“She’s not even certain she’s going to stay in Rambling Rose.” The words were as much for himself as they were for his grandmother. A reminder that jumping in with both feet was fine when you were eight and standing on the precipice of a cool swimming hole on a hot day.
But his life was a lot more complicated now than it had once been. More complicated even than it had been in January. Staying two steps ahead of the man he’d been was getting harder by the day.
“Are you staying in Rambling Rose?” she asked pointedly.
He sighed noisily. She knew he didn’t have an answer. “You know I’m working tomorrow,” he told her. “But you invited her to be free labor for you.”
“She’ll learn a little about gardening and a little about jam-making. It’s a fair trade. Don’t worry. I won’t tell her who you really are, Jett.”
“I’m really Jay Cross,” he said flatly.
She gave him a steady look. “We’ll see ’bout that, won’t we?” She pulled open the door. “It’s hot out there. Go have lemonade and cookies with your girl.”
“Don’t think I miss the significance, Granny.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Can’t imagine what you mean.”
He made a face and passed her through the doorway.
He found Arabella in the potting shed. She was sitting on a stool at the scarred metal workbench, paging through one of his grandmother’s binders that were stored on one of the many shelves above the bench.
“Did you know she keeps notes on what she plants?” She glanced at him. “The dates and what the weather’s like and all sorts of little details?”
“As a matter of fact, I did know.” He set the tray next to the binder. “She has binders going back for decades. Before I was born, even. How else do you think she developed her sugar-soil recipe?” He filled both glasses with lemonade and handed her one. “Better drink it all. She squeezes the lemons by hand, too.”
Arabella’s eyes danced. “Did she mill her own flour for those cookies, too?”
He grinned. “Anything’s possible.” He lightly tapped his glass against hers. “Cheers.”
She took a quick sip of lemonade, made a soft, appreciative “mmm” sound that slid down the base of his spine and took a longer drink. “Delicious.”
He had to force himself to look away from the way her lower lip glistened. “Best lemonade in the county.” He chugged down half his own glass, feeling parched in a way that lemonade would never quench. “She has a box of blue ribbons from the county fair that goes back about as far as the binders do.”
Arabella picked up one of the golden cookies. “Chocolate chip?” She didn’t wait for his nod before she broke off a little piece and popped it in her mouth. She made that same throaty “mmm” sound. “How many blue ribbons did she win for her cookies?”
“No idea,” Jay admitted. “But she did win my grandfather with them.”
Arabella looked even more delighted. “Really?”
If her eyes hadn’t held such vivid interest, he would have wished that he’d kept his mouth shut. “They met when she was just seventeen. Her father wouldn’t let her go out with him because he was eight years older. But her mother, who was a piano teacher, said he could come to their house on Sunday afternoons for piano lessons. After which, my grandmother would serve him her homemade lemonade and chocolate chip cookies. He always claimed that it was the lemonade and cookies that kept him coming back. They eloped a week after she turned eighteen.”
Arabella propped her chin on her hand. “That’s the sweetest story. Is she your mom’s mom or your dad’s?”
“Mom’s. She was their only child. Lonely only, as my mother says.”
“Are you a lonely only, too?”
A crumble of cookie caught in his throat. He coughed slightly and nodded.
“Do your parents live here in Rambling Rose also?”
“Houston. That’s where I grew up. My dad’s a math teacher. Mom’s a piano teacher.”
“I remember you mentioned that the day we met. Like your great-grandmother.”
He nodded. “But I spent a lot of summers here with my grandparents.” Until he’d turned fifteen and decided he was too old for such nonsense. It had taken him another ten years before he’d begun to appreciate the error of his ways. Fortunately, his grandmother hadn’t held that against him too much when he’d needed a bolt-hole.
“And now you live here with her.”
“No, I live in the barn,” he corrected dryly. “Which she tolerates only because I feed the horses she refuses to give up and my presence here keeps my mother relatively quiet on the subject of moving Gran to Houston. In case it’s not apparent by her choice to live way the hell out here, my grandmother likes her privacy.” Something that also suited him very well these days.
Arabella shook her head. “I’ll bet she loves having you here. You, who surprises her with potted plants.”
“One plant.” He rotated his glass in the pool of condensation that had formed around the base. “And it was just so you’d have to deliver it,” he admitted.
Her eyebrows pulled together. The corners of her lips curved again. “You’re joking.”
“You didn’t call me this morning to tell me your battery was dead. What else was I supposed to do?”
She looked down at the tray between them. Her lashes were dark and long and looked entirely natural. “So the plant really was an excuse?”
“For a special occasion.”
She wrinkled her nose and looked at him. “Special occasion being...?”
He was barely aware that he’d leaned down on his arms on the workbench, putting him at her level. “Getting to see you again.”
Her eyes softened. “Jay.”
“Arabella.” He couldn’t help himself. He touched the ponytail hanging over her shoulder. The red strands might look fiery, but they slid through his fingers cool and silky.
“I think you’d better kiss me,” she murmured and her cheeks turned rosy.
“Yeah?” His voice dropped also.
“If you don’t, then I’ll know
