“Miss Willa,” he mumbled against Reece’s mouth, trying as he spoke to put some space between them. It was hard when he didn’t really want that space, and neither did she, judging by the way she clung to him.
His words, though, did the trick. Her hands still on his chest, one beneath his shirt, she drew back enough to focus her gaze on him. “When a man brings up my grandmother while I’m trying to kiss him senseless, I’m obviously not doing it right.” Her voice was husky, tinged with amusement and tempered with impatience.
“I passed senseless a while ago.” He tried for a rueful grin and thought he succeeded with the rueful part. “We’re not exactly being discreet, and your grandmother would give you hell for dallying with the hired help.”
She looked at the house, where rows of windows stared down on them. Jones hadn’t been inside yet, but he’d guess they could be seen there beside the driveway from at least two-thirds of the structure.
“She’s given me hell plenty of times before,” Reece said, taking a step back, then another. “It wouldn’t be anything new. But she wouldn’t fire you for dallying with her granddaughter.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to him. Once voiced, it gave him a moment’s thought: leaving Fair Winds knowing no more about Glen than when he’d come.
But Reece was right, and it showed in her smile. “It’d be easier to send
me
away than to find another big-name landscape architect to handle her project.” There was only the slightest hint of self-pity in her voice before she went on. “A name that I think, after getting more intimately acquainted, I should know.”
He left her a moment to return to the garage and close the door, then came back, took her hand in his and started toward the house. “You know my name.”
“Jones. No
Mister.
Just Jones.” She gave him a wicked sidelong glance. “Don’t tell me your first name is Justin. Or Justice.”
“Nope. Though that wouldn’t be so bad.”
She laughed at the idea of something worse than Justice Jones. “I don’t even know whether Jones is your first or last name.”
She’d asked him that twice, fifteen years apart. The first time he’d always been on the lookout for trouble, and never giving anyone his full name, or sometimes even his own name, had been one safety measure. The second time he’d thought she knew who he was.
Now he believed she didn’t. He’d been wavering on the subject of her self-claimed amnesia, but at that moment he admitted he believed her. And she was right; after that, uh, intimacy, she deserved to know that much.
“It’s my last name. My first name is between me, my lawyers, my accountant and my mother. Everyone else in the world just calls me Jones.”
“Even your girlfriends?”
“When I have one.”
“Do they get tired of waiting for you back there in Kentucky while you travel all over working?”
As they got closer to the house, he released her hand and, in silent agreement, they put a few extra inches between them. “You’re assuming they all break up with me. That’s not always the case. Besides, long-distance relationships aren’t so tough anymore, not with the internet, smartphones and the money to make regular visits.”
“Yeah, it worked for your grandparents and parents.”
“And without the internet, smartphones or airlines.”
“Is that what you want? A long-distance relationship? To always be saying goodbye, sleeping alone, waiting for the next visit? Putting business first, wife and kids last?” Scrunching her face into a frown, she shook her head. “You’re no romantic, Jones.”
Now it was him laughing. He’d learned all the gestures—the fancy restaurants, the flowers, the extravagant gifts, the celebrations for no reason. He could romance a woman with the best of them. It wasn’t his idea of fun, but if it was what a woman wanted, and if he wanted her, he could do it.
He didn’t think the gestures were what Reece wanted at all. Just genuine emotion. Knowing she was important and being shown in the ways that really mattered—the little ways. A massage. A shoulder to lean on when she was upset. A voice to ease the fear. Loving her dogs unconditionally.
Oh, yeah, and being there every night at bedtime.
“First, I’m talking about just a relationship at the moment, not marriage. And second, it’s not ideal, but life usually isn’t. Ideally, I’d want a wife who shared my interest in the business, who would travel and work with me. And ideally by the time we had kids, the business would be at a point where I could just run it and let other people do the traveling.”
“If you’re known well enough in this business to impress Grandmother, then you’re in that position now,” Reece pointed out as they reached the patio.
“I am,” he admitted, then parroted her own words back to her. “I’ve never met a woman I’d remotely consider tying myself to. At least…not yet.”
Their gazes locked, and again there was heat, need, hunger. It was sexual tension, he told himself. Lust. Any man in the world who’d just shared that kiss with her, whose nerves were still humming with little electric shocks, would feel the same way.
It didn’t mean she could be that woman. It didn’t mean they could share any sort of relationship beyond a temporary one. It didn’t mean she felt or wanted the same thing.
It didn’t mean a damn thing at all except that he was in sorry shape.
“I—I’d better get the keys back to Grandmother.” Reece’s voice was unsteady again, just a little quaver that hinted of her physical response.
“I’d better start on the front bed.” He handed her the keys and watched her go to the door. There she turned back to watch him until finally he forced himself to move.
Pansies. Flower beds. Mulch. Soil. Edging. Hard work.
Exactly what he needed.
Chapter 8
T
he clock in the hall chimed four o’clock, drawing Reece’s gaze from the book. Grandmother was resting, something she’d done every afternoon as far back as Reece could remember, and the house was particularly quiet with the housekeeper gone.
Quiet
didn’t apply to outdoors, though. Shortly after she’d come inside, Jones had driven past on his way out. An hour later, he’d returned, parking the truck in the middle of the driveway about even with the porch. Yes, she’d gone into Grandmother’s study to peek through the lace curtains. Behind him was another truck, bigger, loaded with pallets of brick and mulch, bags of concrete mix and some type of equipment. He and the driver had unloaded, shaken hands, then the truck left and Jones turned to the front yard.
The equipment—a tiller, she guessed, not that she’d ever had the opportunity to need one—was noisy and distracted her from her reading. She’d finished four chapters of
Southern Aristocracy
without remembering a word.
Now she closed the book and sighed loudly. It echoed in the salon, as if a dozen souls joined in. Setting the book aside, she stood and stretched, looked around as if seeking something else to do, then gave up the pretense and went into the hall. A slight hum from the refrigerator, the swish of paddle fans in the salon and Grandmother’s study, the smells of wood polish and age and… Her nose twitched as she looked toward the front hall. She took a few steps toward the heavy closed door and sniffed again.
It was cigar smoke. Not the stale decades’ worth of smoke Grandfather’s study had seen, but fresh, almost sweet. She imagined as she stared at the door that she could even see the faint curl as the smoke escaped the room.
She took a few more steps, reaching the door in fits and starts. For a time she just looked, aware that everything in her had gone cold. The smoke was definitely seeping under the door in delicate wisps as if drawn out by an invisible vacuum.
Fingers trembling, she touched the door, solid ancient wood, neither warm nor cold, just a door. Slowly she slid her hand down and to the right, until her fingers brushed the intricate brass knob that the sea captain Howard had brought from India. She could turn it. Open the door. Go inside. Satisfy her curiosity that Grandfather assuredly wasn’t there.
Meow.
She jerked her hand away, strode to the front door and clumsily undid the locks, stumbling in her haste to get out of the house.
Busy with the tiller, Jones didn’t notice her less-than-graceful exit, giving her a chance to study him. He’d removed his shirt and tossed it onto the porch. Sweat sheened on his back, rippling as he worked the tiller in a north/south line, amending the beds he’d already tilled. His skin was brown, a deep tan adding to the rich olive hue he came by naturally, and muscles defined the long bare expanse, disappearing into the sweat-soaked waistband of his shorts. Her breath coming more shallowly, she raised her gaze up again, to where his dark hair curled wetly against his neck.
She saw handsome men every day in New Orleans. She saw handsome men half-dressed and sweaty every day, and while she always appreciated them, she didn’t grow short of breath looking at them. Her fingers didn’t itch to touch them, to feel the heat radiating from them, to comb through their damp hair. For heaven’s sake, she was a twenty-eight-year-old woman, not a fifteen-year-old girl.
Sudden silence made her realize he’d seen her and shut off the machine. She strolled down the steps, absently counting
one, two, three, four,
then stopped at the bottom. “Marvin?”
Removing the ear cups that protected his ears from the tiller’s noise, he quirked one brow.
“Is that your name?”
“Nope. But I have an uncle Marvin.”
“Leonard?”
“Nope. He’s my cousin.”
“Homer?”
Grinning, he shook his head. “That’s my grandpa.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. And my other grandfather’s name is Cleland. I come from more Joneses than a census taker could count. Name a name, and I’ve probably got a relative who answers to it.” He wheeled the tiller off to one side, then swiped his face on a bandanna he pulled from his hip pocket. “What do you think?”
She walked out into the grass to get the full effect of the new beds. There was one on each side of the steps, blocky, their straight lines broken only by diamond points in the center of each bed. The freshly tilled earth smelled rich and lush, an intoxicating fragrance, like the first whiff of coffee early in the morning. Again, she felt a yearning to dig her hands into the soil, grind it into the knees of her jeans, cake it under her nails. Which would just earn her more disapproval from Grandmother.
“I like the points.”
“Every bed had them originally, except in the shade garden, which really didn’t have any beds at all. Things just grew kind of wild.”
“When do the brick people come?”
His grin was way too charming to leave any female unaffected, whether she was fifteen or fifty-five. “You’re looking at him.”
“You’re just a master of all trades, aren’t you?”
“When you work with different tradesmen on every job, it helps to know the job yourself. You want to help?” When she arched her own brow, he said, “I saw the gleam in your eye when you saw the pansies, and then when you got your first whiff of soil. Miss Willa and Valerie might not like getting their hands dirty, but there’s a gardener inside you.”
She didn’t bother telling him that any gleam in her eyes lately had been inspired by
him.
Her kiss earlier had gotten that message across clearly. “I’ll go change.”
She jogged up the steps and went inside, nudging the door shut behind her. As if yanked from her hand, it slammed, echoing through the house, and a puff of cigar smoke billowed around her.
Go away.
For a moment, she froze, then remembered Jones just outside. Batting at the smoke, she started up the stairs, but the words echoed again as she reached the top and an extraordinarily icy patch of air. “You go away,” she whispered with a glance toward Grandmother’s closed door.
Inside her room she started to strip off her jeans, hesitated, then grabbed the clothes she wanted and stepped behind the changing screen in the corner. She didn’t want to be ogled by any ghost, but especially a smelly, bossy one who was likely related to her.
She’d replaced jeans with comfortable cotton shorts and was unbuttoning her shirt when a squeak came from the other side of the screen. Part of her job at Martine’s shop included cleaning glass display cases. She knew the sound of moisture on glass.
Sticking her head around the screen, she watched an unseen finger write on the mirror, the words appearing slowly.
You may not live to regret the answers.
“Are you
threatening
me?”
The first message faded, then what sounded like a sigh—and smelled of tobacco—shivered cold air through the room. “Go home. Forget that summer.”
These words were as clear as her own, the voice as curt and ominous in death as it had been in life. Then, after a long pause, came another word, one she doubted he’d ever said in life, certainly not to the annoying granddaughter who’d disrupted his home for four months.
“Please.”
Slowly she withdrew behind the screen again, though she was certain Grandfather was gone. She removed her shirt and tugged a T-shirt over her head.
Welcome to New Orleans,
it read over a picture of Jackson Square.
Now go home.
The words struck her as…ironic? Prophetic?
With flip-flops and a ballcap to shade her eyes, she returned to the front yard without incident.
Her part of the work was easy. Jones prepared the base for the brick retaining wall that would enclose the garden while she followed his directions. They talked about inconsequential things, the topics two new co-workers might discuss…or a couple on their first date.
And this—helping to build a brick wall, albeit minimally—was more fun than any first date she’d ever been on.
He explained to her that each row of bricks was called a course, and showed her how to be sure the courses were level, how to slather mortar onto the bricks and position each one. She even laid a few herself, using his gloves that were too big and were damp from his own hands, because Portland cement was harsh on the skin.