Bloom of love, p.9
Bloom of Love, page 9
This was probably a gorgeous room at one point. Oh, to have seen it in its heyday!
Right then, she felt something run across her foot and she looked down just quick enough to see the tip of a mouse tail disappear under the trash.
“Ahh!” she yelled, her hand over her chest, her heart pumping a million miles an hour. She was posed to make a run for the door when a sparkle in the dim lighting caught her eye. There was some sort of figurine on the marble mantlepiece she hadn’t even noticed until that moment, buried as it was under the trash. Pulling her shirt up over her nose to block out the smell, she forced herself to climb the less-precarious-looking piles between her and the fireplace, hoping against hope she wasn’t walking across a warren of mice or, heaven forbid, rats, as she worked her way across the room.
She plucked the figurine from the mantel, trying not to touch it any more than she absolutely had to, and tilted it towards the weak light from the filthy windows, settling her reading glasses into place so she could have a good look at it. It was a mother cat and her kitten, posed with the mom giving her baby a bath. Both animals’ eyes glittered. Carla rotated the cool porcelain in her hands, letting the light catch and shine in the depths of the green jewels.
Carla wasn’t exactly a jewelry connoisseur, but she was almost positive these were emeralds.
“Whoa,” she breathed, and shoved her glasses back on top of her head.
She scrambled back over the mountains of junk, hoping she didn’t get stuck with rusty metal on the way and die of tetanus, squeezed back through the doorway, and hurried down the hall, sidling past some crazy tall piles that seemed to be defying gravity. One of these piles could fall over and squash me to death.
She tried not to dwell on that, either.
“Keila,” she hollered as she fought her way back to the main foyer. “I found something!”
She heard scuffling emanating from one of the wings and mentally crossed her fingers that it was Keila on her way back, and not some wild animal with rabies. When Keila pushed her way through a mostly closed doorway – such a tight fit, one of Carla’s thighs wouldn’t fit through, let alone her whole body – and popped out the other side, Carla murmured a quick thank you to the heavens that she was not, in fact, a raccoon intent on eating her for breakfast.
“Look!” she said, holding the delicate figurine out for her new friend to see. “I think the cats’ eyes are emeralds.”
Keila peered at it, but didn’t take it from her. “Pretty,” she said unenthusiastically. “Are you going to keep it?”
“Keep it?” Carla gaped at her. “But, I think these are real emeralds!”
“They’re small,” Keila said dismissively. “If you like it, you can keep it. If you don’t want it, do what you’d like with it. If you pitched it back into The Hoard, I think it’d swallow it whole and burp out a thank-you.”
Carla laughed even as she cradled the figurine in her hands. If Keila could afford to be so cavalier with emeralds – even small ones – she was playing on a completely different financial field than Carla was. Maybe she did have the kind of cash necessary to bring this mansion back to its former glory.
As the group headed back outside into the warm sunshine, leaving the overwhelming stench behind them, Carla breathed in deeply, appreciating clean, sweet air like she never had before. She could hear Yesenia laying out a work schedule with Keila, promising to ask other friends and family members if they’d like to come help even as Nieves was back on her phone, texting again.
Carla searched through the detritus that always managed to accumulate no matter how often she cleaned out her van, and finally found a soft scrap of cloth to wrap around the figurine to protect it. She’d clean it up and take it with her the next time she went to Boise. See if she could find an antique dealer who could tell her more about it. If it ended up being some priceless antique, she’d have to give it back to her friend, no matter what Keila had said.
She secretly hoped it wasn’t worth anything at all – she was already falling in love with the sweet look on the momma’s face as she licked her baby clean. Carla’d find a place of honor for it in the shop.
“Ready?” she asked when Yesenia seemed to have wrapped up her discussion with Keila.
“Yeah. Nice again to have met you. See you tomorrow?” She stuck her hand out to shake Keila’s, and then climbed into the van. Once her younger sister and Autumn were also in, Carla started up her van, waved to her new friend, and carefully made her way back down the driveway, doing a slightly better job of avoiding the potholes this time around.
“Well, you’re in for an adventure, aren’t you?” Carla asked Yesenia with a small laugh once they got back onto pavement. “I hope you’re excited about this. I didn’t mean to volunteer you for something quite that nuts.”
Yesenia sent her a happy grin. “This is more perfect than you know,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve been trying to find a good job that would work around my schedule at Danyard’s, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Keila seems happy to have me put together a schedule that works for me, and says she’ll pay cash every week. I don’t mind cleaning up a few piles of junk.”
Carla laughed at that. “If that’s what you consider to be a few piles of junk,” she said, still chuckling, “I can only imagine what you were like as a teenager with your mom telling you to clean your room.”
As the conversation continued to swirl around the van, Carla thought back to her new friend. There were a few pieces missing to the puzzle here. Why was a gorgeous woman from Boston here in little ol’ Nowhere, Idaho? Why was she buying a monstrous mansion that possessed more major problems than it had bathrooms? How could she afford to buy it, let alone remodel it?
Keila Wilson was a mystery, and people person that Carla was, nothing intrigued her more.
Chapter 13
Christian
Good. Then pour the wine.
~Westley in The Princess Bride
Christian heard the rumble of Adam’s truck long before he spotted it, and just at the sound, his heart sped up.
“Hey, I need to go talk to the vet for a sec,” he said casually to Dave. “Be back in a minute.”
He headed out of the barn and into the bright sunshine, squinting as his eyes adjusted. It was a hot one today, and he instinctively hunted out a bit of shade under a lean-to, to wait for the vet. Adam was there to check on a couple of cows with a nasty greenish discharge, but while he was there…
It’d been a couple of weeks since Yesenia had dropped the bad news on his lap – a nuclear bomb that would destroy his life and all that he wanted from it. He’d struggled with it every day since, knowing that he should break up with Carla, but not able to make himself do it. He’d prided himself growing up on the self-control that he had – how hard he could work. How dedicated he could be to completing a project.
But when it came to breaking up with Carla, he’d found his self-control had gone AWOL on him. A better man than him could let her go, but he couldn’t do it.
If he wasn’t capable of forcing himself to let her find someone more worthy, though, then he could damn well make sure that she wouldn’t have to give up her cats for him. It was the least he could do.
“Hey, Christian!” Adam called, swinging out of his truck, bag in hand. “How’s it goin’?”
“Good, good. It’s a cooker today.”
The tall, lanky vet joined him in the shade, leaning up against the other side of the post as he took his cowboy hat off to fan his face. “July is always the worst of it,” he agreed. “Makes a body want to spend the whole month in a lake. Just get in and don’t come back out again until the weather has a mind to be decent again.”
Christian chuckled politely at that, and then dove head first into it. “Is there a way to get rid of cat allergies?” he asked bluntly.
“Cat? I didn’t know the Millers had cats,” Adam said, looking around as if suddenly expecting one to jump out of the shadows at him.
“No, although Stetson keeps saying he wants to get a couple of barn cats. Keep the mice down.” Adam nodded approvingly at that. “It’s my…girlfriend.” His tongue suddenly felt too big for his mouth.
Was Carla his girlfriend? They’d gone on plenty of dates at this point, but he hadn’t formally asked her. Was he supposed to ask? He didn’t know. There was so much about dating that he didn’t know a damn thing about.
“Oh yeah, I heard about that! Kylie told me about some big date the Miller girls helped you put together down at the old mill with Carla. You’re making the rest of us look bad, you know. Now Kylie’s asking me when I’m gonna rent out the old mill and decorate it to the nines for a big date with her.”
“I figure Zane set the bar so high with his date with his nanny that the rest of us are screwed,” Christian admitted baldly.
Adam let out a bark of laughter at that. “The bar keeps gettin’ higher, that’s for damn sure. All I had to do to win over Kylie was hire her. Next thing I know, guys are going to have to rent helicopters to take a girl out in the valley.”
Christian let out his own belly laugh at that. A helicopter ride in a tux was one of the date ideas he’d been sure Carla was going to require if he was ever going to talk her into going on a date with him. Thank God that theory hadn’t ended up being true.
“So Carla has a cat, and it’s causing you allergies?” Adam mused, bringing the conversation back around. At Christian’s nod, Adam said, “I’m an animal doctor, not a human doctor, to be clear. But from what I understand, it’s best to start out with allergy pills like Benadryl, and if that doesn’t keep it under control, you can look at doing shots.”
“Shots?” Christian tried to play it calm, but his heart went into overdrive just hearing the word. He didn’t like needles.
“Yup. It ain’t guaranteed, but the idea is, they give you a series of shots and over time, your body stops attacking the cat dander and just ignores it instead. It’s a sight easier to just not be around cats, though.” He shot Christian a sideways glance. “How serious are you about Carla?”
Christian shrugged, not sure he knew the answer, and not willing to tell the vet in any case. Adam nodded sagely and left it at that. Just one of the many things to like about the vet.
“Well, I better get to it,” Adam said, pushing away from the pole and settling his hat back on. “The cows are in the solitary corral, right?”
“Yeah, we separated them as soon as we noticed the problem,” Christian said, and they walked together towards the pen where Stetson kept the cows that needed extra attention. “Stetson’s out in the back forty, so I’ll help you out.”
After the vet finished his work and headed off to his next appointment, Christian decided to take a quick stroll up to the main house and get a glass of Carmelita’s world-famous lemonade to cool down with, and maybe oh-so-casually ask her for some help while he was there.
“Christian,” Carmelita said with her soft, Hispanic accent, beaming at him as he came in through the kitchen door. “It is hot today. Do you want some lemonade? You come sit at the table. I will get you a glass, and some cookies too.”
He smiled to himself. With Carmelita around, no one would ever starve to death. She wouldn’t allow it.
“Here, here,” she said, fussing over him and setting out a spread worthy of a king at the kitchen table. “I will get you more cookies. Stetson works you too hard. You are only skin and bones. You must eat more.”
Just then, he heard the crashing of metal against metal, and even before he turned to look, he was sure he knew who it was.
“I’m sorry, abuelita,” Flint wailed, crawling out of the pantry over clanking pots and pans. Once on the other side, the sturdy three year old climbed to his feet and threw his arms around Carmelita’s legs. “I was going to make you a secret pie.”
“You are my best pie-maker,” Carmelita agreed solemnly, winking at Christian over the blond boy’s head. “You pick out which bowl you want to use, and then you need to put the rest back on the shelf. I am too old to bend over so much.”
Flint seized a huge bowl out of the bottom of the pile, causing the rest to crash and rattle yet again, and held it up triumphantly. “We will make a secret HUGE pie!” he said gleefully.
Christian laughed into his glass of lemonade. Stetson and Jennifer should count their lucky stars every night to have such a wonderful abuelita for Flint such as Carmelita.
“After you two are done making your huge pie,” Christian said, “could I talk you into doing a favor for me?”
“Of course, of course,” Carmelita said, bringing over a large ham sandwich and chips, not even asking if he was hungry. Maybe she knew he was always hungry. “What is going on?”
“I’m dating Carla Grahame.” The words were hard to say, but he managed to get them out. Would it ever be easy to refer to someone as his girlfriend? Even someone as amazing as Carla?
“I heard this from Jennifer!” the housekeeper said with a delighted clap of her hands. “Flint and I, we made your dinner that night at the mill. I like Carla very much. You have good taste in women. She has meat on her bones,” she said with satisfaction.
Flint had finished stacking the pots, pans, and bowls back on the pantry shelf in a haphazard fashion that was sure to topple back over at any moment, and was now busy tugging a chair over to the counter so he could stand on it as he cooked.
“Get the sugar and salt out and put them on the counter,” Carmelita told her little helper, and then turned back to Christian. “Now, you said you are dating Carla. What can I help you with?”
“A big picnic basket,” he said, figuring he’d better get to the point before Flint pulled her attention away again. “Carla surprised me one morning with a basket out in the field, and I thought it’d be fun to return the favor. Take her up into the mountains and treat her to a picnic. Get away from this heat.”
After their tractor date, they’d gone out almost every weekend, and after a meal at a local restaurant, would go on long walks around the lake, talking and laughing and getting to know each other. He had yet to take her back to his place – his single-wide trailer was not good enough for someone like Carla – but he hadn’t seen her place yet, either. Every time he offered to drop her off at her house, she would say she had a few more things to wrap up at the shop so he should drop her off there instead.
All of this meant that somehow, after a month of dates, they still hadn’t gotten past first base. But a picnic up in the mountains with no one around and a stream trickling by?
Christian had a lot of plans for this date, and only some of it included food.
“¡Excelente!” Carmelita exclaimed, and clearly excited about whatever would make his beloved abuelita excited, Flint began clapping. Carmelita laughed and leaned over to press a kiss to his forehead. “It is very exciting, no?” she said, pulling the boy in for a quick hug. “Christian here is a smart man.” She looked over at Christian. “I will make you a big basket filled with food. Something to make Carla fall in love with you,” and winked.
“I love you,” Flint said, and began banging on the counter with a wooden spoon.
“Yes, yes, but maybe not so much noise,” Carmelita said, rescuing the spoon from the boy’s hands.
With a wave goodbye at the pair, Christian slipped out the back door. Seeing Flint today reminded him all over again about his bond with Yesenia almost from the day she was born. Although he was damn proud of how she’d turned out, a part of him missed having his own little shadow, following him everywhere and “helping” him at every turn, whether he wanted the help or not.
He would be forty in another two years. If he was going to have kids of his own, he’d better get a move on.
Did Carla want kids?
It was too soon to ask, but he needed to gather up the courage to broach the topic soon. He’d always wanted kids – the more, the merrier – and watching Stetson’s kid grow up over the past three years had made that crystal clear for him, along with the hoards of his own nieces and nephews.
Kids and Carla…
Somehow, that wasn’t nearly as scary as it should’ve been.
Chapter 14
Carla
What he meant was, I love you.
~Grandfather in The Princess Bride
Hiking along a beautiful wooded trail, Carla was busy questioning her life choices. When Christian had promised her a “big date,” she’d taken her time picking out her sexiest underwear and matching panties.
Satin and lace, they made even her look sexy.
Unfortunately, satin thong underwear wasn’t the best choice for hiking, and as she tried to discretely un-wedge the material from her butt crack, she began to think she should’ve stuck to her granny panties. Not to mention that her bra, although it made her tits look fabulous, wasn’t really meant to hold the girls in place during athletic pursuits.
Note to self: Next time, ask more questions about what, exactly, you’re going to be doing on your “big date.”
After a few more switchbacks, the trail opened up and Carla gasped with surprise. Okay, so maybe it was actually her just gasping for breath after that steep climb, but she was surprised, nonetheless.
“Do you like it?” Christian asked, the nerves showing a little more on his face than he probably realized.
He cared if she liked it. A lot.
She reached over and took his hand, pulling his work-hardened knuckles to her mouth and kissing them. “A lot,” she whispered.
And she did. How someone could not was beyond her. The meadow was picture-perfect, like the scene from a postcard.
