Circle of the Moon (Soulwood #4 )- Faith Hunter Page 0,18

be up to me to bring Rick into this sense of accord. And my social skills were not the best.

I flapped my hands at the unit and said, “You’uns go play at the office. This is the last of my days off and I need my hands in the dirt.”

They left, all of them departing through the front door.

• • •

I changed into overalls and work boots and rubbed some of my homemade bug-be-gone on my exposed skin and went out the back to work in the garden. Occam was there, his back to the house, looking over my split wood supply. It was under a blue tarp to keep it dry. John had been planning to build a shed for the wood, but he died before he could knock one together. The tarp worked fine for me. Occam stood there, framed by the blue of the tarp, one knee bent, that leg out to the side, his feet hidden in the grass. He was taller than me, rangy and lean, but broad across the shoulders. The faded jeans were tight across his backside and I flushed, shook my head, and dragged my eyes away from the vision as I squashed my imagination of what that backside would look like without the jeans. It was a bizarre thought and not one I had ever had about a man. I hooked my thumbs into the bib of my overalls and walked up next to him, knowing he would hear and smell me as I approached. Espccially as I was covered in bug gunk.

“What time of year do you start looking for firewood?” he asked.

“Been looking around already. There’s a couple of guys I can call. And I toss deadfall into my truck when I find it. Split it when I get it home.”

“You split your own wood?”

I didn’t hear censure in his tone. In the church it wasn’t considered womanly for the weaker sex to handle an ax. John had said he figured that was to keep a woman from knowing how to use a weapon and I’d agreed, but I’d kept that thought to myself. John might have saved me from become a concubine in God’s Cloud of Glory polygamist cult—not a church, not really—but he still had strong feelings about a woman’s place in the home and in society. “John taught me. The same week he found out he had cancer and it was … pretty much everywhere already. He was gone a few months later, but in between, he worked on my shooting, taught me how to clean all his weapons, hunt, field dress a deer. Showed me how to butcher and clean doves and pheasants and even small hogs. Taught me maintenance on the well pump and the windmill. He made sure I was self-sufficient so that if I married again it would be my choice and not because I was starving to death and needed a roof over my head.”

“He loved you.” Occam said the words softly.

“Yeah. He did.”

“Did you love him?” he asked, even softer.

“Much as I was able. I respected him. I was and am eternally grateful to him and to Leah for marrying me. For saving me from the Colonel.” The Colonel, Ernest Jackson, the leader of the church, had wanted me for a junior wife or concubine. Even though I’d led his enemies to him and I was pretty dang sure Yummy the vampire had killed him, the thought of him still had power. I shivered in the heat. “I’m grateful to John for leaving me the land and enough money to survive. And sometimes, a man’s kindness, a woman’s loneliness, and that kind of gratitude are enough to make it seem like love.” Occam didn’t respond, and we were both staring at the small pile of wood as if it was the most important thing in the world.

Occam said, still softly, “The churchmen who came courting you. They wanted your land.”

“Yep. In their eyes, I was useful, and as a woman, I would surely be stupid enough to fall into their arms and give away all John left me. But if I’d not had the land, none a them woulda come calling. It wasn’t me they wanted, it was my land, except the Colonel, and he was a filthy pedophile and a sexual predator both.”

“I like hunting on your land. But I’ll never try to take it.”

My face softened from a stiffness I hadn’t noticed. “That’s good to know, Occam. That