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Her parents had been concerned about the move initially. California? All on her own? What if the panic attacks came back?
But Rowena had known it was the right thing. Her twin sister, Roxanna, was living in Italy with her gorgeous husband, Gino. And Rowena was only in Florida in the first place because she’d fled to her parents in their retirement condo after her anxiety problem had become too severe to handle on her own.
It was time to strike out, to find her independence, her courage, her self-sufficiency and her place in the world. Apart from her parents, she’d had no ties in the Fort Lauderdale area, and no important ones in New Jersey, where she and Rox had grown up. As well, the opportunities for the kind of garden design that interested her were few and far between on Florida’s low-lying, sandy terrain.
A couple of major garden design contracts in the Santa Barbara area sealed the deal, and after a year in her new, light-filled apartment, with an office in a building full of dentists and lawyers and architects nearby, she loved it here and felt at home. There was an enormous range of climates and plant life along the Pacific coast, as well as so much fascinating history.
Jeanette was great, too. The therapy sessions worked. Whether it was finding the right person or just a readiness for change in Rowena herself, they worked. She had gone from “Being able to leave my parents’ apartment” to “Being able to speak at professional conferences” and now she felt ready for “Being able to date.”
“Although, to be honest, I think this one’s going to take a while,” she said.
“You’re stronger than you know, Rowena,” Jeanette said.
“Sometimes I might agree with that statement!” She sighed. “But sometimes it seems as if I take three steps forward and two steps back.”
“We all do that. Three forward and two back is still progress. Just don’t underestimate those forward steps. Write them down.”
“And the backward steps, too?”
“Let’s just focus on the forward ones. Let the backward steps go. Dwelling on those doesn’t help.”
Spring unfolded.
Then summer.
And then—
“This is Ben Radford,” said a male voice on the phone on a Monday morning in September. “Are you still interested in working on the garden at my Santa Margarita Ranch, Dr. Madison?”
Ben Radford. Good-looking, wealthy, cynical, forbidding Ben, who’d made Rowena brave enough, in the space of one morning, to want some danger in her life.
Rowena sat heavily into her swivel chair, the brimming mug of coffee she’d just made for herself splashing a small puddle onto the desk in front of her. “I sent you the draft plan and costing for the project six months ago,” she said blankly.
There was a short, impatient silence down the phone, then, “I take it that’s a no.”
“Um, n-not exactly a no.”
“Then what?” More impatience. “Your estimate has doubled?”
“Not that, either. More of a let me consider.”
“If you’re fully booked with other projects, I can wait. Just give me an exact timetable.” His deep, liquid English voice seemed ridiculously familiar, even though they hadn’t spoken in so long. Thank heaven we never had children. The line had echoed in her head for weeks afterward. How often had she heard a man express that degree of emotion in his voice?
She’d been listening to other men’s voices lately, but they hadn’t made her forget Ben Radford’s. She’d been on several dates, and although they hadn’t led to long-term relationships, they’d been a success in her own terms.
She hadn’t panicked, canceled or run. She’d been able to eat and talk and ask questions. She hadn’t felt her own emotions and reactions like the throb of a sore, swollen thumb, the way she used to. She’d relaxed and enjoyed herself. She’d kissed two men, smiled and said good-night to them without feeling that she had to make some stammering, apologetic explanation about not going to bed on the first date and…
Yes.
Progress. Forward steps, which she’d measured and made note of, as Jeanette had suggested, while letting the backward steps go. It was great.
And it all seemed to evaporate in an instant at the sound of Ben Radford’s voice, bringing back all too familiar sensations of breathlessness and agitation that she hadn’t experienced in a long time.
“I’m booked, but there are some windows,” she said. “It’s just…” She trailed off, then found the professionalism that always helped her through. “Most people don’t take six months to make up their mind on whether a design proposal is acceptable, Ben. What’s going on?”
“I decided it was best to get my divorce and property settlement finalized first,” he said. “It took longer than I expected.”
“Oh. Of course. I’m sorry.” Sorry that she’d pushed for his reasons.
“But things are a lot better now.”
For me, too, she almost said.
Although maybe that wasn’t true, because a familiar impulse to cut and run, which she thought she’d dealt with, suddenly surged again inside her. It was all she could do not to gabble without pause for breath while starting to sweat. I’msorry, I’ve just looked at my schedule, I am fully booked forthe next fifty-three years, you’d better find somebody else,goodbye.
Don’t do it, Rowie. Didn’t you want the danger?
“Let me look at my calendar,” she said instead, after a deep breath. Still more flustered than she wanted to be, she dived at random into the ledger-size planner on her desk and found her time heavily booked for the week after next, and the following two weeks after that.
“First, can I ask how you plan to proceed?” he said, before she could turn the pages of her planner again.
Despite the many and varied garden proposals she’d put together since seeing Santa Margarita, Rowena found that her memory of Ben Radford’s place was detailed and acute.
“We’d need to work in at least two phases, and probably three,” she said. “First, I’ll have to see what we’re working with. An exploratory phase, clearing out the jungle that’s there now. Then I’d be able to return here to put together a detailed plan, which is likely to be split between a hardscaping phase—putting in any new structures—and then a planting phase. Costing’s included in all of it, of course.”
“And the exploratory phase could take place when?”
She flipped her planner again, backward this time, to confirm what she’d been ninety percent certain of all along. Apart from two site visits, which she could easily reschedule, the pages in her planner were blank between the day after tomorrow and the end of next week.
He’d been right to wait, Ben concluded two days later, when he saw Rowena Madison cross the tarmac at San Diego Airport’s small commuter terminal down near the water.
If he’d tried to proceed with the garden project while dealing with the messy details of his divorce and property settlement, he would have ended up hating every flower and every paving stone, and probably thoroughly disliking Dr. Madison herself—if she’d managed to last on the job. He would very likely have sent her packing with his negative moods, his distance and his distracted mental state before the project was even half-finished.
And if he’d gone with a larger local landscaping company, he would never have experienced this astonishing kid-in-a-candy-store feeling welling up inside him now.
He realized that he was itching to get started on this thing, and began to understand how much it had to do with the painful failure of his divorce. He wanted the validation of something new, something fabulous, something that worked.
He’d cleared his schedule as much as he could for the next nine days. Just a few business meetings and conference calls, as well as a couple of evening commitments. Dr. Madison might envisage him supervising her ideas from a safe distance with the occasional stroll around the perimeter of the dirty work, but he had a very different plan in mind. He was going to shed his heavy business suits like a snake shedding its skin. He’d put on jeans, T-shirts and work boots, and get his hands dirty right along beside her.
She saw him as she came through the door and into the terminal building, and she smiled. Carefully professional and a little wary, he saw. She had a gorgeous mouth but the smile was wobbly, and her deep-blue eyes were shadowed by her tension-tightened lids.
Well, he couldn’t blame her for the wariness, if her memories of their morning together six months ago were as fresh as his were.
They’d rattled each other that day.
They’d gotten right under each other’s skin.
They’d told each other far too much.
Now they shook hands. The sober gray cuffs of her jacket were too long. They hid her wrists completely, but couldn’t hide the way she’d had to work at her hands to get rid of the garden stains. Manicured in clear polish and softly moisturized, they nonetheless had a slight roughness to the palms that told him she had every intention of getting dirty, too.
“Thank you for meeting me in person, Ben,” she said, visibly struggling with the informality of his first name. “You really didn’t have to. In fact I expected—” She frowned.
“You thought I’d send a car for you?”
“No, I assumed I’d drive a rental. When I return for the next two phases I’ll bring my own car, but this time it was in the shop for some work. I’ve made a rental reservation. We arranged that I’d come out to Santa Margarita for a meeting at three, didn’t we?”
“We’ll cancel the car rental reservation. And as for our meeting, that’s still on, but meeting you at the airport beforehand seemed like a better idea, since I was in the city already.”
“About the car,” she persisted stubbornly, setting that mouth in a straight line. “I will need my own transportation.”
“You can drive my SUV if you need to. That would be easier for you, in any case, with equipment and samples and so forth, wouldn’t it?”
“It would be, yes,” she agreed carefully.
Her caution seemed habitual. Ben compared it with her sharply accurate and quite passionate outburst about his self-importance six months ago and was intrigued.
What would she be like when the polite and bland veneer slipped? It was a veneer, he felt convinced, and in fact it had already slipped a couple of times, when they’d talked about his divorce. She had brains, heart, humor and perception. He wondered why, too often, those things just didn’t show.
“Any bags to wait for?” he asked.
“Um, a couple. As it happens.” She winced slightly, and a few minutes later he understood why.
Three large matching suitcases.
Gray, of course.
Ben wanted to tell her that black, gray and navy weren’t the only colors a professional woman could be seen with in public while still keeping her reputation intact. Some high-flying female executives were daring enough to try cream or burgundy, or even florals. Some of them showed a bit of skin. Instead, heaving her baggage from the carousel, he exclaimed, “What on earth do you have in these? Sample paving stones?”
“Research material.”
“Books?”
“Mainly.”
“They feel like encyclopedias.”
“Well, most of them are about that big, I guess. For some reason, publishers don’t put out small reference books.” The smile was almost flirty for a moment, but then Ben could actually, visibly, see her pulling back, like a scared cat skittering across a slippery floor. The smile turned into a frown, like the sun disappearing behind a cloud. The body language tightened. She stepped farther away.
“We’ll get a cart,” he said, while fighting an out-of-leftfield curiosity to know which of her conflicting personality traits she expressed in what she wore when she was alone.
There must be some occasions when she let her vibrant side free. What did she wear to bed, for example? Flannel pajamas? High-necked cotton nightgown? Strappy satin slip?
Or maybe—a long shot, here—she wore nothing at all.…
“Will I be able to keep some of them at Santa Margarita?” she asked.
Nope. Had to be the cotton nightgown. With full-length sleeves.
“Some of them?” he echoed, having to force his concentration. “Where will you keep the rest?”
“At my motel.”
Oh, hell, they should have worked all this out in advance!
“I thought you’d prefer to stay at the ranch,” he told her. “There’s a separate guest wing, and I’ve had my housekeeper prepare it for you. We won’t be in each other’s pockets.”
“No,” she agreed awkwardly. “I mean, it’s a big house.”
“It’s up to you, of course, but I thought you’d be more comfortable staying on-site, with meals on hand and no driving back and forth. The nearest motel I’d recommend is some miles away from Santa Margarita.”
“That’s…that’s very kind of you. Thank you.”
“You can come and go as you want, of course,” he reassured her again. “There’s a separate entrance. Your private life is your own.”
She still seemed uneasy about it, however, and her ongoing discomfort got under his skin. Why did the damn woman have this effect on him?
Rowena adjusted her thinking.
She ditched the idea of lining the trunk of a zippy little rental compact with a layer of heavy-duty plastic so she could ferry plant or paving samples from garden centers back to Santa Margarita. Ditched the anonymous safety of a budget-priced room at a blandly elegant chain motel. Ditched the prospect of several hours in which to gather her breath and her cool before heading out to Ben Radford’s land-grant ranch at the respectable and prearranged hour of three o’clock this afternoon.
She’d be driving his SUV, staying in his guest wing and, before she got to any of that, it seemed that they were having lunch. He announced the fact in an offhand way as he maneuvered out of the airport parking lot in his midnight-blue European car. Rowena hadn’t taken in the make or model; she was too busy sinking into the luxury of its butter-soft leather seating.
And then he hit her with the lunch thing.
“At La Jolla,” he explained. “Not quite on the way, but almost. There’s a great seafood place that overlooks the ocean. It’s on the market, and I think it might be an interesting addition to the Radford Lateral Enterprises portfolio so I’m scoping it out. We can celebrate the start of the project with some champagne.”
She wanted to ask him if a long, expensive lunch was really necessary, but when she rehearsed the words in her head they sounded prim and disapproving and, really, did she need to be that way? She should remember why she was here.
To work on a really fascinating, historic, possibility-laden Spanish-land-grant ranch’s mission-style garden.
Ben Radford’s garden.
“Great,” she said firmly. “And while we eat, we can talk about some ideas.”
Five minutes before reaching the restaurant, they passed the corporate headquarters of Radford Biotech. The low white building was set in a manicured sea of green turf, mown in a crisscross pattern that made it look like a plaid blanket spread on the ground.
The reflective glass of the windows shone in the sun. The massed plantings of exotic grasses and desert shrubs had a majestic, almost architectural quality, and the asphalt driveway that led into the parking lot was as fresh and smooth as the frosting on a wedding cake.
“That’s my original outfit,” was Ben’s four-word commentary, and Rowena didn’t like to crane her neck to take a backward glance at the building because he seemed so offhanded about it.
And after all, the corporation was no longer his.
It said something about him, though—about his eye for detail and beauty in the building and its surrounds, and the hard work he must have put in to create something so successful.
She didn’t totally buy the offhandedness, either. “You sold it all? You didn’t keep a partial share?”
“I sold it all,” he said, then added almost ruefully, “And then three months ago a big parcel of shares came back onto the market and I bought them for twenty percent more per share than I’d gotten for them last year. Just as my ex-wife predicted, the value’s still going up. So I do have a stake in the old place again, now—around ten percent.”
