Miniseries: Holiday Hearts
Special Edition Series, #1739
Silhouette
February 2006
Featuring: Jacob Trask; Celie Favreau
256 pages ISBN: 0373247397 Paperback
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"In every generation of Trasks lives one man born to be
alone…." And Jacob was clearly his generation's representative.
Because while his brothers sought their livelihoods — and
loves — elsewhere, he knew he had to stay where he
belonged. Where he was needed. And where eligible women
were as rare as an eighty-degree day in January... And then came a possible danger to his beloved family
farm. The bearer of bad news? A petite, gorgeous, non-stop
talker named Celie Favreau. And though captivated by
Jacob's rugged good looks and piercing blue eyes, she had
to stay on track. She'd come to warn of a threat to his
trees. The threat to his heart was merely incidental....
Excerpt Vermont, January 2006 Celie Favreau muttered an impatient curse and dragged her
fingers through her short brown hair. Trees, trees and
more trees: beech, ash, birch, the occasional startling
green of a pine, and maples, always maples, as far as the
eye could see. Sugar maples, Vermont's state tree. She'd always adored maples. Too bad she hadn't come to the
state in the autumn, in time to see the legendary wash of
glorious color. Instead, she saw the flat brown and white
of a dormant winter landscape. Of course, she knew it
wasn't really dormant at all, not in late January. Already
the drumbeat of spring was beginning to pulse in the trees
as the sap gathered for the rise that triggered rebirth. And already the threat was stirring. Celie squinted at the page of directions in her hand and
checked her odometer again. When she'd fled Montreal for a
career in forestry, she'd done it partly out of a desire
for open space and a conspicuous absence of concrete. She hadn't thought about the conspicuous absence of road
signs. Of course, she should have been used to it by now. In the
past four years she'd been sent to hot spots in seven
different states, always moving around. Living somewhere
new every few months wasn't a hardship — generally, she
enjoyed the variety, she enjoyed a chance to get out of
the same old rut. These days, though, a rut didn't seem like such a bad
thing. The sign by the building up ahead read Ray's
Feed 'n' Read. It made her grin. She couldn't pass that
one up without a look. With luck, she could also get
directions to the Institute. When she opened the front door, the blast of heat made her
forget the winter chill outside. To the left of the door
stood a checkout counter, the wall behind it decorated
with a lighted Napa sign and a calendar advertising cattle
cake. The smile of the balding man at the register faded
as he pegged her as a stranger. He gave her a sharp nod. "Good morning," Celie said. Beyond him lay the swept
concrete floor and pallets of goods of a standard seed and
grain store. To the right, she saw an incongruously cozy
book nook with a dozen shelves and a few comfortable, over-
stuffed chairs. It called to her irresistibly. "Nice place
you've got here." He grunted. "Is this Eastmont?" she asked, drifting to a
stop in front of a display of lurid thrillers. "Last time I checked." Celie fought a smile. "Is this the part where I ask
directions and you say 'Cahn't get theah from heah?'" His lips twitched. "Well, if it's Eastmont, Maine you're
asking about, that's different. We have a translation book
for Mainers," he added. "So I see. No translation book for Vermonters?" "None needed. We don't have any accent. Now you, you're
not from around these parts. What's that I hear in your
voice?" Even after all these years, the whisper of a French accent
still lingered. "Canada. I grew up in Montreal." "Ah. The wife and I went up there about twenty years ago
for an anniversary. Nice town, especially the old part." "My parents own a bookstore in Vieux Montréal." "Do tell? I thought you looked like a book person when you
walked in." She couldn't tell him that she'd moved away because the
bookstore had suffocated her. Instead, she picked up a
thriller and headed to the counter. "So what's more
popular, the feed or the read?" "Oh, you'd be surprised. Folks around here will pick up a
book, especially in winter. Shoot, we've got one guy buys
so many books I don't know how he gets any sugaring done."
He passed the book over the bar-code scanner. "Maybe he's trying to improve himself." He snorted. "I think Jacob would say he's as improved as
he needs to be. That'll be $6.25," he added, slipping the
book into a plain brown bag. Celie passed him a twenty. "I wonder if you could help me
out. I'm looking for the Woodward Maple Research
Institute. It's around here, right?" "Close enough." "I don't suppose you'd be willing to tell me how close?"
He considered, making an effort to look crusty. "Oh, a
couple miles as the crow flies." "Any chance I could get there if I weren't a crow?" she
asked, reaching out for her change. "Oh, you're wanting
directions." "Assuming you can get theah from heah." The smile was full-fledged this time. "Well, you'll want
Bixley Road." He rested his hands on the counter. "Turn
right out of the parking lot and go until you see a sign
that says Trask Farm. The second left after that is Bixley
Road. You'll know it because it heads uphill at first.
You'll pass maybe three roads and you'll see the signs for
the Institute. If you see the covered bridge, you'll know
you've gone too far." "Thank you kindly," she said. "You working at the Institute?" "That depends." "On what?" She grinned. "Whether I find it." "Well, Jacob Trask, who would have thought you were such a
good-looking boy under all that hair?" Muriel Anderson,
the comfortable-looking clerk at Washington County Maple
Supplies gave him a long look up and down. "I almost
didn't recognize you. I see those Eastmont girls took you
to task." Those Eastmont girls had trimmed and tidied and
upholstered him until he could hardly stand it. In the
first stunned moments when he'd stared at his newly shorn
face in the salon mirror, all he'd been able to do was
calculate feverishly how long it would take to grow back.
He'd been shocked at how naked being clean-shaven made him
feel. He'd grown the beard at twenty and left it on. Without it,
he almost hadn't recognized himself. In the intervening
sixteen years, his face had grown more angular, the chin
more stubborn, the bones pressed more tightly against the
skin. It was the face of someone else, not him. A week, he'd
figured, a week to get covered up. He hadn't figured on noticing the mix of gray hairs among
the black in the new beard as it sprouted. More, far more
than he'd recalled before. There certainly weren't any on
his head. He could do without the ones down below. After
all, a man was entitled to some vanity, wasn't he? The
beard, he'd decided, would stay gone. "Hi, Jacob," purred Eliza, Muriel's twenty-year-old
daughter, as she walked past. Or maybe it wouldn't, he thought uneasily, taking the
fifty-pound bag of diatomaceous earth off his shoulder and
setting it down on the counter. He was all for having a
personal life, but the non-stop scrutiny he'd begun
attracting from women felt a little weird. He liked
cruising along below the radar; he had from the time he'd
looked around in third grade and realized he was a head
taller than any of his classmates. Cruising below the
radar had gotten hard, though, all of a sudden. "Did you hear they found some cases of maple borer over in
New York?" Muriel asked as she started ringing up Jacob's
order. "They had to take down 423 trees from the heart of
a sugarbush to get it all. Sixteen-inchers, most of them." Four-hundred-some-odd trees? Nearly ten acres, maybe more.
That would be a financial hit, and one that would persist
for decades. After all, sugar maples didn't grow old
enough to tap for thirty or forty years. "Are you sure
they're not exaggerating?" "Tom Bollinger said it, and he can be trusted." Muriel
shook her head. "You should spend less time looking at
books in Ray's and more time around the stove talking to
people, Jacob. You might find out something you can use." "I'd rather hear it from you." He winked at her, as he had
so many times over the years. And to his everlasting
shock, she blushed. "Oh, you." She shook her head at him. "Talking isn't
nearly as hard as chopping brush." For Jacob talking was harder, except in the case of a
handful of people, such as Muriel. "Everything I hear tells me we've got something to worry
about here," Muriel continued. "Some of those Institute
fellows were over at Willoughby's sugarbush a couple of
weeks ago, poking at his trees and muttering." Concern was immediate. Willoughby's property adjoined his
own. Like most sugar-makers, Jacob found solvency a
delicate balancing act, especially now that he was the one
running the farm to support his mother and himself. The
prospect of losing five or ten percent of his revenue-
producing trees was a sobering one. "Do they think his
trees are infested?" "They don't know. Took some samples, said they'd get back
to him." Jacob stuffed his change in his pocket distractedly. "If
you see him, tell him I wish him luck." "You can tell him yourself at the county growers' meeting
tomorrow." His noise of disgust earned a click of the
tongue from Muriel. "You've got to show up at these
things, Jacob," she chided. "I do show up, Muriel." "It's not enough to show. You need to talk. You can't just
sit through the program. That's not where you learn the
important things." It was where he learned all he needed to know, Jacob
thought, that and the Internet. He'd never understood
people's obsession with sitting around and yapping their
fool heads off about nothing. Working he understood, and
he was happy to do it. Standing around and chewing the fat
in hopes he might get something more than idle speculation
was a waste of time. A couple of miles from the Feed 'n' Read, Celie began
wondering if she'd somehow missed a turn again. It wasn't
that the directions were difficult but that the
term "road" was a vague one. To her, it meant pavement and
a sign. To the clerk at the feed store, who knew? She'd
passed several things that looked more like gravel drives.
They could be part of a sugar-bush access system, assuming
the maples she was driving through belonged to a
sugarbush, or they could lead to some-one's house. Or they could be her landmarks. She was reasonably confident she'd gotten onto Bixley Road
all right. She hadn't seen a covered bridge, though, and
by the directions her contact had sent her, she should
have found the Institute long since. Wrong turn? Possible,
but she might also have been close because she was clearly
driving through tended maples, and the Institute was
located in the middle of a sugarbush. More than likely,
she was on the property already. She scanned the trees automatically as she drove, a habit
so established she wasn't even aware of it. Suddenly she saw something that had her swerving to the
side of the road, pulse speeding up. It was almost too
subtle to be seen, the striations of the trunk, the slight
thickening at the base of the tree that set off warning
bells. A closer look, she thought, hoping to God it wasn't
what it appeared to be. Turning off the engine was barely a decision at all. This
was more important than what time she arrived at the
Institute. After all, she was already late enough that it
wouldn't matter one way or another. This would. Reaching behind the front seat of her truck, Celie pulled
out her field kit. She wore hiking boots, as was her habit. It paid to be
prepared. With a job like hers, you could be tramping
around a stand of trees at a moment's notice. It was one
of the things she loved about it. Oh, growing up in
Montreal had been exciting, but it had been too confined,
too structured. And it was too associated with the dusty,
musty demands of the Cité de L'Ile, the bookstore that was
her family's legacy. Her family's, not hers. Hers was
going to be eliminating the insatiable pest that had the
power to destroy the maple forests of North America. In warmer weather, the dip she crossed to get to the trees
was probably a drainage ditch. Now, it was just a running
depression in the snow. Celie walked back parallel to the
road. Sixteen- to eighteen-inch trunks, she estimated,
moving among them. A mature, tended stand with only a
handful of non-maple species. She was unfortunately going
to show up at the Institute with some unwelcome news about
what had every appearance of being their sugarbush. The laughter was gone from her eyes now, replaced by focus
as she knelt to inspect first one tree, then another. Up
close, it was harder to identify the one that had caught
her eye. She went through half a dozen before she found it
and dug out her loupe. Crouched in the snow, she ignored
the sound of passing vehicles on the road, ignored the
cold spreading up through her toes. What mattered was the
puzzle in front of her. What mattered was finding the
evidence. There were holes, though not the characteristic round
holes of the maple borer but something more irregular.
Were they signs of the beetle or just normal bark
disturbances? Unzipping a pocket of her field kit, she
pulled out a wire-thin metal spatula. Scraping the side of the hole yielded a crumbly, dark
residue. Rotted bark or the fungus that the beetle carried
from tree to tree? She rubbed a bit thoughtfully between
her fingers and tipped the spatula into a glass sample
vial. A laboratory analysis would show.
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