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“We could lose some really valuable things,” she finished vaguely.
He nodded, instantly decisive. “No bulldozer. It’s a deal. So you’d use a team to clear the cactus by hand? Machetes and whatnot?”
“I’d be here myself the whole time, to oversee the work so that nothing important was damaged. If this place was mine, I’d let the design of the restored garden evolve over a period of some days as we began to discover what lay beneath. I wouldn’t plan it on paper in advance. It would be a unique, fascinating exercise.”
She ran her gaze over the mazelike expanse and felt a ridiculous itch to get started at once, like a kid in a candy store. Was that the curve of a stone well housing she could glimpse between the forests of cacti? Even if the well didn’t produce water, the old stone would make a dramatic accent with the right surroundings. She could see brilliant yellow flowers, too, but couldn’t make out what they were. It would be wonderful to work on this garden.
“Tell me more, Rowena,” Ben Radford invited her softly. “Make me see it. Paint it for me.”
“Oh, um…” she began awkwardly, and even when she relaxed and grew more fluent, she kept waiting for him to lose interest and signal that she’d said enough.
But he never did. Instead he stayed silent. He followed the gestures she made, nodded when she emphasized a point, smiled and even laughed with her once or twice when she invited him to picture an incident from a previous project. Like the time she’d briefly mistaken a late-twentieth-century lost toy for a Civil War belt buckle because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She’d made an appointment to get contact lenses the next day.
She didn’t mind telling an anecdote against herself if it made a man laugh. Ben Radford’s laugh was deep and a little rusty, as if he didn’t use it often enough.
“I really think that’s about all I can tell you for the moment,” she finished, after several minutes.
Ben nodded slowly, and made up for his disdainful failure to glance in her direction earlier by studying her with a disconcerting intensity now. What was he looking at? The too-dreamy expression in her eyes? The way her smile wobbled when she felt doubtful about something she’d said? Or was he seeing something else? Had she gone way over the top just now? What did he see? How much was he judging her?
“That’s not what I envisaged when I decided to bring you in,” he said.
“You expected to start with a blank canvas, so to speak, and lay the whole thing out according to a plan on paper, right off the bat.”
“I guess I did.”
“I could do it that way,” she conceded slowly.
“But you’d rather not.”
“No, because it’s such a fabulous opportunity!” She clasped her hands together, then quickly separated them again. Her body language would say she was begging. “With what you’ve done to the house so far—that’s wonderful, by the way, such a great blend of modern comfort and warmth, and authentic historical references. I’d love to do the same with this yard. To stay true to the Hispanic and pre-Hispanic heritage, while developing a space that’s beautiful and usable and welcoming at the same time. You’d love it, too. I know you would.”
His smile was crooked and cynical this time. “You know I would? What if I said it doesn’t fit my idea of the place at all?”
She’d let her personal feelings show too clearly, and she’d assumed way too much about her prospective client. Putting on a blank, polite face, she told him, “Then we’ll do whatever you decide. You’re the client, Mr.—Ben. Or you would be,” she corrected herself quickly, “if you decided to contract me for the project.”
She didn’t think that he would. Their initial dealings with each other this morning had been too awkward, and he was the kind of man who made quick, incisive decisions that he didn’t rethink.
Even now, after they’d found some common ground, there was something in the air that she couldn’t put her finger on, a kind of tension that made her uncomfortable and which she wanted to escape from as soon as she could. Her therapist, Jeanette, would probably want her to identify the tension’s exact origin in their next session, but Rowena wasn’t convinced she should risk taking a closer look at it.
“Tell me why I’d love this idea of yours,” Ben said. “How can I know? Convince me. How do you know? You seemed pretty sure just now.”
“Because I saw what you’d done with the house,” she explained simply. “That couldn’t just have been the work of decorators. I could see one person’s unique vision there. I assume that person was you.”
“You’re right. It was me. I said no to half of what the interior designer wanted, not to mention—” But he stopped.
He narrowed his eyes, looked down at the tips of his fingers and rubbed them together almost without seeing them. Was he still thinking of the picture Rowena had painted? Or was this an absentminded interest in the brilliant color of the dye that stained his skin.
“My wife thinks this whole idea is insane,” he said abruptly. Then he swore under his breath and muttered, “I have to start remembering to call her my ex!”
Rowena didn’t know what to say.
Ben picked up on her awkwardness. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t planned to say that out loud.” He gave her a sharp glance, as if wondering what on earth had made him apologize to someone like her for the second time in the space of half an hour.
“It’s fine.” She kept the polite facade in place.
“But you probably didn’t expect to find yourself discussing my divorce,” he persisted.
“No. Your bio that I found on the Internet said you were happily married,” she blurted out, then mentally swore. Oh,shoot!
Ben Radford swore right out loud, and he didn’t say anything so mild as shoot. “We maintained the fiction for quite a while, but I’m afraid the Internet information is out of date. If I sound bitter about it, there are reasons.”
“So what went wrong?” she blurted again. Oh, this was getting worse and worse! Just because he’d let a couple of details that he clearly regretted already slip, that was no reason for her to keep this same conversational ball rolling. It was as if his forthright Irish housekeeper had slipped truth serum into their coffee. “Forget I said that,” she added quickly.
“I’ll answer, if you want.”
“No, no please.”
“Let me answer,” he insisted lightly. “I need the practice.”
She laughed before she could stop herself—oh Lord, what would he think now?—because it was the same thing she’d thought about him, some minutes ago, when they’d reached their first uneasy truce.
In dealing with men like Ben Radford, she definitely needed the practice.
“You have to laugh, don’t you?” he said. He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t even smiling. “Either that or punch walls. Which hurts, I’ve discovered.” He rubbed his knuckles to illustrate the point and made her laugh again.
Like Ben Radford himself, she wasn’t all that accustomed to laughter.
Her twin, Roxanna, laughed a lot.
Rox was bright and bubbly and confident, as well as creative, disorganized and quirky. She lived in Tuscany now, having fallen hard for a wealthy Italian businessman who loved her sizzling personality. She’d been the stronger, healthier twin at birth, while Rowena had been in and out of hospitals for years as a child, with respiratory problems and a heart defect that had required more than one operation to correct.
Formed by these childhood experiences, the differences between them had persisted into adulthood. Where Rox enjoyed parties and music and crowds of interesting people, Rowena liked the meditative silence of the research libraries where she tracked down her garden history and the fresh air and beauty of the gardens themselves. Where Rox turned men’s heads with her dazzling smile, Rowena became flustered and confused at male attention.
A serious clinical anxiety disorder had taken her out of the dating game completely for the past couple of years, and despite the huge progress she’d made under the guidance of her therapist, she knew she had some distance still to travel.
“I’ve never been divorced,” she blurted out. “Or married. Or engaged. Or even very serious.”
“You strike me as very serious.”
“About a man. Was what I meant.”
“I’m teasing you, Rowena.” She felt foolish, until he added unsmilingly, “Because if I don’t undercut your advantage a little, I am about to make myself very, very emotionally naked, telling a virtual stranger what went wrong with my marriage.”
“Oh, please don’t feel you have to do that!” She pressed a hand to her cheek, stricken at the fact that she seemed to have drawn out a vulnerable side to Ben Radford that she wouldn’t have thought could exist.
He wasn’t listening. “After I sold Radford Biotech, our divergent money styles became irreconcilable. I could phrase it that way.”
“Mmm,” she agreed politely.
“Do you think? How does it sound? I need more feedback than that.” He looked at her, and only now did she see that those dark eyes had softened, crinkling at the corners, inviting her to take this lightly.
She still didn’t fully understand the man’s motivation, but okay, sure. He was the client, after all…
“Too formal,” she said solemnly. She tapped the end of her pen against her bottom lip, while those eyes of his kept watching her.
“You’re right.” His mouth barely moved when he talked. Everything came out as a cynical, tight-lipped drawl. “How do I put it more simply?”
“You had different life goals?” she suggested. “Or, no, differing life goals.”
He gave a brief, crooked grin. “That’s not bad, Dr. Madison, not bad at all. You’re right. Ing. Differing. A subtle but significant improvement. It implies polite, ongoing disagreement. And says nothing whatsoever about what really happened.”
What did really happen? she wondered.
“Needs a little more, though,” he went on. “A kind of one-two-punch approach. Any thoughts on that?”
“But the two of you will always remain friends. That’s what you’d say if you were movie stars. And you’d still say it even if you couldn’t stand being in the same city as each other at the same time.”
“We would. We’d say exactly that. Heather will love it. Maybe I should write it down for her.”
He was still smiling at her, in his crooked, cynical, smoky-eyed and almost dangerous way, and all at once it was too much. It seemed more like flirting than anything else, and Dr. Rowena Madison just did not do flirting.
She didn’t know how.
And she didn’t want to learn.
He was standing too close. Rowie could sense his superior height and strength and bone-deep confidence like a gravitational pull. She could detect the finer nuances in the delicious way he smelled. The tantalizing scent of expensive male grooming products floated on the clear, dry Southern California air and seemed to belong there. It gave Rowena a dangerous, illusory sense that she belonged, too.
Belonged where, exactly?
The adrenaline rush generated by her earlier boldness was ebbing fast, leaving her with a million familiar doubts.
“You can stop teasing me now, Mr. Radford,” she said stiffly.
“I told you to make it Ben.”
“Yes, but I’m withdrawing to a more formal level to save us both from embarrassment later on.”
“You mean because of this uncomfortably personal conversation? Even though on the surface we’re treating it as a joke?”
“Yes.”
He heard a noise and glanced through the old gate to where he could just glimpse the driveway that curved in front of the house. A car sped around the curve and jerked to a halt.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to get even more personal any second,” he said. “And a lot less of a joke. This is Heather now.”
Chapter Two
Heather Radford caught sight of Rowena and Ben standing by the courtyard gate just as she stepped out of the low-slung yellow sports car, so she came along the side of the old adobe toward them, instead of going to the front door.
“My lawyer’s valuation of joint assets,” she announced by way of a greeting, and dumped an impressively thick binder of papers into Ben Radford’s hands.
Rowena felt almost comically inadequate when she considered the thin quantity of papers on her own clipboard. It was like a two-door compact car owner coming bumper to bumper with someone driving a brand-new Ferrari.
This woman had serious paperwork!
And if it wasn’t an actual Ferrari she was driving, it was something with the same flair.
“I’ll take a look at it later,” Ben said. “Heather, this is Dr. Rowena Madison, who’s doing some work on the garden.”
His voice had changed since their flirty conversation a minute or two ago. It was harder, tighter, with his English origins prominent in the clipped vowels. His face had changed, too. In the space of an hour, Rowena had seen him as the arrogant, impatient businessman, the intelligent connoisseur and the charmingly cynical flirt. Now she was shocked to see him as a human being through and through, with a beating, vulnerable heart.
He minded about the divorce, she realized.
Minded horribly, in a whole lot of ways that went bone deep and that he hadn’t even begun to come to terms with, yet.
For a moment there, she’d thought his light approach to the subject meant the opposite—that he didn’t care a bit. But now she could see she’d been wrong. He made those drawling jokes about it to mask the anger and failure and pain—mask them from others and from himself. He talked about it because he was still too raw to keep it to himself. He shrouded himself in a successful businessman’s arrogance because this was probably the first, and certainly the worst, failure he’d ever had to deal with in his life.
And at some level, he had no idea that this was what he was doing.
“Dr. Madison?” Heather echoed sharply. “You’re a doctor and you have to take a second job as a gardener to make ends meet?” She was a tiny, gorgeous blonde with bright-blue eyes, flawless porcelain skin and a pert nose, and she wore a cream silk trouser suit that would have taken out Rowena’s monthly dry-cleaning bill in a single hit. “Boy, did you pick the wrong specialty!”
It would have been a funny line, if the sarcasm level hadn’t been so high. Rowena had the impression that Heather could be a very funny woman when she wanted to be—funny and clever and captivating and even more ruthlessly cynical than Ben.
“I’m not a medical doctor,” Rowena said, her awkwardness rising back to where it had been just before she’d let fly at Ben Radford half an hour ago. “I have a Ph. D.”
“Ah, now it makes sense. There’s no money at all in academia. Wait a minute, though. You have a Ph. D. in actual gardening? You can do that?”
“I design and restore historic gardens, yes. My Ph. D. dissertation involved—”
Heather wasn’t interested in the subject of Rowie’s dissertation. She trained an accusing look on her not-quite-ex-husband. “How much work are you having done in the yard? You’re bringing in someone like this. I bet you’re landscaping the whole damn thing!”
“Not quite the whole damn thing, Heather. I’ve decided to leave the cattle runs alone,” Ben drawled. “The beasts seem happy enough with grass. I’m just doing the section behind the house.”
“Just? That’s an acre! More! And, let me guess, we’re not just talking about a few deliveries of dirt and flowers. This is going to be hugely expensive, isn’t it? You’re pouring yet more money into this impossible place, and it’s going to mess up the valuation and slow down the divorce. You’re doing it deliberately.I’mnot fooled, Ben! Not for a second!”
“And I’m not doing it to be difficult,” he said tightly. “For heaven’s sake, Heather! You knew I wanted to restore the whole place when we bought it.”
“When you bought it, against my wishes. When you sold a brilliant, high-profit company for half or even a third of what you could have gotten if you’d waited another few years, just so you could mess around with money pits like your precious gallery and your precious casting agency and your restaurant and this wretched historic ranch that’s already soaked up a gazillion dollars. It makes zero sense! And don’t tell me again that you were bored.”
“I was, though,” he said curtly. “Horribly bored. I’d done everything I wanted to do with Radford Biotech. I’d made plenty of money and I didn’t want to hang on to it just so I could wear myself out making even more money doing more of the same thing. Heather, we’ve been through this a hundred times.”
“Yes,” she said bitterly. “And nothing changes. Which is why we’re getting divorced.”
“Is it?”
“Yes! So please, if you have any vestige of feeling left for the time we spent together, don’t mess up my lawyer’s incredibly careful and conscientious and fair valuation with this insane landscaping plan.”
She snatched the binder back from him, turned on a heel that was way too high for such a maneuver and stalked back to the car with her shoes cracking like gunshots on the paving.
