been ebbing from Sid’s mind rose back up.

“You’re saying Weese did this? He loves these horses. He wouldn’t do anything to put them at risk.”

“Not on purpose, but we’re all human. I’ve done the same thing, or worse, left the feed-room door open, the feed unsecured, and the stall door unlatched.”

“Good heavens. When was that?”

“After my dad died. I was older than Luis, but it was an unexpected death. I went overnight from being Dad’s treasured firstborn to the man of the house. I’d find myself driving somewhere, and forget where I was going and why I was going there.”

Sid kissed his cheek and smoothed down his hair, because the memory still bothered him.

“I’ve done that. It’s like you keep waking up in some stranger’s life, except the stranger is you,” she said. The horses, meanwhile, had already scarfed up their bedtime snacks.

“Stress, I suppose,” Mac said. “Losing a loved one is stressful as hell.”

“Losing these horses would be stressful for Luis.” Sid turned, so she was nearly in MacKenzie’s embrace. “If DSS was ready to shut me down over a hog house, what do you think they’d do if Daisy or Buttercup caused an accident on the highway? People who can’t look after horses shouldn’t be looking after children.”

She could hear Amy Snyder saying those very words as she tapped away at the SmartPad of doom.

Mac’s fingers paused midway around the curve of Sid’s ear. “When is Luis’s hearing?”

“Damn it to hell, MacKenzie. You’ve hit it on the head. The last time we faced a hearing, Luis would go to school without his backpack, put laundry right into the dryer without washing it, put the teakettle in the refrigerator and the milk in the cupboard. He never said a word, just silently fell apart.”

“Court is stressful for most people. Luis still needs to know his girls went off on a toot, or it’s more likely to happen again.”

“Do I have to tell him now?”

“Yes.” Mac’s tone held a touch of humor.

Sid let herself burrow closer for one long moment, then stepped back.

“Come along, then. If we’re lucky, we can sweeten the lecture with a reprise of that blueberry pie.”

“I like it when you’re bossy, Sidonie.”

Sidonie.
The name Mac used for her when the message was intimate. He fell in step beside her, but Sid resisted the urge to take his hand. What to say to Weese, and how to say it?

They reached the kitchen to find Luis was already making inroads on the remains of the pie.

“I left you some,” he said from his seat at the table. “It wasn’t a big pie to begin with.”

“Getting smaller all the time.” Sid set a glass at Luis’s elbow and retrieved the milk from the fridge.

“We had some excitement in the barnyard,” Mac said, putting a plate on the counter. “The mares got out and were halfway to the road before we caught up with them. No pie for me, Sid, but you should have some.”

Sid poured the milk.
The
mares
got
out. No pie for me.
Simple, effective, and yet Luis was on his feet, headed for the door, pie forgotten.

“Your mom got them back to the barn with a bucket of feed,” Mac went on. “They’re safe, and the stall door is latched up tight.”

Luis stopped short of the door. “They’re OK? You’re sure?”

“Better than OK, because they had a little exercise. Finish that pie, son, or I might have to see to it myself. No harm, no foul.”

Man and boy stared at each other, exchanging some silent set of signals Sid couldn’t decipher, then Luis moved back to the table. She poured his milk and put the jug back in the fridge.

“I must have left their door open.” Luis stared at his half-eaten pie. “I can’t remember. I think I closed it, but I can’t be sure.”

Mac lounged back against the counter. “You probably did close it, but you didn’t latch it, and they get to bumping on the door, and it moves a little, so they get their noses into the act, and lips that are damned near prehensile, and soon enough, two loose horses. I used to tie some baling twine around the stall doors at night with a bowknot so I wouldn’t forget, like tying a string around my finger. Sid, you want some tea?”

He pushed away from the counter and took the teakettle off the stove.

“Peppermint,” she said. “Something to settle my stomach after all the night’s excitement.” Mac held the teakettle under the spigot, his expression…bashful.

Good.

Lest Sid stare at Mr. Bashful until her indecent thoughts were visible on her face, she got down a couple of mugs and the honey. “What about you, MacKenzie? What kind of tea will you have?”

“Same.”

“I’m going out to tie some string around the stall door.” Luis got right back up again. “I shouldn’t have forgotten. Adelia and Neils will kill me if I do something like this at the stable.”

“I’ll come with you,” Mac said. Sid was about to suggest they make a trio of it, when she caught Mac’s eye and the slightest shake of his head. “Might as well finish that piece of pie, Sid. Your boy seems determined to abandon it.”

Mac followed Luis out the door, leaving Sid alone with a messy, half-eaten piece of very good pie.

Which should not be allowed to go to waste.

“You have a hearing coming up.” Mac waited until he and Luis were halfway to the barn to drop that bomb.

Luis stopped walking and turned a belligerent expression on Mac. “What of it?”

“You have a hearing coming up, the social worker has already threatened to move you once, and kids get moved at hearings all the time, particularly if DSS wants to move you from foster care to some therapeutic group home.”

“What do you know of it?” Luis resumed his march toward the barn, his thin shoulders hunched as if the night were cold.

“More than you think. Hannah was raised in foster care.”

“Who? Oh, her. She was nice.”

“She’s lovely. Luis, everybody makes mistakes. Get that through your thick, adolescent head.”

“I don’t just make mistakes, I fuck up.” He stopped outside the barn, his expression bleak. “Sid deserves better than me.”

“She doesn’t agree with you, and letting a pair of horses wander around in the front yard for fifteen minutes doesn’t make you the eighth biblical plague.”

The kid’s expression turned hopeless and lost.

“What aren’t you telling her?” Mac, veteran of uncomfortable discussions with many delinquent teens, let the question hang.

“Sometimes you do more harm by telling, right?” Luis replied. “Like when I got into the beer? James asked me what the benefit would be to Sid of telling the truth, and there wasn’t any.”

“Except you told her the truth in your own time anyway, because there is a benefit to treating the people you love with respect. Truth is usually part of that respect.”

“So is keeping a few things to yourself,” Luis said. “I know the social worker called today. I was out on the porch when she did, but Sid thinks I was doing my chores. I should have been doing them.”

If they didn’t move this conversation into the barn, Sid would soon be out on that same porch.

“God almighty, Weese. How many things are you going to beat yourself up for at once? What did the social worker say?”

“I got the impression she was still trying to jerk Sid’s license, but Sid got around her.”

Mac looked up at the moon, at the cool, remote beauty of it in contrast to all the tension and misery he felt in the boy.

“She won’t jerk Sid’s license. Teenagers are hard to place, boys handle moves worse than girls, and your lawyer will get you a hearing in a heartbeat if DSS tries to move you.”

“My lawyer can’t get a hearing if DSS is only moving me from one foster home to the next. It has to be from here to a more restrictive placement, like a therapeutic group home, before I’m entitled to a hearing.”

“Ever think of becoming a lawyer?” Mac asked, moving off toward the barn.

“Sid would kill me.”

At least the idea put a hint of a smile on Luis’s face, but surely the kid was indulging in adolescent hyperbole?

“Well, you’re close to right. If you’re being moved to a more restrictive placement, then they must give you a hearing, but you can ask for a hearing at any time for a good cause. This is a good cause.”

Luis flipped the switch to the right of the barn door, and dim lights came on in the aisle. “None of my lawyers told me that.”

Or they’d told him and he’d been too stressed out to absorb it. “What kid wants extra hearings?”

“I do, if they’re trying to move me. I don’t want to leave here. Not the horses, not Sid, not—I don’t want to leave here.”

“Then let Sid adopt you.”

Luis stalked away. “I’ll tie some baling twine around the stall door. The horses won’t get out again.”

Mac watched him go, wondering what in the hopeless hell the boy was keeping to himself in the name of protecting Sid.

* * *

“You’d think nobody ever had topsoil for sale around here before,” James muttered as he maneuvered Trent’s farm pickup so Luis could dump a cubic yard of rich, dark earth into the bed.

“You want more?” Luis yelled. “Sid’ll cut you a deal, maybe.”

“Fill half the bed,” James said, craning his neck to eye the truck’s rear tires. The kid was running around with the loader like he’d been born doing it, which boded well if he expected to spend the summer doing farm work.

The truck shuddered as the additional dirt was spilled into the bed, and James moved his vehicle so the next customer could be served. He parked in the shade near the house and found Sid on the porch, shaking hands with Elroy Wyandt.

“You’ll do business with just about anybody, won’t you, Sid?” James asked as he ambled up the steps.

“She must,” Wyandt said, sticking out a hand to James. “Somebody let you back on the property, didn’t they? Hear you and old Inskip are getting in bed together, Knightley.”

Old Inskip was probably ten years Elroy’s junior, a good foot taller, and possessed of twice the number of natural teeth, but the proprieties had to be observed.

“If you heard that, then Louella must have made you get some decent hearing aids,” James said, letting the old man squeeze his hand hard. “I’ve got you a new customer too, if you have some wood for sale, Elroy.”

“The pee-anna lady. Heard something about that too.”

“You can interrogate him at your leisure about the piano lady or anything else,” Sid chimed in, “but James has to get out his wallet if he’s going to stand here all day.”

She jammed her hands into her back pockets, which thrust her breasts out against the fabric of her flannel shirt. Elroy’s gaze dropped down over that unwitting display, then darted out to the pasture.

“I’ll be moseying,” Elroy said, swallowing. “You tell me how much wood you want, missus, and I’ll have it stacked for you come September. Knightley, best of luck with Inskip’s operation.”

He scampered down the steps, a wizened little gnome as spry as a man one-third his age.

“You got him lending you his loader and giving you wood?” James asked.

“He took a look at the quality of that topsoil, set aside three loads for himself, and started talking to me about heating with wood.”

In the barnyard, two more pickups lined up behind the one Luis was filling with vintage horse manure.

“I have a woodstove,” James said. “It gives off a nice heat, and you have enough deadfall in your woods to make heating with wood a cheap proposition. You heard Elroy mention I’m going into a joint venture with Hiram Inskip?”

“I heard him giving you a hard time about something to that effect.”

Elroy had barely been getting started when Sid had run him off.

“Inskip and I are in a partnership,” James said, “which I will come to control over the next five years. I’d like to talk to you about it, because working your land figures prominently into our plans.”

Sid’s smile faded; her hands came out of those back pockets. “Put the kettle on. I’ll tell Weese to collect the money while I’m listening to what you have to say.” She gave him a visual once-over, as if she could predict what he’d say by studying him, then hustled off.

Not a pushover, Miss Sidonie, and James liked her for it. Good looks and charm in abundance meant James seldom had to work to win a woman’s approval, but he was about to work to win hers.

Which, considering MacKenzie approved of
her
, was probably fitting.

The kettle was whistling in earnest when Sid came back in through the kitchen door. “When does it get nice and hot around here, for God’s sake?”

“Same time it does in Baltimore, I’m guessing.” James opened cupboards, one, two, three, finding mugs behind door number three, same place his mom had stored her everyday mugs. “You notice the weather more out here, you notice the sky, you notice the breezes, or the lack of them, and you surely do notice the smells.”

To James, they were good smells, even the sharp scent of that dark topsoil wafting across the barnyard.

“What kind of tea are we having?” he asked.

“Hannah gave me some green tea with jasmine as a housewarming present. Will that do?”

“It’s her favorite, and I like it. The nights aren’t as cold lately, and the sun’s gaining strength. We’ll be planting corn in the next few weeks and taking off the first cutting of hay right after that if the weather runs true to form.” James was looking forward to both, same as he had as a kid on the farm.

“I know the frost date for this zone is May first, but don’t you sometimes get frost after that?”

And with one question, Sid had him going. Frost dates, early hybrid strains of corn, the trade-off between the stress of the heat and drought of midsummer versus the cold nights of late spring, the potential for planting two crops in one year if the winter wheat came off early for wet wrapping and the corn went in late.

James had finished off most of a pot of tea before he realized he hadn’t even approached his intended purpose for meeting with Sid, but to sit in this kitchen and talk crops and weather and possibilities had felt comfortable.

Surprisingly comfortable.

“How does a CPA know so much about all this agricultural stuff?” Sid asked, peering into the only orange ceramic teapot James had ever seen.

The question caught him off guard. Most people thought of him as a lawyer, because he purposely didn’t lead with his accounting credentials. Lawyering was sexier than accounting, right? And yet Mac had cautioned him not to approach Sid from a legal angle.

“I grew up on this farm,” James said. “I watched my parents live and die here, and I considered buying the place both times it came back on the market. Every farmer has to be a competent businessman, but few businessmen understand farming.”

Sid topped up her mug from the teapot, fragrant steam curling upward. “You watched your parents die here? Both of them?”

Too late, James realized his error. This was old ground, ground that did not need to be plowed up again.

“I was speaking figuratively.”

Sid set the pot down and peered at him, a slow, green-eyed perusal that had probably inspired Luis into admitting all manner of uncomfortable truths.

“I do not abide untruths, James Knightley. Mac told me your mother died in the bedroom where Luis sleeps now. You were speaking literally. How did your father die?”

He stood, taking his mug to the sink to buy time. He washed it out, set it in the drain rack, and tried to figure out why he was stalling.

“Dad died in a farming accident. Tractor rolled; he didn’t suffer long. Best we can figure, he had a heart attack doing what he loved.” James very purposely did not close his eyes as he spoke, because he knew exactly which memories and which images would crowd into his mind if he did.

They crowded anyway, but he focused on folding a dish towel over the handle of the oven.

“How long has it been, James?”

“Seventeen, eighteen years since Dad died.”

“It’s still hard to talk about, isn’t it?” She stayed at the table, as if she understood James needed space to keep breathing. This wasn’t on his agenda. This topic was never on his agenda.

“The accident was my fault, at least partly.”

She regarded him steadily, and all James could detect in her eyes was concern.

“It couldn’t have been your fault. You were a kid. My brother died of AIDS—that is my least favorite sentence in any language, by the way—but I still blame myself. Tony was an adult who made his own choices, but I blame myself.”

She was still blaming herself, from the sadness in her voice. James shifted to stand at the window, where he could see Luis filling the bed of yet another pickup with vintage horse poop.

“You’re right, in a sense, Sid. I didn’t push the tractor over on him, didn’t give him a bad ticker, but as the youngest, it was my job to take Dad his lunch if he didn’t come in for it. I got to making a hay fort in the mow, lost track of the time, and all the while, he was under that stupid tractor.”

“But even if you’d found him earlier, James, could you have lifted the tractor off him? Fixed his heart? Pulled a medevac chopper out of your pocket, if they even had them around here that long ago? No, you could not. It was his turn.”

“This isn’t what I came to talk about.”

“You don’t ever want to think about it, either. I do apologize for prying. Tell me some more about why I should sign a five-year agreement to let you work my land.”

To launch into the cost-benefit analyses, the figures and percentages, the risk assessments, was a relief, and all the while, Sid followed the discussion. She asked the right questions, comprehended the answers, and spared James having to break things down as he might have for a less savvy audience.

“Does Mac know you’re so smart, Sid?”

“I’m not smart, James, I’m educated.”

“MBA?”

She nodded, but it hadn’t been much of a guess.

“From?”

“Wharton. My primary emphasis was human resources management, but they don’t let you through that gauntlet without getting a thorough grasp of numbers. How about you?”

“I’m Maryland educated. Maryland and the school of hard knocks. You want some time to think this over?”

“No, I do not. I’ll read this carefully.” She tapped a folded document with her index finger. “If it says what you’ve represented it to say, I’ll sign it.”

“You won’t have somebody look it over for you? I wouldn’t be offended.”

“If a Wharton MBA can’t read a land-use agreement, then Wharton needs to lower its tuition. The last purpose I’ll put my money to is paying off some lawyer’s sailboat. You hungry?”

Her animosity wasn’t the garden-variety lawyer bashing, which suggested retreat was prudent.

“I told Twyla I’d have some dirt for us to make flower beds with this afternoon, so I’d better get moving. My thanks for the tea and the conversation.”

“Who’s Twyla?”

“My fiancée’s daughter. She’s eight and believes a deal’s a deal. I disappoint her at my peril.”

“I believe a deal’s a deal too, James Knightley.” Sid stuck out her hand, and James shook it, then held her hand a moment longer.

“Mac likes you.”

“I like him too.”

“He likes you a lot. I can see why.”

He brought her knuckles to his lips in an old-fashioned gesture of gentlemanly respect, and left her in her kitchen, her expression perplexed.

* * *

Why
hadn’t Mac disclosed that his father died on my farm?
Of course, any parent’s death would be hard to discuss, but should it be a secret?