Not on Her Own

“Fridge. Bottom shelf.”

As Brandon retrieved the pie—burnt on one side, but still an improvement over the rice and peas—he prompted his uncle. “What do you mean, she’s got grit? You’ve never met her, have you?”

“Nope. Been here a week now, and she ain’t introduced herself. If Geraldine hadn’t been doin’ so poorly, I’d have gotten round to going over there, being neighborly…”

Brandon dug into the pie and tried not to smile as his uncle digressed into a long and sorry tale about his prize sow.

“So how do you know she’s got grit? Penelope, I mean.”

His uncle looked startled by Brandon’s change of subject. “You said it yourself. She’s got that place livable. She’s doing all the work herself. And if she’s doing outdoor sculpture, she’s got to be handy with a welder. That’s a girl who ain’t afraid of hard work.”

“How do you know about sculpting?”

Uncle Jake waved a hand at the crammed bookshelf on one wall of the dining room. “Some book I read sometime. I forget what. Talked all about it.”

“She didn’t say anything about welding.” But Brandon didn’t argue the point.

“She pretty?”

“What?”

“I say, is she pretty?”

An image of tanned legs and dark curly hair spilling over bare shoulders shot into Brandon’s mind. “I guess you’d call her pretty.”

“Well, then.” Uncle Jake beamed. “Maybe she’s got a fellow somewhere who wants her back. Or maybe she’ll get bored with country boys and head on back to the big city for what she’s used to. If she sells out at a decent price, we could get that land back.”

A woman like Penelope was attractive enough to have a long list of guys interested in her. Brandon pushed the plate of pie away and wondered why his uncle’s idea didn’t cheer him up. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to have to wait for Penelope to give up and get lost.

His uncle began clearing the table. Brandon fell into step, not saying anything in response to his uncle’s idea.

“What are you so quiet about?” Uncle Jake asked. “Did I say something?”

Brandon dropped the plates into the sink. “No, sir,” he replied in a voice he injected with a good measure of cheerfulness.

“Look, Brandon, you gave it your best shot, that land-swapping idea. And there’s nothing wrong with hoping she’ll give up and go on somewhere else. But you’re not dreaming of any devilment, are you?”

“Devilment?”

“You know, revenge on Murphy. Stealing that land back. Something like that. If I can get my land back fair and square, that’s okay. It was my fault I didn’t keep that receipt. I should have known better. You pay in cash, you need to be double sure you keep the proof you paid. And yeah, Murphy and Melton took sore advantage of me. Melton is a lying dog, saying I didn’t pay that tax debt.” Uncle Jake slammed the refrigerator door shut. “But I’ll tell you like that doc told me when I had my heart attack over all this. You got to move on, or it will kill you. Toting a grudge will eat you alive.”

Brandon said nothing. Let Uncle Jake think what he wanted. He didn’t want to admit to Uncle Jake he’d been thinking about how pretty Penelope was or how many lucky guys she had at her fingertips.

No, Brandon wouldn’t be one of the guys on Penelope Langston’s list. She wasn’t the right sort of woman. Couldn’t be. Not when she was standing square in the middle of the road to what Brandon was after.

P ENELOPE JABBED the calculator’s keypad with the ground-down eraser on her pencil. She’d figured her money three times—and all three times it had agreed.

She’d come up short.

She clenched the pencil, unclenched it, then clenched it again. She glanced over at the single sheet of paper that had laid waste to her plans.

I regret to inform you that we must cancel the commission we’d agreed upon and surrender to you the ten percent deposit already paid. I trust that this comes to you before you’ve ordered materials…

What a day. First that crazy deputy calling Grandpa a thief, and now this. The writing hadn’t changed, not in the thirty seconds that had passed since Penelope had last read it.

Fifty grand. Gone up in smoke.

She’d been counting on that money. She’d emptied her checking and savings accounts to pay for the land and the house. Her grandmother had matched her dollar for dollar. An art investment, Grams had called it as she signed the check with a flourish. Penelope had borrowed more money for the studio and renovating the house. That money was spent, and Penelope had borrowed still more money for the studio…

Her brain refused to process anything beyond how this could have happened. She’d played by the rules. She’d got an agreement. She’d done her financial homework.

And yet here she was, caught on the tracks with a mortgage payment bearing down on her—and no way to pay it.

Two months. She had two months before the first payment was due. Penelope said a silent prayer of thanks that she’d taken up the mortgage company’s offer for delayed payments.

Theo wound around her legs and yowled for attention. She ignored him. Think. She had to think.

If this company didn’t want her sculpture, somebody else would—she’d just have to get out there and sell it. And in the meantime, she’d have to come up with a way to survive without touching the borrowed money in her checking account.

Penelope had survived before. She’d eaten mac and cheese from scratch-and-dent sales and taken on untold numbers of jobs to pay the rent—bartending, car washing, waitressing, even a short stint at a Cineplex, selling popcorn until the smell nauseated her.

One thing she wouldn’t do: breathe a word to her parents. She’d learned the hard way that if they even suspected she was going through lean times, they’d be wiring money to her checking account or asking the landlord to check her fridge for food.

She hated the way they’d held her failures over her head as a way to persuade her to join the family business.

Real estate. Land, land, land. Buying, selling, leasing, commercial, residential, option clauses. She’d grown up with it, and it numbed her. When Grandpa Murphy had told her about this land, had suggested she try to buy it and keep it in the family, it had seemed the perfect solution. This property had been the only land she’d ever gotten excited about. Land far enough away that her parents couldn’t lie and say, We stopped by on our way to—

A knock on the front door cut into Penelope’s conflicted thoughts. She frowned and made her way up the hall to the living room.

A glance out the windows told her it was Brandon Wilkes. Her mouth tightened. Wouldn’t he be glad to know about her commission being canceled?

Penelope threw open the door. “Yes? What do you want now? Me to move to the moon?”

Brandon blinked. “Uh, well…I guess I deserved that. What with my crazy offer. I just—” Brandon broke off. “I came by to apologize. I was taking out my disappointment on you. If…er…if you need a hand with anything, all you have to do is let ’em know at the sheriff’s department. I work mostly nights, but they’ll find me during the day.”

He turned to make his way down the cinder blocks she’d stacked up as impromptu porch steps.

“Wait!”

Brandon paused, turned to her slowly.

“Are you simply being polite? Or do you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“Your offer.” Penelope’s mouth went dry. “To help.”

“Sure, I mean it. What do you need?”