A Family For The Farmer. Laurel Blount

thick white plates and set an oversize muffin on each one. Casting a quick look back at the tall man sitting at the table, she considered, and then added a second muffin to one of the plates. Abel Whitlock had always been lean, but if her memory served, he had a hearty appetite.

      “Thanks.” Abel picked up one of the muffins and toyed briefly with the thin silver paper on its bottom before setting it back down on the plate. “These look real good, but I can’t eat your food, Emily, until I’m sure you understand where I stand on this. I know you’re finding it hard to believe, but I’m on your side here. I want to help you.”

      “Even though you’ll get the farm if I don’t stick this out?” She offered him a wry smile, but this time his expression remained serious.

      “This farm is yours by rights. Miss Sadie was your family, not mine, and I’m sorry she left things like she did. I truly am.”

      He sounded sincere, and Emily felt a niggle of guilt. Abel had no family worth speaking of. His mother had run off when Abel was just a boy, leaving him to deal with his younger brother and their moody, alcoholic father as best he could.

      Her grandmother had told her about the morning Abel had knocked on the farmhouse door. A fourteen-year-old boy with hungry eyes, he’d asked if he could split firewood for her in exchange for some food for himself and his little brother.

      “I almost ran him off the property,” Grandma had told Emily, shaking her head ruefully. “I’d been living next to the Whitlocks for too long not to be suspicious of them. Most of them would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. But he was nothing but a boy, skinny as a beanpole and so famished he was shaking. No telling when he’d eaten last. Elton Whitlock never cared much about anything that didn’t come straight out of a liquor bottle, and he sure wasn’t troubling his sorry head about feeding those boys of his after Gina left him. But that young’un had more gumption in his little finger than the rest of his kin put together. He wouldn’t even eat the sandwich I brought out to him unless I let him earn it. So in the end I just handed him the ax and let him get on with it.”

      At the end of that day, Sadie Elliott had a neatly stacked woodpile that would last her for a month of cold weather, and young Abel had gone home with a new shirt on his back, a basket stuffed with eggs and vegetables from her garden and a job on Goosefeather Farm for as long as he wanted it. Abel had been family to Sadie ever since that day, and Emily knew it.

      She got very busy peeling the paper off a muffin before she spoke. “You don’t have to apologize for meaning a lot to my grandmother, Abel. And I don’t blame you for the way she left her will. You and I both know nobody could talk Grandma into doing anything she didn’t want to do.”

      Abel heaved a deep sigh, and she looked up from her muffin to find him smiling that lopsided smile of his. He looked relieved. “That’s good to hear.” He stripped the paper off one of his own muffins and broke off a generous chunk.

      “That doesn’t mean I’m happy about being put through this trial by farm, or whatever you want to call it,” Emily cautioned. “It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of. I don’t know what Grandma was thinking.”

      “The letter didn’t tell you?”

      Emily shrugged. “Grandma never thought I appreciated Goosefeather Farm the way she wanted me to. It looks like she just wanted one last opportunity to change my mind. She was always convinced I belonged here.”

      “Maybe you do,” Abel said simply, breaking off another chunk of muffin.

      “Believe me, I don’t.” He looked as unconvinced as her grandmother had every time they’d had this particular conversation. Time to change the subject. “How are those muffins? I baked them yesterday morning.” She was tinkering with her apple spice muffin recipe, and she thought adding the extra ground cloves had been a good idea.

      “Really good. But then you always were a good cook, even when you were a little slip of a thing. Better than Miss Sadie, rest her soul. Her muffins were like hockey pucks.”

      Emily smiled, remembering. “She mixed them too much. You’ve got to be careful with muffin batter. I always told her so, but you know Grandma. Whatever she did, she did with a vengeance.”

      Abel chuckled. “You’re right about that. Miss Sadie never did do things by halves. I recall when she finally got fed up with my excuses about not going to church with her. She went out in the middle of a Saturday night and flattened her own truck tires, all four of them, so I’d have to come over and drive her into town. Then she made a big show of stumbling on the curb in front of the church so I’d be sure to walk her in. She had me sitting in that pew before I knew what had happened, and she was right beside me, grinning like a mule eating briars.” He sighed. “I’m sure going to miss her.”

      Emily nodded and took a deliberate sip of her scalding coffee to dissolve the lump in her throat. “I know. Me, too.”

      She’d been right to give him two muffins. He polished them both off in short order. She watched as he carefully wiped up the few crumbs he’d dropped on the table and deposited them on the plate next to his neatly folded muffin papers. Then he drained his coffee mug, set it on the plate and rose to carry his dirty dishes to the sink.

      Abel had always done that, she remembered. He’d cleaned up after himself, been careful to remove his muddy boots at the back door and never left one crumb or drop behind. It had seemed so strange for such a big, outdoorsy boy to be so meticulous about things like that that Emily had found it amusing. She’d joked about it one time to her grandmother, and Sadie Elliott’s sharp reply had caught her off guard. “Them that’s had their share of trouble know better than to make trouble for other folks, missy! Mark that, and remember it.”

      “Emily?”

      She glanced up, startled to find Abel standing at the sink looking uneasy.

      “Yes?” She tilted her head to look up at him, thinking that inside the house he seemed bigger somehow. He’d always been tall, but she never remembered him taking up so much space before.

      “I reckon we’ve circled around all this long enough. I don’t want to upset you, but I’m going to speak plain. You’re going to lose this farm if you don’t have good help. There’s just no two ways about it, and I’d sure hate to see that happen.”

      He’d filled out, Emily realized suddenly. Abel couldn’t be called lanky anymore. He was still lean, but his shoulders had broadened, and there was a muscular set to them now. When she’d left Goosefeather Farm six years ago, Abel Whitlock was only a few years out of his teens. Now he was a man. That was the difference she was picking up on.

      She felt a sudden prickle of nerves. Maybe this deal with Abel wasn’t such a good idea after all. Then again, she knew he made a good point. If she didn’t have help, she’d never be able to keep this place afloat.

      It looked like she was trapped between this rock of a man and a very hard place.

      “Listen to me, Emily. I know you’re not easy in your mind about any of this. You don’t like leaning on somebody else, and I can’t say as I blame you. I’d likely feel the same if I were in your shoes. But I’m no stranger to you. You’ve known me nearly half your life, and you surely know me well enough by now to know that I mean what I say. If you let me help you, I’ll make sure you end up with this farm at the end of the summer. You have my word on it.”

      For a second, all Emily could do was blink at this man standing in her grandmother’s kitchen in faded jeans and a threadbare shirt. Apparently he was so determined to forfeit a tidy little inheritance that he was promising his help to the very person who was going to do her best to make sure he didn’t get it. Was it even possible that such a person still existed in this dog-eat-dog world?

      “Come on, Emily,” he coaxed, one side of his mouth quirking up. “You must have one last Goosefeather Farm summer left in you.” Suddenly there was something irresistible about that crooked smile. She found herself smiling right back at him, and that was when it happened.

      Emily