Instead of crying, she nodded sagely, and Isaac reached below the counter to retrieve one of the suckers they kept on hand for children. “How ’bout a treat?”
Her face lit up. “Sure.”
“Ask your mom first.”
“Mom?” she said, turning expectantly.
Reenie’s eyebrows knit together as she looked over. “What, honey?”
“Can I have a sucker?”
“Absolutely not.”
The answer, so quick and resolute, surprised Isaac and Isabella. “Why not?” Isabella asked indignantly.
“It’s too close to dinner.”
“School just got out.”
In truth, it was only four o’clock.
“I’ll buy you something at the grocery store,” Reenie said.
“But I don’t want to go to the grocery store,” Isabella argued. “That takes too long. I want to go home so I can play.”
“Ask her if you can have the sucker if Earl gives it to you,” Isaac suggested. He knew he was provoking Reenie, but he was tired of allowing her to ignore him. At least now he’d get a reaction.
“She’s my daughter, and she doesn’t need it,” Reenie snapped before Isabella could say anything.
“Yes I do!” Isabella said. “Puh-leeze?”
A muscle moved in Reenie’s cheek as she glared at Isaac. “You did that on purpose.”
He shrugged, still smiling. “Maybe. But I’ve done worse, right? Like moving here? And accepting a teaching position at the high school? It’s criminal, really. I should be locked up.”
“I’m glad we agree on something,” she said tartly.
“Aren’t you going a little overboard, Reenie?” Earl said. He glanced between them, but she ignored him.
“She can’t accept anything from you,” she said to Isaac.
“But Mom-my, why?” Isabella asked.
Earl brought the feed sack to the front and dropped it on the counter. “Reenie, it’s only a sucker. I would’ve given it to her myself had I thought of it.”
Faced with Earl’s support and her pleading daughter, Reenie finally seemed to realize she was letting her emotions tempt her into an unnecessary battle. “Fine,” she said. But she clenched her jaw as Isabella eagerly unwrapped her candy. Then she paid Earl, waited for him to load the sack, and spun gravel as she drove off.
“That has to be the only woman in town who doesn’t like you,” Earl said, shaking his head as he came back in.
And the only woman—in town or anywhere else—that Isaac couldn’t quit thinking about.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Lucky said, her confusion revealing itself in her voice.
Reenie exited the horse site she’d been visiting on the Internet and switched the telephone to her other ear. “I just explained it to you.”
“You said Isaac had finally crossed the line.”
“He has!”
“By giving Isabella a sucker?”
“It was more than that,” Reenie said. “He—he knew I didn’t want her to have it.”
“I must be missing something,” Lucky responded. “I mean, there are worse crimes then trying to make your little girl happy.”
“You had to be there,” Reenie snapped. “Anyway, he made Earl, who I’ve known all my life, turn on me, too.”
“Earl turned on you?”
“Yes, he sided with Isaac.”
“How did Isaac make him do that?”
“He just did. Isaac’s good at winning people over. You know how much everyone likes him. You should’ve heard the other teachers at school on Monday. ‘He has a Ph.D…he’s a biologist…I can’t believe he’ll be working here…God, he’s so handsome…’ What does handsome have to do with teaching?”
There was a long pause. “Reenie?”
“What?”
“You’re too stressed-out for your own good.”
“I’m telling you he’s stealing all my friends!” Reenie knew she sounded like Isabella instead of a thirty-one-year-old woman. But she couldn’t help it. Although subtle, Earl’s defection earlier today had really stung.
“Isaac can’t steal your friends. Everyone loves you. You’re just overwrought. And you’re going to drive yourself into a nervous breakdown if you don’t relax.”
Reenie knew Lucky was right. She was traveling hell-bent for a brick wall. But she didn’t know how to stop her forward momentum. She already had more than she could do in a day, yet she kept adding more. She had to keep busy—the stress was killing her but saving her at the same time. “I’m managing.”
“Why won’t you take it easy?”
And give herself a chance to miss what she’d lost? Never. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re whipped. Maybe you should sell your horse and cow and forget about fixing up the farm for a while.”
Reenie rubbed her eyes. It was already after eleven. She should be in bed right now, getting a good night’s sleep so she could wake refreshed and eager to teach in the morning. But even as hard as she was working, she’d begun to dream occasionally. And when she dreamed, she sometimes felt a pair of strong arms around her. Then the memories would wash over her, reminding her how it felt to be loved by a man, to be desired and protected.
Pure fantasy, she thought. If there was one thing she’d learned from the past year it was that her own arms were the only ones she could depend on.
She bent over to pet Bailey, who’d come to lie at her feet, and tried not to notice how quickly his health seemed to be failing. He couldn’t die on top of everything else. Not now. “You’re okay, boy, aren’t you?” she said.
His eyebrows twitched as he looked up at her with his liquid brown eyes. “Don’t go anywhere,” she whispered to him. “Please?”
“Will you do me a favor?” Lucky asked.
Bailey affectionately nosed her bare feet as Reenie returned to her conversation. “What?”
“Take a few days off and sleep, okay?”
Running her toes lightly over the dog’s back, Reenie surfed through a few more horse sites. Her problems weren’t as easily solved as taking a vacation. But everyone seemed to give her the same advice. “Sure, good idea,” she said drily.
Lucky sighed on the other end of the line. “You’re really scaring me.”