Wild in the Field

Again her jaw dropped. “He said what?”

“Yeah, cool, huh? I wasn’t convinced, because you’re a woman and all. But then Dad explained that you’re not really like a woman.”

This time her voice seemed to raise a complete octave. “He said what?”

The brothers exchanged glances, as if suddenly aware she didn’t sound thrilled with the conversation. The one without the cowlick-Simon-seemed to be inherently elected to handle difficult verbal situations with adults. “Dad said you’re okay. Like, look at you. You dress like a guy. You’ve got dirty boots. Your hair’s all messed up. You’re ornery. I mean, you’re practically like us.”

Sean nodded, as if anxious to clear up this problem of potentially offending her. “See, once Mom took off, we all just said screw it. We don’t need or want women in our lives, you know? Because Dad was, like, way depressed. And now he’s fine. The whole trick was getting rid of women.”

Simon finished up the explanation. “Now do you get us? If you were like a woman, we’d never have trusted you to take Darby.”

“I see.” Actually, what Camille saw was that a chill wind was scooching over the hill; it was nearing the dinner hour; she hadn’t gotten a lick of work done; and now she had to translate fourteen-year-old-teenage-boy lingo into something an adult might understand. That godforsaken dog was clearly a prize. To them. And that she was apparently too unkempt and ornery to be “like a woman” was a giant compliment. To them.

“Okay. Anyways…” Both boys suddenly turned around and picked up their clippers again.

“Whoa. Wait a minute there-”

“It’s okay, Ms. Campbell. We know what to do. Dad called the county extension office, and this guy talked to all of us about lavender, how it’s grown, what to do and everything.”

“We know it’s a flower. Neither of us wanted to work around anything sissy like flowers, but it’s not your fault, after all, that your sister’s so bonkers-”

“Simon, shut up. You’re insulting her family, you nimwit.”

“Oh.” Simon glanced back, stricken. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything. I meant to say how sorry I was for you. Your sister scares all of us, and you have to deal with her all the time. It can’t be easy.”

“Anyways…” Sean started clip, clip, clipping as he talked. “We learned a bunch of junk. It was pretty interesting, about how there’s English lavender and French lavender and Spanish lavender. What you got here is apparently all kinds of crossbreeds.”

“And what we have to do is lop off about a third from the top and sides.” Simon glanced at her clippers, shook his head. “Yours aren’t sharp enough. They have to be good ones. But back to the job. We have to cut the stems back to a few inches from where the woody part starts. See?”

He motioned, and stayed hunkered down like that until she came over, scowling, and bent down to have a look. Then he went on. “This is like a big mess. It’ll take three years to get it back, the county guy said, but you can do it if it’s worked right. Lop the sides and top. Then the stems back. Then next year, you do another third. Then by the third year, it’ll be vible again.”

“Vible?”

“Vi-a-ble,” Sean said disgustedly. “He gets Cs in English. He’s so stupid.”

“Am not.”

“Are, too. Anyways, Ms. Campbell, you really got a lot of this lavender.”

She tried wildly waving a hand to get a turn in. “I know I do, but I don’t need you boys!”

They stopped working abruptly, but both of them looked crushed. “Dad’s paying us, Ms. Campbell, so you don’t have to. And it’s either this or we have to clean the bathrooms and do the wash. I mean, come on. We really work good. I promise. And we can get here most afternoons by like three-fifteen or so. You wouldn’t fire us before you even gave us a chance, would you?”

For Pete’s sake. She’d like to throw up on the whole damn world, but how was she supposed to be mean to two motherless brats? “You two can’t possibly do this whole twenty acres and that’s that. You can work for an hour in the afternoon sometimes. IF you want to. When you want to. And only if it doesn’t interfere with your damned schoolwork, you hear me?”

Yup, they both heard her. They were both nodding like bobbing corks.

“And I never said ‘damned’ either!”

More exuberant nodding. Hell. It was all she could do not to slick down Sean’s cowlick and jog up to the house to bring cookies to the brats.

She stormed back to the cottage, thinking that this just wasn’t going to work. She knew it. But this was Pete’s doing, so the only way she could stop it was to go directly to Pete.

And that meant risking being near him-not that he’d want to kiss her again. Considering that he apparently thought of her as an unkempt, ugly, genderless nonwoman, it was astounding that he’d wanted to kiss her the first time. Nevertheless, once you’d been stung by a mosquito, you knew what the itch was like and obviously avoided it a second time if you could.

She could put up with the boys. For a while. Anything was better than risking getting too close to Pete again-at least until she figured out what the Sam Hill that kiss had been about.

Camille waited the dog out for three more days, but by Saturday afternoon, she’d had it. When the temperature climbed to a reasonably warm seventy-six degrees, she pulled on ragged shorts and a black tee, then carted outside a bucket, flea shampoo, rags and a hose.

Killer-alias Darby-had been allowing her to bring food and water, particularly if the food included ground round, and he’d quit snarling in her presence. But coming close enough to touch him was a different proposition. He bared his teeth when she stepped off the cottage porch, and bristled into a hair-ruffed growl when she got within five feet.

She stopped there. Temporarily. “Look,” she said irritably. “You stink. You stink so bad I can smell it through the windows. I’ve had it with this whole attitude thing. If you think you can out-mean me, buster, you’ve got another think coming. Now you’re getting a bath today, and I mean to tell you, that’s that.”

Growl, snap, snarl. Growl, snap, snarl.

Camille pushed back her hair, put her hands on her hips, and growled right back. Her voice was deceptively as soothing as a whisper. “You want to tear me apart?” she demanded. “Well, where you’re making a mistake, Killer, is thinking that I care. If you were a person, my dad would be calling you a sumph. You know what that is? In Scottish, it’s the word for a half-wit. Because that’s how you’re behaving. Half-witted.”

She’d been talking to him for days, knowing he was completely ignoring her, but she didn’t turn her back on the dog. She wasn’t that stupid. Quietly she bent down, added the flea shampoo to the warmish water in the bucket, and dunked in the rag. Killer stopped snarling-until she took another step closer-and then he resumed the fierce warning growls.

“I am so sick of this. You snap at me, I’ll snap right back, you no-count worthless mutt. You think life’s treated you so terribly? Well, big frigging deal. I lost everything…” When he stopped growling, she took a quiet step toward him.

“So the owner you loved turned mean and now you don’t trust anyone. That’s tough. Real tough.” She took another step. Then another. “But the guy I loved was killed by strangers. The court system barely slapped their hands. I’ll never feel safe again as long as I live. I literally lost everything-my job, my husband, my life. Myself.” Calmly, slowly, she sponged the soapy water on his neck and back. The dog went still, rigid as stone, eyes tracking her with the fierceness and anger of a predator. “So don’t waste that stupid attitude on me. I’m tired of it. You think life’s unfair? I agree. You think life’s not worth living? I agree. You just want to be left alone to be miserable-man, I agree with that, too. And I’ll leave you completely alone. But you have to have a bath first, because I’m the one trying to sleep under that window there. I’ve been living with that smell ever since you got here. I’ve had enough…”

It wasn’t as if she were sweet-talking the darn dog. She was being plenty mean and tough. She just happened to be using a crooning tone of voice, because as long as she kept talking, he stopped growling and was letting her wash him. Maybe he was just sick of being filthy, who knew? But her heart was beating hard enough to implode-it wasn’t easy getting this close to the dog, when she had every reason to fear it might attack her. Still. She had to try something. The wild, despairing rage in its eyes-she couldn’t stand it anymore. She understood it. All too well.

“I’m not going near your face or eyes, so don’t get your liver in an uproar. Just a little more now. Then I’ll rinse