She could see immediately it wasn't as well kept as most of its neighbors. The front lawn was patchy.
The foundation plantings desperately needed shaping, and what had been flower beds looked either overgrown or stone dead.
She heard the buzz of chain saws and country music playing too loud as she walked around the side
of the house. Ivy was growing madly here, crawling its way up the brick. Should be stripped off, she thought. That maple needs to come down, before it falls down, and that fence line's covered with brambles, overrun with honeysuckle.
In the back, she spotted Logan, harnessed halfway up a dead oak. Wielding the chain saw, he speared through branches. It was cool, but the sun and the labor had a dew of sweat on his face, and a line of
it darkening the back of his shirt.
Okay, so he was sexy. Any well-built man doing manual labor looked sexy. Add some sort of dangerous tool to the mix, and the image went straight to the lust bars and played a primal tune.
But sexy, she reminded herself, wasn't the point.
His work and their working dynamics were the point. She stood well out of the way while he worked,
and scanned the rest of the backyard.
The space might have been lovely once, but now it was neglected, weedy, overgrown with trash trees
and dying shrubs. A sagging garden shed tilted in the far corner of a fence smothered in vines.
Nearly a quarter of an acre, she estimated as she watched a huge black man drag lopped branches
toward a short, skinny white man working a splitter. Nearby a burly-looking mulcher waited its turn to chew up the rest.
The beauty here wasn't lost, Stella decided. It was just buried.
It needed vision to bring it to life again.
Since the black man caught her eye, Stella wandered over to the ground crew.
'Help you, Miss?'
She extended her hand and a smile. 'I'm Stella Rothchild, Ms. Harper's manager.'
' 'Meetcha. I'm Sam, this here is Dick.'
The little guy had the fresh, freckled face of a twelve-year-old, with a scraggly goatee that looked as if
it might have grown there by mistake. 'Heard about you.' He sent an eyebrow-wiggling grin toward
her coworker.
'Really?' She kept her tone friendly, though her teeth came together tight in the smile. 'I thought it
would be helpful if I dropped by a couple of the jobs, looked at the work.' She scanned the yard again, deliberately keeping her gaze below Logan's perch in the tree. 'You've certainly got yours cut out for
you with this.'
'Got a mess of clearing to do,' Sam agreed. Covered with work gloves, his enormous hands settled on
his hips. 'Seen worse, though.'
'Is there a projection on man-hours?'
'Projection.' Dick sniggered and elbowed Sam.
From his great height, Sam sent down a pitying look.
'You want to know about the plans and, uh, projections,' he said, 'you need to talk to the boss. He's
got all that worked up.'
'All right, then. Thanks. I'll let you get back to work.'
Walking away, Stella took the little camera out of her bag and began to take what she thought of as 'before' pictures.
* * *
He knew she was there. Standing down there all pressed and tidy with her wild hair pulled back and shaded glasses hiding her big blue eyes.
He'd wondered when she would come nag him on a job, as it appeared to him she was a woman born
to nag. At least she had the sense not to interrupt.
Then again, she seemed to be nothing but sense.
Maybe she'd surprise him. He liked surprises, and he'd gotten one when he met her kids. He'd expected to see a couple of polite little robots. The sort that looked to their domineering mother before saying a word. Instead he'd found them normal, interesting, funny kids. Surely it took some imagination to
manage two active boys.
Maybe she was only a pain in the ass when it came to work.
Well, he grinned a little as he cut through a branch. So was he.
He let her wait while he finished. It took him another thirty minutes, during which he largely ignored her. Though he did see her take a camera—Jesus—then a notebook out of her purse.
He also noticed she'd gone over to speak to his men and that Dick sent occasional glances in Stella's direction.
Dick was a social moron, Logan thought, particularly when it came to women. But he was a tireless worker, and he would take on the filthiest job with a blissful and idiotic grin. Sam, who had more common sense in his big toe than Dick had in his entire skinny body, was, thank God, a tolerant and patient man.
They went back to high school, and that was the sort of thing that set well with Logan. The continuity
of it, and the fact that because they'd known each other around twenty years, they didn't have to gab
all the damn time to make themselves understood.
Explaining things half a dozen times just tried his patience. Which he had no problem admitting he had
in short supply to begin with.
Between the three of them, they did good work, often exceptional work. And with Sam's brawn and Dick's energy, he rarely had to take on any more laborers.
Which suited him. He preferred small crews to large. It was more personal that way, at least from his point of view. And in Logan's point of view, every job he took was personal.
It was his vision, his sweat, his blood that went into the land. And his name that stood for what he
created with it.
The Yankee could harp about forms and systemic bullshit all she wanted. The land didn't give a rat's
ass about that. And neither did he.
He called out a warning to his men, then topped the old, dead oak. When he shimmied down, he unhooked his harness and grabbed a bottle of water. He drank half of it down without taking a breath.
'Mr....' No, friendly, Stella remembered. She boosted up her smile, and started over. 'Nice job.
I didn't realize you did the tree work yourself.'
'Depends. Nothing tricky to this one. Out for a drive?'
'No, though I did enjoy looking at the neighborhood. It's beautiful.' She looked around the yard,
gestured to encompass it. 'This must have been, too, once. What happened?'
'Couple lived here fifty years. He died a while back. She couldn't handle the place on her own, and
none of their kids still live close by. She got sick, place got rundown. She got sicker. Kids finally got
her out and into a nursing home.'
'That's hard. It's sad.'
'Yeah, a lot of life is. They sold the place. New owners got a bargain and want the grounds done up. We're doing them up.'
'What've you got in mind?'
He took another slug from the water bottle. She noticed the mulcher had stopped grinding, and after Logan sent a long, narrowed look over her shoulder, it got going again.
'I've got a lot of things in mind.'
'Dealing with this job, specifically?'
'Why?'
'Because it'll help me do my job if I know more about yours. Obviously you're taking out the oak and
I assume the maple out front.'
'Yeah. Okay, here's the deal. We clear everything out that can't or shouldn't be saved. New sod, new fencing. We knock down the old shed, replace it. New owners want lots of color. So we shape up the azaleas, put a weeping cherry out front, replacing the maple. Lilac over there, and a magnolia on that
