keep the present and future from capsizing, too.
Suddenly, Zander was at Susannah’s elbow, wiping a dirty rag across his own sweaty face. “Little brat broke the shaking machine.”
“What?”
Susannah looked again toward Eli and realized belatedly that the machine should not have been silent and still. It should have been roaring and grumbling away, moving among the trees, grabbing trunks with its tail-like pincers, and jostling dime-sized peaches from branches like a blush-colored rain.
She sniffed, and finally she smelled it—the stench of steam and burning rubber wafting through the orchard, a dark undercurrent below the sweetness of the fruit-littered ground.
Eli seemed to think she was staring at him, because he smiled again, carving dimples into his cheeks. He pointed the empty water bottle toward the shaking machine, then used it to draw an imaginary line across his throat.
The message was clear. The machine was dead. And Eli thought it was mildly amusing.
Well, he could afford to consider this a little gift from the go-home-early gods, but Susannah wanted to cuss. It could take days to get it repaired. And now that every fruit grower in central Texas was in the throes of thinning season, where would she be able to borrow another one in the meantime?
“I knew it was too good to be true,” Zander muttered. “I knew all this perfect employee crap was just an act.”
“It’s not Eli’s fault.” Somehow Susannah kept her voice cool. “It broke on you last year, too, Zander. It’s just old. We need a new one.”
“We can’t afford a new one.”
She slapped her work gloves into the palm of her hand, trying to hold back the retort that sprang to her lips. Of course she knew they couldn’t afford one. If they hadn’t been in dire straits, did Zander think she would have sold herself into a year of matrimonial bondage?
“Maybe,” she said, “Chase will loan us his.”
“Yes. You should ask Trent about it ASAP.” Zander frowned. “Where is he, anyhow? Haven’t seen him around all weekend.”
That was, of course, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Where was her brand-new husband? He had slept at Everly every night, she knew that. That first night he’d used the sofa, but after that he’d confiscated her grandfather’s bedroom. He came in late, then left again early in the morning.
Which was fine with her, of course. The less she saw of him, the better. Still, she couldn’t help wondering where he went. To Chase’s ranch? Maybe. Running a ranch that large could easily eat up your weekends, too.
But she couldn’t help wondering whether he might be going somewhere…softer.
To someone softer.
After all, he’d done it before.
She forced the image out of her mind. As long as he satisfied the will’s requirements by spending the nights under her roof, she didn’t give a damn about his days. And if she kept letting him disrupt her concentration, she was going to be in even bigger trouble than she was already.
Her gaze drifted to the other workers, who were still moving toward them, following the machine’s path, hand-thinning the small branches that hadn’t let go of their bounty.
So much to do…so many people to pay.
Her mind began performing calculations at warp speed. If this was a big repair, and it sure smelled that way, it would eat into the payroll, and then she’d be behind on the—
“Die, you bastard! Die!”
Her heart pounding, she wheeled quickly, just in time to see that Eli had grabbed a shovel and was violently slashing at the ground, just a couple of yards away from the shaker’s cab.
For a split second, as he jumped and hollered, she wondered whether Zander and Trent been right about Eli all along. Had she hired a madman?
But then she saw the rubbery-looking, writhing coils at Eli’s feet. A shiver sped down her spine.
He was killing a very large rattlesnake.
Though it seemed to be happening in slow motion, it probably was over in less than ten seconds, and the poor creature lay mangled in the dirt, thoroughly destroyed. Several other workers, including Zander, gathered to get a better look.
Eli’s cocky smile was gone, and his cheeks were pale beneath the sunburn. He stared down at his palms, bloodied by the pitted metal on the old shovel’s handle.
Then he raised a stricken face and glanced over at Susannah, as if he feared he might have done the wrong thing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, in a voice that belonged to a much younger boy. “I just saw him there, and I panicked.”
If she hadn’t been his employer, she would have put her arm around his shoulder, the same way she might have comforted Nikki after a bad day at school. She settled for offering a reassuring smile.
“You did great. Come on, let’s go back and get that blood cleaned up. Zander will take care of all this.”
She ignored the older man’s look of irritation. The boy’s hands needed tending. Besides, it was her fault he was hurt. That shovel should have been replaced years ago, like so many other things on this spread.
She sighed as she started the truck, hearing the hesitation of a battery about to go dead.
How many problems could she handle at once?
* * *
FIVE YEARS AGO, when Trent had accepted Chase’s offer to be the ranch manager at the Double C, he had worked twenty-hour days for more than a year, sleeping on a cot in the office, determined not to let Chase down.
He’d had so much to prove. He knew what everyone had thought when he’d left town six years earlier, after the fire, while Paul still lay dying in that hospital bed.
They’d thought he was a bad-tempered son of a bitch, who had been playing out of his league for years and finally got exposed as the loser he really was. He knew that’s what they’d thought, because that was what he’d thought, too.
So he’d run. He hadn’t known what else to do. The whole tragedy had been too much to stand. He was only nineteen, and he’d messed up everything he cared about in the whole stinking world. He’d cheated on Susannah, and then, in a fit of pique, he’d punched his best friend, and somehow rained disaster down on them all.
Sometimes, now, he could hardly remember how it happened. But sometimes it played over in his head, as if it were a videotape caught in a slow-motion loop.
He had been in a rotten mood that night, furious with himself for succumbing to Missy Snowdon’s cheap charms, and praying Susannah would never find out. They’d all gone to a bar for dinner, and he had unwisely let himself drink too much. Susannah and Paul had been flirting, and by the third beer, courtesy of friends older than the legal limit, Trent hadn’t been able to pretend he didn’t care.
He’d said
