“I’ve cursed him a time or two,” Kevin conceded.
“More than that, I’ll bet.” She regarded him sympathetically. “Don’t worry about Bobby Ray. I wanted to warn you about him stirring everyone up, but he’ll settle down. He always does.”
“I’m not worried,” Kevin assured her. “There’s no dirt for Bobby Ray to uncover, so he can’t possibly make trouble for me.”
“One of these days, he’ll try, though. You know he will. The rest of us won’t be able to stop him.”
Kevin sighed. “I know.”
“We may not want to, but we’ll have to side with him, too,” she warned.
“I know that, too.”
She stood and rounded the desk to brush a casual kiss across his cheek. “Watch your back, darling. That’s really all I came by to say.”
“Thanks, Helen.”
She opened her mouth, but this time Kevin knew exactly what she was going to say and beat her to it. “I won’t tell Bobby Ray we had this conversation,” he promised.
She smiled at him. “Never thought you would.”
And then she breezed out as rapidly as she’d entered, leaving behind an expensive French scent and an atmosphere choked with tension. Kevin knew his cousin meant well, but she’d pretty much ruined his mood with her dire warnings. He could think of only one way to recapture his earlier optimism.
“Molly!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
When the housekeeper appeared in the doorway, he ignored the scowl that his ill-mannered shout had spawned. “Get Mr. Sparks for me, will you?”
“You’re going to plant the garden?” she asked, her expression brightening.
“I’m going to plant the garden.”
When the pickup pulled up in front of her house, Gracie assumed it was for one of the neighbors. When Kevin emerged and began unloading huge sacks of something or other, she bolted through the front door and down the steps.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?”
He paused only long enough to shoot one of those irrepressible grins over his shoulder. “What does it look like?”
She read the label on one of the bags as it passed by. “That’s mulch. What are you doing delivering mulch?”
“You’re not too quick this morning, darlin’? Rough night?”
“My night was just fine,” she lied. She’d tossed and turned, kicked off the covers, tugged them back into place, counted hundreds of infernal sheep, then finally gotten up and prepared a glass of warm milk. Nothing had been able to rid her mind of sexy images of the man who was currently ignoring her and going about doing whatever the heck it was he was doing.
She finally planted herself squarely in his path. “I didn’t order any mulch.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t order any dirt, either,” she said when she spotted the bags of top soil.
“I know.”
She peered past him into the back of the truck. It was filled with flats of flowers. Vivid pink petunias, red-and-purple impatiens, yellow marigolds, and a few things she didn’t recognize. The one thing they all had in common was that they were blindingly bright. Cheerful, she concluded, smiling despite herself.
“I didn’t order those, either,” she said.
“That’s true.”
“So what are they doing here?”
“It’s a present.”
“A present?” she repeated.
“There you go again, going blank on me. Surely you’ve gotten presents before.”
“A dozen roses is a present. A corsage is a present. This is a whole damned garden.”
“Precisely.” He beamed as if she’d finally grasped a very critical point.
“Nobody gives a garden as a present,” she protested.
“I do.”
She had to scramble to keep up with him. “Kevin—”
“You’re not going to waste time arguing with me, are you? I could use some help deciding what goes where.”
For a full sixty seconds she stared at his retreating back and tried to summon up the argument that would get him to go away. In the end, though, the image of her backyard filled with all those flowers held too much appeal.
“This is a waste of perfectly good flowers,” she finally shouted after him.
“Why is that?”
“They’ll have to stay behind when I move into that Victorian.”
He laughed. “In your dreams, sweetheart. Now go away or prepare to get dirty.” He surveyed her white slacks and shook his head. “You’re hopeless, you know that. Do you have an apron in the house? Maybe some coveralls?”
“Why would I need those?” she inquired tartly. “You’re doing all the work, aren’t you? Isn’t that part of the present?”
“I had this image of the two of us working companionably, side by side.”
“Now who’s dreaming?”
Eventually, though, curiosity got the better of her. She followed him into the backyard. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“Not exactly.”
“Terrific.”
He dragged a dirt-streaked piece of paper out of his pocket. “I have instructions, though. It pretty much amounts to digging a hole and sticking one of these little suckers into it.”
Gracie regarded him doubtfully. “Are you sure about that?”
“Cross my heart. Mr. Sparks says it’s so simple, any fool can do it.”
“And Mr. Sparks is…?”
“My groundskeeper.”
“Why didn’t you just send him around?”
“And give him the pleasure of your company when I could be here myself? No way. Like I said, working together is going to be half the fun. I have an image of myself sitting in that chair over there and watching you bending over to put these little guys into the ground.”
“I don’t think so.”
He shrugged. “Oh, well, you can’t blame a man for hoping.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to me.”
“It’s simple enough. Every time you glance out your kitchen window from now on and see the flowers, you’ll think of me.”
Since he was stripping off his shirt as he said it, Gracie was pretty certain he was right. There was no way she’d get that image of bare flesh
