Chapter Fourteen
ANNIE RESCHEDULED SOME of the sessions she’d originally canceled for the week, including an informal activity at three o’clock. She sent out a round of text messages. Five guys showed, which wasn’t bad on last-minute notice.
“Grab some shovels and buckets,” she told them.
Would have been nice if Cole had come.
As soon as the thought surfaced, she shook it off. She needed to be glad that he wasn’t here. She’d been serious when she’d told him she couldn’t help him anymore as his therapist. She had to be circumspect at work.
And outside of work?
He wouldn’t let her go to the feedings alone. Probably only because his default setting was protector.
Don’t read anything into it.
Maybe she should have sent him away when she found him waiting for her in the parking lot, but she couldn’t.
Because he needed the normalcy of the chores?
Because she liked his company?
Both? Neither?
Her thoughts and feelings were a swirling mess when it came to Cole.
She was smart enough to know when she was in trouble.
Yet when he lumbered up as the group headed to the back of the buildings, her heart leapt. She acknowledged it, but remained firm in her decision not to encourage the attraction.
She nodded a greeting, then turned to lead the group, not stopping until they reached the designated spot.
“So we’ll mark out the spots for the trees, then start digging the holes. We need holes about two inches deeper and two inches larger all around than the root balls. Everybody who didn’t get a shovel needs to start carrying water.”
None of them ever complained about having to do something physical. Getting them to talk or consider taking some of the alternative-treatment methods seriously was like pulling teeth. But if hard work and muscle were needed, they were there.
Cole carried water. Digging one-handed would have been awkward for him. Annie made sure not to pay any more attention to him than to the others. He was preoccupied, doing the work, but his attention was clearly not on his task. He almost planted one of the trees without taking the burlap off the root ball.
“Why are we planting two of everything?” Dale, a recovering burn victim and former marine, shouted over. “OCD?”
At the moment, the brand-new orchard consisted of two cherry trees, two apples, two pears, two plums, two sour cherries, and two peaches.
“I’m experimenting with what’ll grow well in this soil,” Annie said. “We’ll plant more of whatever produces well.”
The property had plenty of space, and if they grew more fruit than the cafeteria needed, they could always donate the rest to the Broslin food pantry.
“Why not plant one of each, then?” Dale wiped his hands on his jeans. “If you’re not sure they’ll all make it.”
“Most fruit trees need two of a kind for cross-pollination,” Kyle, a farm boy from Iowa, told him.
“They don’t look too good.” Dale had doubt written all over his city-boy face.
“They’re going dormant for the winter.” Kyle rolled his eyes.
And Annie added, “Best time to plant them.”
The trees wouldn’t bear fruit for years. None of the men who planted today would be here for the harvest. They wouldn’t benefit. They were planting for others.
They talked about that as they worked on the orchard. Annie considered the concept of continuity important. She wanted them to viscerally understand that there was a future—a future that could be bettered by simply working on things today.
She hoped the message reached Dale, specifically.
Most of her patients lived in the past—had trouble letting go of the past, of things that had happened to them, things they had done. She had to coax most of them to live more in the present. Not Dale. Dale lived too much in the present. If something didn’t work right now, it was never going to work. If he had trouble sleeping right now, he was never going to sleep again. She’d done several visualization exercises with him in the past couple of weeks about what his ideal future would look like. He had a lot of trouble with that.
In his mind, the way things were—especially bad things—was the way they were always going to be.
Annie wished Trevor had been able to attend the tree planting, but Trev had PT. The planting would have probably been too strenuous for him anyway. Titanium screws held his neck together.
The guys did a great job with the task, the trees popping into the ground one after the other. Annie was pleased.
She was also far too aware of Cole in a way she wasn’t aware of the others. She wanted to think the reason was because he was bigger than everyone else. And, also, she had to be aware of him to make sure she turned toward him when she spoke, so he could read her lips. Except, if she was honest with herself, her awareness of him went beyond that.
She had to admit that she was aware of him as a man. When he passed by with a bucket of water and brushed her arm, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
She was aware of his shifting muscles as she watched him lift a hundred-pound root ball with one hand. Every time he came within ten feet, her entire body focused on him.
She had to get over her stupid and extremely inappropriate attraction before he noticed. And before others noticed. None of the men were fools. If anyone figured out how stupid she was being, her credibility with her patients would be ruined. Not to mention her continued job prospects at Hope Hill.
“I’ll take that.” Cole popped up at her elbow as she reached for the cooler the cafeteria had packed for them.
She’d wanted to eat at least a snack outside with the group under the sky, in the orchard they were planting—another connection.
Cole reached around her and took the cooler, his arm brushing her shoulder. Once again, lightning sliced through her. Before she could step back, he was gone, taking the cooler to the picnic table in the center of the future orchard and dropping it in the middle.
Dale opened the top. “Egg-salad sandwiches.” He picked one along with a bottle of water, then looked back in. “Got some tuna too.”
The guys gathered around and sat. Annie rubbed her arm where her skin tingled, then went to join them.
She had no plans to sneak in any therapy. A shared meal, community, nature, and good work all contributed healing power.
The picnic table could easily sit eight average people, but some of the guys were pretty big, especially Cole and Dale. Their warrior bodies took up a lot of space. Only when she stood next to them did Annie notice that there wasn’t enough room for her at the table.
Cole sat on one end. As Annie prepared to sit on an overturned bucket, Cole leaned into the row of massive soldiers next to him and pushed them over. He barely exerted himself, but the row moved, until Dale fell off on the other end.
“Make room for the lady,” Cole mumbled under his breath as the others laughed, Dale taking his dethronement in stride and claiming the bucket.
Nothing for Annie to do then but sit next to Cole. She made sure to keep an inch or two between them as she dropped her hands onto her lap. She didn’t want to reach over Cole for a sandwich and accidentally press a breast against his arm. She wasn’t that hungry anyway.
“Can I grab you something?”
They were so close to each other, she could see the golden flecks that ringed his dark irises. His gaze dropped to her mouth as he waited for her answer.
He looked at her mouth a lot. She knew he had a perfectly good reason. Awareness zinged through her anyway.
Knock it off.
“An egg-salad sandwich and a bottle of green tea would be great.”
He turned to grab what she’d asked for and handed it over, keeping his gaze on her mouth in case she asked for something more.
The guys talked about the game they’d watched on TV the night before. Cole didn’t join in.
She was as acutely aware of his silence as she was of his body. It occurred to her that his need to read lips might be even more isolating than she’d realized before. Maybe he felt uncomfortable watching other men’s lips. Or maybe other men didn’t talk as much to him because having another guy stare at your mouth for an extended amount of time was weird. Not to mention, trying to follow a conversation among six people had to be challenging. Just finding the speaker would take time, making Cole miss part of the conversation. And if two people spoke at the same time?
Annie didn’t have a large family, but she was friendly with a lot of people. She talked to a dozen different people a day. Cole’s isolation made her heart hurt. She wanted to lean into his massive side and put her arms around him.
Bad idea.
She snapped herself right out of it and was so studiously professional for the rest of the day, it made her teeth ache.
After the break, they finished planting the trees. All went well, until the very last one, when Dale stabbed the shovel into his foot, right through his sneakers. He swore. Blood ran everywhere.
Kyle just laughed. “City boy.”
The others too were more amused than worried. Apparently, their idea of grave injury was on a different level than Annie’s.
Annie’s head turned woozy at the sight of flowing crimson. She stepped forward anyway, her heart pounding. “Let me see.”
Cole came through between them like a bear galloping through the woods. He tackled Dale at the waist and kept going, slinging the big fellow over his shoulder. “I’ll take him in for first aid.”
“Put me down, dammit.” Dale’s voice was strangled with embarrassment.
Cole couldn’t have heard, but he responded anyway, probably because Dale was trying to break away. “Wouldn’t want you to die from your little paper cut.”
The rest of the guys laughed, then went back to work. They watered everything they’d just planted. The forecast promised plenty of rain, but they still gave two full buckets—carried from the showers at the pool complex—to each tree.
After they finished and cleaned up the site, they headed in for a real meal—dinner. Annie usually ate with the patients, but today she sat at the staff table and chatted with Dan Ambrose about a new study on behavioral therapy. By the time she finished eating, she needed to head back home again.
Cole waited for her in the parking lot as usual, leaning against his silver pickup, looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
“I’ll drive you.”
She was ridiculously aware of his gaze on her lips, his wide shoulders, his strength that had propelled her out of the pool that morning . . . and how much she liked his company.
“You don’t have to do this. It’s not your job to protect me.”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I’ve decided I like driving a pickup and doing the country-boy thing. It’s definitely not Chicago’s South Side. And I’m finding the gentleness of the llamas healing. As a therapist, you shouldn’t discourage me from a healing experience.”
“Don’t mock my llamas,” she said, but got into his pickup.
“Who says I’m mocking?”
She tried not to like his wry humor so much. She failed. Gave up. “Thank you for helping Dale.” He’d been back by dinner, with stitches.
“The guy needs to cut down on the bean burgers.”
“You didn’t have to carry him.”
For a long moment, Cole didn’t respond. Then he said, “You don’t like blood.”
Oh. Had that been why he’d barreled into the situation? To get Dale’s bleeding foot away from her as fast as possible? Had he done it to spare her?
“Why?” he asked.
And because her defenses were suddenly down, she responded. “Childhood trauma.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Hey, who’s the therapist here?” She tried to regain their earlier, light tone, resisting the dark memories that threatened to pull her back into the past.
“Hey, look who’s stalling.”
When she still wouldn’t say anything, he asked, “Would this be related to Randy?”
Her chest clenched. “Do you always remember every word everybody says?”
He shook his head. “I remember the people I want to kill.”
“Don’t make me put homicidal impulses in your file.”
“Those threats are getting old. You’re not my therapist.”
“You should keep up with the green therapy on your own.” She jumped on the subject change. She didn’t want to talk about Randy.
Cole huffed. “Let me guess. Barefoot. Will the earth absorb my murderous impulses through the soles of my feet?”
“Laugh all you want. It works. Ecotherapy solves problems.”
“So does a nine-millimeter bullet,” he said under his breath.
His massive biceps stretched his navy cotton shirt. He was 100 percent male, 100 percent soldier. Nothing she said was going to soften him. And she didn’t really want him to change. She liked him way too much the way he was.
Once they arrived at her house, Cole helped her muck the soiled straw out of the garage and lay down new bedding.
“You need a barn,” he called after her as she picked up the wheelbarrow handles.
“It’s on my wish list.”
“So what’s this Randy guy’s last name again?” he asked in a way-too-casual tone as she passed him.
She turned so he could read her lips. “Give it a rest.”
She came back in, warm from all the physical work. She’d be more comfortable finishing up in fewer layers. She stopped inside the open garage door and started to pull off her sweatshirt.
“Stop.” His voice was strong enough to freeze her with the shirt over her head. “Don’t move.”
“Is it a spider?”
She loved all God’s creatures, but . . . she had nightmares that the tarantula she’d rescued last month had hidden her eggs somewhere in the garage before her untimely death. In those dreams, the eggs hatched, and the baby spiders came to get her for not protecting their mother from the goat’s chomping teeth.
“Get it off! Please get it off.”
Dammit, he couldn’t see what she was saying. She tried to wiggle her face free, but he was next to her by then, and he caught her wrist.
Thunder rumbled through his voice, the tone sharper than she’d ever heard from him. “Who did this?”
She had no idea what he was talking about until his finger glanced over the naked skin of her rib cage. Obviously, her T-shirt had ridden up. Then she forgot about the T-shirt as she realized what he was talking about. She’d been put off too, when she’d changed earlier and seen all that black and blue on her side.
She tugged to pull her arms down, but he held them fast. She wiggled her head and finally freed her face. “I hit the water the wrong way when I dove into the pool.”
The message his dark eyes were transmitting switched like a traffic light from murder to a more subdued All right, nobody has to die. He quietly swore as he let her go, tugged her T-shirt down, tugged the sweatshirt off, and hung it on the peg by the door.
He pointed at the stacked bags of pig feed by the wall. “Take a break.”
She did, but only because her skin was still tingling where he’d touched her, and she needed to regroup.
“What else do you need done?” he asked.
“The animals need to be watered.”
“I’ll do that. You sit right there and tell me all about ecotherapy. I’m ready to listen.”
Sure he was. “Don’t think I don’t know you’re faking interest just to keep me sitting.” But, of course, she couldn’t resist. “What would you like to know?”
“Did you learn it in college?”
“I studied psychology. Kept feeling that I needed more. Like if someone had panic attacks, we just tried to make it easier to deal with them. Mantras and visualizations to make it less scary, to make it go away faster. I wanted a solution that would prevent the panic attacks from happening in the first place. Thyroid disease or even celiac can cause anxiety. No amount of talking about your feelings is going to fix that.”
He watched her lips as he worked.
“I did a lot of extra reading,” she told him. “I believe that physical and mental health are part of a larger system and can’t be treated separately. Our physical health and mental health are not separate from the health of our environment.”
“Makes sense.”
“I interned at a counseling center that had all these middle-class women as their clients. Great houses in the suburbs, great jobs, or some didn’t even have to work. And they were all falling apart. I swear some of them were in worse shape than the military vets I’m treating now. These women were popping pills like you wouldn’t believe. Not to mention self-medicating with wine.”
Cole quirked an eyebrow.
“These women told me,” she continued, “that they felt as if the world was rushing by them at a hundred miles an hour. And they felt impelled to keep up, even at the cost of their health and relationships. A million meetings at work, then a million after-school activities for the kids, then making costumes for the plays and baking cupcakes for the fund-raisers. And the hairdresser and facials and the trips to the gym for maintenance, and shopping for the right clothes for just the right image.”
Cole leaned the broom in the corner, outside the llama pen so neither Esmeralda nor Dorothy the pig could eat it. “How did you fix them?”
“I didn’t fix them. I can’t fix anyone. All I can do is share some ideas people can use to fix themselves.”
“And what did you share?” His gaze hung on her face, as he was genuinely interested.
“Not me. My mentor. I was basically there to learn and handle the paperwork. But Susan shared that it’s OK to get off the train. She got me thinking that maybe what’s outside the train is actually your true life. All the little moments when you stop to smell the roses. A lot of the other stuff is just noise.”
“Pretty deep for an intern.”
“I was a total nerd. I just followed Susan around, when she would put up with me, and read the rest of the time.” She’d spent pretty much every minute of her college years with her nose in a book.
Cole leaned against the door frame. “What did you do after college?”
“Worked with inner-city kids in Philly. There’s a concept called nature deficit disorder. The idea is that not spending enough time in nature negatively affects people’s psyches in ways they don’t realize. A foundation put up the money, and we did nature activities with at-risk kids who live in the concrete jungle. Spent a lot of time at Fairmount Park after school.”
“Did it work?”
“Spectacularly. Missed days at school went down by forty percent. Incidents of in-school violence went down by fifty-four percent. Graduation rate went up by thirty percent.”
He watched her, and he must have picked up on her mixed emotions, because he asked, “But?”
Melancholy filled her. “We had a four-year grant. The foundation’s idea is to give worthy causes three to four years to prove their concept. They figure other investors or some state or federal funds will take over at that point.”
“And that didn’t happen?”
“The city didn’t have the budget. The state is into rural development right now. They think Philly already gets more than its share of state funds. As for federal aid, there are areas of the country in much worse trouble than the Northeast. We couldn’t get funding. The program shut down.”
“You hated leaving the kids.”
Someone else might have said, Tough losing a job like that. But Cole knew what hurt her most. The thought swirled around in her chest, unsure where to nest.
“Some of the kids still keep in touch. We text.”
“I’m glad you found your way here.”
“I was lucky that a position opened up at Hope Hill. It’s not like there are a million openings for ecotherapists.”
He pushed away from the door frame to pick up an empty bucket. “Tree hugging is vastly underrated. It’ll catch on. I mean, what’s not to like? Right?”
“Definitely the next big thing.” It hit her how much she loved spending time with him like this. How could the two of them together feel so right even as she knew, with her rational mind, that a relationship between them would be all wrong?
When she heard a car pull up, she was grateful for the distraction. She went to see who it was. Then her stomach clenched when she spotted Joey’s camo-painted pickup in the driveway behind Cole’s.
Joey cracked the driver’s side door to get out.
Dammit, Joey. “I can’t talk to you right now.”
He paused with the door half-open and pushed his red baseball hat up his forehead an inch with a finger. “I can’t take a no for an answer again. You have to give me time to explain.”
Then Cole strode past her, heading Joey off before Joey could even get out. When Cole pushed the pickup’s door closed, Joey rolled down his window, a wary look on his face. “Who are you?”
Cole said, “You need to leave. You won’t be stopping by again.”
Outrage reddened Joey’s cheeks. “I’m Annie’s boyfriend. Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the guy you’ll be seeing through your tears when I rip your balls off.”
Good grief.
Annie flinched as she stood in the doorway. She didn’t need Cole to defend her. But she knew she couldn’t stop Cole, and Joey needed a wake-up call. As unpleasant as their conversation was, maybe it was something Joey would finally take seriously.
“You don’t come by,” Cole said. “You don’t call. You don’t run into her in town.” He took a step closer to the pickup. “If you see her on the street, you turn and start walking in the other direction before she even notices you. Am I clear?”
Joey cast a hurt look at Annie. “Don’t do this to me. You can’t choose this guy over me, Annie. Not him.”
Cole fisted his left hand and punched the pickup’s door so hard he dented it.
“What the hell, man? You can’t do that!” Joey scrambled to roll up his window. When the dented door wouldn’t let him, he switched his efforts to backing out of the driveway. Then he was off, his mouth moving, probably swearing. Annie could no longer hear him.
By the time Cole came into the garage, Annie had the first-aid kit ready.
“Anger management. It can do wonders.” She twisted the top off the peroxide bottle. “Let me see that hand.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to. Having to look at a few drops of blood isn’t going to kill me. Neither of us believes in indulging our weaknesses.”
Cole held out his busted knuckles for her. The damage wasn’t as bad as it’d been back at the gas station.
He scowled. “Somebody had to talk to the kid.”
“That was you talking?” Annie shook her head as she cleaned Cole up. “Band-Aid?”
“Don’t bother,” he said, and went back to work.
When Cole finished filling the outside troughs with water, they fed the skunk kittens together, then drove back to Hope Hill.
“Thanks,” she said into the silence.
“For what?”
“Everything.”
He nodded.
Come midnight, he once again insisted on going with her. She didn’t even bother resisting. She’d been dreading having to go back to the house alone in the middle of the night.
Cole said little. He was preoccupied. Annie was too. The whole time he was helping her, she lectured herself over and over. Don’t get used to this. Don’t get used to this.
The man in the window watched Annie return to Hope Hill in the middle of the night, once again with Cole. Anger built a fire in his gut.
Were they sleeping together? They had to be.
He’d seen that kiss at the pool, had been walking by and happened to look through the glass.
Rage fisted his hands now as it had then.
He did not share.
As Annie had not been smart enough to heed his previous warnings, he was going to have to be clearer.
He thought of her stupid pig. Then the one-eyed donkey. She could be changed into a blind donkey fairly easily.
Yet maiming or killing one of Annie’s animals no longer felt like enough punishment.
Whoring herself to Cole was a personal affront. The punishment too would have to be personal.
Annie would bear his retribution on her flesh. He had so many wonderful tools. His pride and joy. He’d made them all himself.
She wasn’t going to like his tools. His mother certainly didn’t. But how else was one to teach stubborn women?