Irish Rose by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

without me. I liked your farm when we were here yesterday." He glanced around now at the neat buildings. The cottage was nearly half again as large as the one where Adelia Grant had grown up, but the roof had the same bleached yellow thatching and sturdy stone walls. There were flowers here as well. The Irish seemed happy to let them grow as they chose—gay, untamed and sturdy. A hedge of wild fuchsia was already blooming. It made him think of home and the snow covering the fields.
    The roof of the barn showed fresh patching. The paint on the silo was peeling and no longer white, but the chickens in the coop were fat and clucking. He imagined the McKinnons worked seven days a week to maintain the place. Such was the life of a farmer. "This is a fine piece of land. Apparently your father knows what to do with it."
    "It's his life," Erin said simply as she took down the last of the wash.
    "What about yours?"
    "I don't know what you mean."
    He lifted the basket before she could. "It's a good farm, a good life for some. You weren't meant for it."
    "You don't know me well enough to say what I'm meant for." She took the basket from him and walked toward the kitchen door. "But I've already told you I'm going north to an office job in a year or so. Taking a deep breath, she swung the door open. Her mother would be horrified if she didn't ask the man in and at least offer him a cup of tea. She turned to him, but before she could issue the invitation he was taking the first step.
    "Let's take a walk. I have a proposition for you."
    Erin leaned back against the door and studied him coolly. "Oh, I'll just bet you do."
    He took the basket from her again, set it inside the door and gave it a little shove. "You're getting ahead of yourself, Irish. Let's just say when I want you in bed I won't ask."
    And he wouldn't, she thought as they watched each other. He wasn't the type to court a woman with flowers and pretty words, any more than he was the type to coax a woman gently into his arms. Well, she wasn't the type who wanted to be coaxed, but neither would she be steamrollered. "Just what is it you're wanting, Burke?"
    "Let's take a walk," he repeated, but this time he closed his hand over hers.
    She could have refused, but then she wouldn't know what it was he had to say. Erin decided that if she shook free and shut the door in his face, he'd tuck his hands in his pockets and stroll off, leaving her the one who was fuming.
    There was no harm in walking with him, she told herself as she stepped down beside him. Her mother was in the house, and her father, along with a couple of her brothers, was somewhere on the farm. Added to that was the fact that she had every confidence she could take care of herself.
    "I don't have much time," she said briskly. "There's a lot more to be done today."
    "This won't take long." But he said nothing more as they walked away from the house. He didn't seem to look, but he saw everything—the care, the sweat that went into the farm, the long hours and the hope. He counted thirty cows. A man could make a living off less, he imagined. It hadn't been so many years since he'd worked backbreaking hours. He hadn't forgotten, just as he never forgot that fate could take what he had just as easily as it had given it to him.
    "If it was a tour of the farm you were wanting—" Erin began.
    "I had one yesterday, remember?" He paused a moment to look out over a field. He knew what it was to haul rocks from them, to ride sweating over them at baling time and to curse the land as much as you worshiped it. "You grow grain here for the stock?"
    "Aye. It'll be plowing time soon."
    "You work the fields?"
    "I've been known to."
    Burke turned her hand palm-up and studied it. It wasn't raw and cracked, but toughened with a ridge of callus. The nails were trimmed short and left un-painted. "You haven't pampered them."
    "What good would that do me? I'm not ashamed of the work they've done."
    "No. You're too practical for that." He