Vermont Valentine (Holiday Hearts #3) Read online

  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 someone’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.

  The sudden barking of a dog made her jump and drop the vial. When she turned, shock took her breath. A man stalked toward her, looking as if he’d walked out of another century with his buckskin jacket and his coal-dark hair brushing his shoulders, a black hound at his heels. Way over six feet tall, with shoulders a couple feet wide. The bones of his face stood out strongly, as though pressed there by sheer force of personality. The dark stubble on his jaw only made him look dangerous. But it was his eyes that caught and held her attention, startlingly blue and narrowed now at her in irritation.

  “You mind telling me what you’re doing in my trees?”

  Jacob usually came across trespassers in the fall, when the leaf peepers were out in force. People figured that if there weren’t fences, they were free to just walk all over the place, not understanding that they compacted the soil, compressed the roots and generally compromised the health of the trees every time they walked near them.

  The battered, rust-streaked mini truck he’d stopped behind boasted out-of-state plates. And the intruder crouched in front of the tree was not just looking at it but messing with it. Sightseers were damaging enough. Those, he usually chatted with and pointed toward the Trask gift shop. A kid vandalizing his trees, though, earned a different treatment. Jacob strode over with the intent of summarily tossing him off the property.

  But then the kid looked up and Jacob realized the him was a her, a bright-eyed pixie of a her with a cap of curly dark hair.

  Murphy barked his way up in his usual fearsome guard-dog act. It was just an act—the minute she began talking to him and rubbing his ears, he began wagging his tail, the traitor.

  Of course, if she petted Jacob the way she was currently stroking Murphy, his tail might start wagging, too. “Hi, sweetie,” she crooned. “Aren’t you gorgeous? And you like that, don’t you?” She scratched Murphy’s chest until he sank down on the snow and rolled over for her to rub his belly. No dignity at all.

  She offered Jacob a disarming smile. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to trespass. I thought this was Institute property. Your forestry techniques are top, really top. That’s why I thought I was on Institute land,” she chattered. And the whole while she was swiftly putting her tools away and zipping up her field kit.

  A very professional-looking field kit, he realized with a frown.

  “That’s why I got confused,” she continued. “I wasn’t expecting a private grower to be doing such a good job and I—”

  “Who are you?” he interrupted. “What were you doing?”

  “Just looking at trees. It was an honest mistake.” She stood. Propping one fist on her hip, she stared up at him. “Well, you are a big one, aren’t you?”

  His impression of a pixie had been accurate, Jacob thought—she was easily a foot shorter than he was, and tiny, even wearing her bulky parka. The cold had reddened her cheeks. The humor dancing now in her sherry-brown eyes didn’t entirely hide the sharp intelligence—or purpose—that lurked there. Mostly, though, in her red jacket, she was a welcome flash of color in the drab winter backdrop, sloe-eyed, lush-mouthed and far too tempting for the middle of a work day.

  She leaned down to give Murphy a last pat. “Anyway, I apologize. I didn’t intend to trespass.” Nimbly, she stepped around him and walked across the drainage ditch toward the battered red truck. “I tend to get excited about trees and sometimes I don’t think, I just stop and take a look. But I’ll get out of your way now.” She was opening the door and inside almost before he realized she was really going.

  And then she was gone and only small footprints in the snow gave any evidence that she’d ever been there at all.

  How was someone that beautiful allowed to just walk around in the woods sneaking up on women? Celie wondered feverishly as she drove away. Good lord, the man made her palms sweat. Not to mention the fact that he’d come across her on his land without permission. Strictly against the policy and procedure manual her boss loved to wave in front of her face. You were required to get permission from property owners before venturing in, and mistakes—however well-intentioned—weren’t allowed. Oh yes, Gavin Masterson would have a field day with the incident. Shoot, it would give him fodder for a whole week of lectures.

  Assuming he found out.

  She breathed a silent prayer that the hunk of a property owner—the very large hunk of a property owner—would just let the incident go. Then again, there wasn’t much she could do about it if he didn’t. He’d do what he was going to do. All sh
e could do in return was roll with the changes, something she’d always been good at.

  “Thank God,” she muttered at the sight of the Woodward Institute sign at the side of the road. At least something was finally going right.

  The Institute occupied an unprepossessing two-story building faced with biscuit-colored vinyl siding and roofed in pale brown. Rising behind it she saw the high venting peak of a sugarhouse. In all directions stretched different varieties of maples.

  The inhabitants of the facility didn’t stand on ceremony. When she walked through the doors, she stepped into an empty reception area separated from the central room beyond by a waist-high wooden barrier fitted with a gate and a bell. To get someone’s attention, presumably, you rang, although she supposed yelling was always an option. The central area held a few cubicles inside the perimeter of offices. A number of the doors were open, letting winter sunlight stream through.

  A bearded man in a flannel shirt and jeans stood in front of a copy machine. He glanced up at her, the light glinting off his gold-rimmed glasses. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Bob Ford.”

  “You’ve found him.” He collected his copies and took the original off the glass plate. “Are you Celie?”

  She nodded. “Sorry I’m late. I had some adventures finding the place.”

  “I’m not surprised. We really need to sit down and redo our directions. Come on in.” He waved her through the barrier and put his hand out to shake. “Pleasure to meet you. Come on, my office is over here.”

  She followed him along the aisle to where he turned in a door. “Wow.” She stopped short, staring through the wide band of windows at the sugarbush beyond. “Quite a view you’ve got here.”

  “A corner office.” His teeth gleamed against his neatly trimmed silver beard. “The perks of command.”

  At his gesture, she sat in the client chair. “It’s gorgeous up here.”

  “We like to think so. It won’t be for long if your bug gets loose, though.”

  Her bug. Celie had studied the scarlet-horned maple borer since undergraduate school, shocked by the toll it had exacted in Asia. Finding a way to destroy it became a personal mission, not just the subject of her doctorate. When the beetle had emerged as a threat to the northern forests of the United States, she and her advisor, Jack Benchley, had been recruited for the science advisory panel that determined a plan of action. From there, it had been only a short step to taking the job heading up the eradication program.

  And there she’d been ever since, her name synonymous with a predator of increasing destructiveness.

  “Do you think you’ve got things under control in New York?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it. She moved her shoulders. “We took down a lot of trees. Will it help? I don’t know. I suppose in our own way we’re just as bad as the borer.”

  “You don’t destroy trees for the sake of destruction,” Ford said quietly.

  “Neither do they. They’re just going about the business of life.” But they were relentless, implacable, and every time she had to take out an acre of century-old trees it made her soul sick. “Do the sugar-makers around here know that you’ve discovered evidence of the borer?”

  “We’ve done some inspections but I haven’t said anything. I thought you ought to get a look around. There’s a county growers’ meeting tomorrow night. You can fill them in on the details then, let them know what to expect.”

  “When I figure that out, I’ll let you know.” Through the open door, she heard the sudden sound of voices as a group of people came in from outside.

  Ford glanced out toward the central room and his jaw set a fraction. “You should be aware, we’ve also got an…official from the Vermont Division of Forestry to oversee the project.”

  Hairs prickled on the back of her neck. “To oversee the project? This is a federal program. I’m running it.”

  “Not in my state,” said a voice from the door.

  Without turning, Celie knew who it was. Dick Rumson, the old guard head of forest resource protection for the state. Undereducated and overprotected, he was a political appointee who ran roughshod over far-more-qualified people by virtue of his connections. He’d wangled a spot on the science advisory panel for the maple borer and obdurately contested the findings put forth by Celie and Benchley. Fortunately, they’d had the data to back up every assertion, whereas he’d had only bluster. Ultimately, she and Benchley had carried all the votes, with Rumson as the lone holdout. That he still bitterly resented being shown up was obvious by the set of his beaky mouth.

  “Dick,” she said smoothly, rising to put out her hand. “Good to see you again.”

  “We can handle this ourselves,” Rumson said brusquely, ignoring Celie to aim a stare at Bob Ford. “We don’t need federal folks in here.”

  “I think it’s too early to assume that,” Celie countered, jamming her hands in her pockets. “The staff here has reason to suspect an infestation, and I think they might be right.” Calm, she reminded herself. Calmness was the best way to get to him. He wasn’t a threat, only an irritant. Everything would be twice as hard and take twice as long with him around, but it would get done. “I’ll know more about the situation after I’ve had a chance to do some inspections.” She toyed with the items in her pocket: a coin, a paperclip, a hard cylinder she didn’t remember putting in there.

  “We’ve already inspected and we haven’t found anything. You might as well save your time.”

  “Now, Dick,” Ford began, “you know we’ve found—”

  “You university types jump to conclusions,” Rumson said contemptuously. “I’ve got a staff of experienced forestry specialists and we haven’t found anything.”

  Celie touched the hard cylinder again. The sample vial, she realized. “Really?” She brought it out. “You want to tell me what this is, then?”

  Rumson squinted over at it. “What’s that?”

  “A sample from a bore hole.”

  Rumson gave a contemptuous snort. “That’s bark.”

  “Look closer,” she invited. “That greenish powder on the top might be maple-borer fungi.”

  “Or it could just be bark dust.”

  “You want to come into the lab with me and find out?”

  “I don’t have time for this load of time-wasting horse hockey,” he barked, a sure sign he was feeling on unsteady ground.

  “I’ll be happy to call you with the results,” Celie said silkily. “I’m not doing this for entertainment, Dick. If the maple borer is in your woods, we’ve got to find it and act quickly. Unless you want to lose your entire maple syrup industry and all those tourist dollars the leaf peepers bring in the fall. How many billion dollars does that add up to again?”

  Rumson’s face turned a dull red. “Now just a minute here. Don’t you think you can come in and just start clearing acres. How do I know you didn’t bring that in?”

  “Careful, Dick.” Somehow, Ford’s voice managed to be both mild and steely with warning.

  Rumson worked his jaw a moment in silence. “I want to talk with your supervisor.”

  “I’ll be happy to give you his number. We need to work together on this.”

  “I saw how you cooperated at the advisory panel meeting,” he said, his expression sullen. “I want my team overseeing everything you do.”

  “I’ll go you one better. Once I’ve trained them, your team can be involved in every inspection. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and very little time to do it in. We’re going to need every pair of eyeballs we can get.”

  “If you think that—”

  “What I think is that as head of resource protection you want what’s best for your forests, Dick. I’ve always thought that. How we work out the specifics is just details.” She gave him a friendly, open smile.

  It stopped him for a long moment while he tried to work out a response. “Don’t think this is over,” he said finally, turning toward the door.

  Celie
resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Trust me, Dick, I know it’s only the start.”

  Chapter Two

  “Sorry you had to deal with that,” Ford said as Rumson slammed out. “I was going to warn you but there wasn’t time.”

  Celie shrugged. “I should have expected it. Dick and I go back a ways.” And little of their history was pleasant.

  Ford studied her. “Is he going to get in the way of you getting the job done?”

  “I’m sure he’ll try, but he’s never managed to be more than an annoyance so far.”

  “Let me see that sample.” He reached out a hand and she passed over the glass cylinder.

  Ford studied it, turning it over in his hands. “You really think this is the fungus?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not as green as it usually is but the trunk showed the typical thickening of the bark, and holes, although they looked like a bird had been at them. Hard to say if they were made by our boy or not.”

  “Where’d you see it?”

  “A sugarbush on the way here. I’m not sure where. I ran into the owner while I was out there—a big, tall guy with black hair.” And shoulders to die for but she didn’t figure he wanted to hear that.

  “Jacob Trask,” Ford said. “He’s got about a hundred acres of maples adjoining the Institute.” He shook his head. “Let’s hope this is just bark in here. He lost his father last spring. That family doesn’t need any more bad news.”

  He hadn’t looked like someone’s son but like some wood-master sprung out of the earth to walk the forest, with his black hair and those cheekbones and those eyes, those impossibly blue eyes. And he’d stood there staring at her until all she’d been able to do was babble like an idiot and scramble away before she just started whimpering and salivating right there in front of him.

  “Well, there’s nothing for it,” Ford said, handing the sample vial back and rising. “You’ve got to do your job. Come on, I’ll show you the cube and the lab you can use.”