'I envy you—and admire you—every inch of this. If you need some extra hands, give me a call. I miss gardening for the pleasure of it.'
'You want to come by sometime, bring those hands and the kids, I'll put them to work.' When she just lifted her eyebrows, he added. 'Kids don't bother me, if that's what you're thinking. And there's no point planning a yard space where kids aren't welcome.'
'Why don't you have any? Kids?'
'Figured I would by now.' He reached out to touch her hair, pleased that she hadn't bothered with pins. 'Things don't always work out like you figure.'
She walked with him back toward the house. 'People often say divorce is like death.'
'I don't think so.' He shook his head, taking his time on the walk back. 'It's like an end. You make a mistake, you fix it, end it, start over from there. It was her mistake as well as mine. We just didn't
figure that out until we were already married.'
'Most men, given the opportunity, will cheerfully trash an ex.'
'Waste of energy. We stopped loving each other, then we stopped liking each other. That's the part I'm sorry about,' he added, then opened the wide glass door to the kitchen. 'Then we stopped being married, which was the best thing for both of us. She stayed where she wanted to be, I came back to where I wanted to be. It was a couple years out of our lives, and it wasn't all bad.'
'Sensible.' But marriage was a serious business, she thought. Maybe the most serious. The ending of it should leave some scars, shouldn't it?
He poured more wine into their glasses, then took her hand. 'I'll show you the rest of the house.'
Their footsteps echoed as they moved through empty spaces. 'I'm thinking of making a kind of library here, with work space. I could do my designs here.'
'Where do you do them now?'
'Out of the bedroom mostly, or in the kitchen. Whatever's handiest. Powder room over there, needs a complete overhaul, eventually. Stairs are sturdy, but need to be sanded and buffed up.'
He led her up, and she imagined paint on the walls, some sort of technique, she decided, mat blended earthy colors and brought out the tones of wood.
'I'd have files and lists and clippings and dozens of pictures cut out of magazines.' She slanted him a look. 'I don't imagine you do.'
'I've got thoughts, and I don't mind giving them time to stew a while. I grew up on a farm, remember? Farm's got a farmhouse, and my mama loved to buy old furniture and fix it up. Place was packed with tables—she had a weakness for tables. For now, I'm enjoying having nothing much but space around.'
'What did she do with all of it when they moved? Ah, someone mentioned your parents moved to Montana,' she added when he stopped to give her a speculative look.
'Yeah, got a nice little place in Helena. My daddy goes fly-fishing nearly every damn day, according to my mama, anyway. And she took her favorite pieces with her, filled a frigging moving van with stuff.
She sold some, gave some to my sister, dumped some on me. I got it stored. Gotta get around to going through it one of these days, see what I can use.'
'If you went through it, you'd be able to decide how you want to paint, decorate, arrange your rooms. You'd have some focal points.'
'Focal points.' He leaned against the wall, just grinned at her.
'Landscaping and home decorating have the same basic core of using space, focal points, design—and you know that very well or you couldn't have done what you did with your kitchen. So I'll shut up now.'
'Don't mind hearing you talk.'
'Well, I'm done now, so what's the next stop on the tour?'
'Guess this would be. I'm sort of using this as an office.' He gestured to a door. 'And I don't think you want to look in there.'
'I can take it.'
'I'm not sure I can.' He tugged her away, moved on to another door. 'You'll get all steamed up about filing systems and in and out boxes or whatever, and it'll screw up the rhythm. No point in using the grounds as foreplay if I'm going to break the mood by showing you something that'll insult your sensibilities.'
'The grounds are foreplay?'
He just smiled and drew her through a door.
It was his bedroom and, like the kitchen, had been finished in a style that mirrored him. Simple, spacious, and male, with the outdoors blending with the in. The deck she'd seen was outside atrium doors, and beyond it the spring green of trees dominated the view. The walls were a dull, muted yellow, set off by warm wood tones in trim, in floor, in the pitched angles of the ceiling, where a trio of skylights let in the evening glow.
His bed was wide. A man of his size would want room there, she concluded. For sleeping, and for sex. Black iron head- and footboards and a chocolate-brown spread.
There were framed pencil drawings on the walls, gardens in black and white. And when she moved closer, she saw the scrawled signature at the lower corner. 'You did these? They're wonderful.'
'I like to get a visual of projects, and sometimes I sketch them up. Sometimes the sketches aren't half bad.'
'These are a lot better than half bad, and you know it.' She couldn't imagine those big, hard hands drawing anything so elegant, so lovely and fresh. 'You're a constant surprise to me, Logan. A study
of contrasts. I was thinking about contrasts on the way over here tonight, about how things aren't
lined up the way I thought they would be. Should be.'
She turned back to him, gestured toward his sketches. 'These are another blue dahlia.'
'Sorry—not following you. Like the one in your dream?'
'Dreams. I've had two now, and neither was entirely comfortable. In fact, they're getting downright
scary. But the thing is the dahlia, it's so bold and beautiful, so unexpected. But it's not what I planned. Not what I imagined. Neither is this.'
'Planned, imagined, or not, I wanted you here.'
She took another sip of wine. 'And here I am.' She breathed slow in and out. 'Maybe we should talk about... what we expect and how we'll—'
He moved in, pulled her against him. 'Why don't we plant another blue dahlia and just see what happens.'
Or we could try that, she thought when his mouth was on hers. The low tickle in her belly spread, and
the needy part of her whispered, Thank God, inside her head.
She rose on her toes, all the way up, like a dancer on point, to meet him. And angling her body more
truly to his, let him take the glass out of her hand.
Then his hands were in her hair, fingers streaming through it, clutching at it, and her arms were locked around him.
'I feel dizzy,' she whispered. 'Something about you makes me dizzy.'
His blood fired, blasting a bubbling charge of lust straight to his belly. 'Then you should get off your feet.' In one quick move he scooped her up in his arms. She was, he thought, the sort of woman a man wanted to scoop up. Feminine and slight and curvy and soft. Holding her made him feel impossibly strong, uncommonly tender.
'I want to touch you everywhere. Then start right back at the beginning and touch you everywhere again.' When he carried her to the bed, he felt sexy little tremors run through her. 'Even when you
annoy me, I want my hands on you.'
'You must want them on me all the time, then.'
'Truer words. Your hair drives me half crazy.' He buried his face in it as he lowered the two of them
to the bed.
'Me too.' Her skin sprang to life with a thousand nerves as his lips wandered down to her throat. 'But probably for different reasons.'
He bit that sensitive skin, lightly, like a man helping himself to a sample. And the sensation rippled through her in one long, sweet stream. 'We're grown-ups,' she began.
'Thank God.'
A shaky laugh escaped. 'What I mean is we ...' His teeth explored the flesh just above her collarbone
