Beautiful Bad Man by O'Connell Ellen

Author:O'Connell, Ellen [O'Connell, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance
Published: 2012-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

* * *

“COME ON PARTNER, time to plant corn.”

The first months of marriage destroyed Norah’s comfortable ideas about Caleb working the farm while she tended to familiar household chores. Today she moved along the rows of a freshly plowed field with a sack of seed corn over her shoulder, enjoying the scent of freshly turned earth and warm spring air. Plunging her planting stick into the soil up to the mark the way Caleb had demonstrated, she withdrew it, dropped a corn kernel in the hole, closed the hole with her foot, and moved on.

No matter what he had said about knowing and liking the rhythms of the land, Norah had not believed him in the beginning. More and more she understood his feelings were unlike what she’d seen from her father and Joe.

She watched him now as he dropped his own planting stick, picked up a handful of dirt and squeezed it in his fist. He spread it over his palm, poked it with one long finger, and examined it. At last he tipped his hand to one side and let it fall little by little to the ground.

He wasn’t evaluating the moisture content as another man might. He was admiring that dirt the same way he sometimes admired sprouting seeds.

“If you keep that up, I’m going to beat you to the end of this row,” she called out.

“The only way you’ll beat me is by distracting me with the way you look peeking out from under that bonnet at me like that. It’s cheating.”

“You look like a mysterious stranger under your hat brim yourself, so you’re cheating too.”

“Not me. I’m not pretty.”

No, he wasn’t. He was beautiful. Heaven help her. She had to remember he was also bad. Not evil maybe, but very bad. A liar, a thief, a killer.

He would work the land and enjoy besting Mr. Van Cleve. In a year, two at most, farming would bore him, and he would go back to his old life, and after all, that was what she wanted.

Norah left the fields first so she could have supper ready when he came in at sunset. On her way back to the house with a bucket of water from the creek, she stopped to admire her garden.

Caleb had plowed and helped her plant, but only after moving the plot from where it had always been near the house to here by the creek. Why had it never occurred to her or to Joe that taking the garden to the water made life far easier than hauling endless buckets of water to the garden?

Moving the garden was only one of his endless ideas. They’d never plant corn by hand again, he assured her. Next year they’d have a check row planter. He built shelves along the kitchen wall to replace the turned over packing crates she had used and muttered about wells and cisterns, a spring house, and an outdoor fire pit for summer cooking.

After a day in the fields planting, her father, brothers, and Joe had all eaten supper in silence and gone straight to bed.

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