The cab pulled up in front of a gracious old mansion in New Orleans’s
garden district.
“Are you sure?” she asked the cab driver.
“This the address you gave me.”
She felt disoriented, and from more than a few hours on a plane
and a change from breezy Atlantic Canada to this hot, humid paradise.
“Thank you,” she said at last and got out of the
cab, still staring at the home of her newfound relatives.
Wrought iron, that wonderful curlicued twirling iron lace, fronted
the mansion. Inside the gates was a walkway that ought to have
been artistically crumbling but looked brand new winding through
lush gardens. The house itself was the perfect combination between
grand and charming, with balconies, rich cream stucco walls and
the kind of verandah where you simply had to sit and sip a mint
julep.
She hadn’t been bothered by the thought that her hosts
might live modestly, but she’d never thought for a second
that she’d be vacationing at Tara. Wow.
She swung her overnighter over her shoulder and dragged her suitcase
on wheels behind her so it bumped noisily over the sidewalk. The
gate was open, so she walked through and bumped her way up the
path.
When she was half way to that inviting verandah, she had to stop
and unbutton. The jacket she’d needed in Halifax was suffocating
her suddenly. Her oatmeal linen trousers might as well have been
made of asbestos and her trés fashionable beaded cotton
top felt like a ski parka.
Once she’d stopped to slip off her jacket and lay it over
her arm, she took another second to drink in the beauty around
her. There was so much of it. An embarrassment of garden riches.
From gardenia in full, perfumed splendor to massive Magnolia trees
sporting white blossoms the size of dinner plates. Walls spilling
over with purple bougainvillea, green slinky vines and palm trees.
Peeking from among the greenery were tiny garden gnomes. Somewhere
water played which only made her feel hotter.
A prickle ran over her skin and she realized in that sudden jolt
that she wasn’t alone in the garden.
A quick, searching glance and she discovered a sweaty guy with
black, shaggy hair leaned silently on a shovel, watching her.
The sweaty guy was shirtless.
He stood to the side of the house and he’d obviously stopped
in the middle of digging to watch her. There was a patch of fresh,
frothy black dirt around his feet but he wasn’t digging
now. He was staring. Hadn’t offered her a hand with her
luggage, either.
He continued to stare at her and the heat of the afternoon intensified.
He was exactly the kind of man who appealed to the part of her
she didn’t want to encourage. His eyes appeared heavy-lidded
and predatory, his hair so long past the cut-by date that it curled
over where his collar would be – if he’d been wearing
a shirt.
What he was wearing was a tan. The kind of tan a man gets by
working outside a lot without his shirt on. Even as she willed
her feet to move up the path and toward the house, that part of
her that was yelling, Yes, Yes YESSS!! held her rooted to the
spot.
She’d never entirely believed Lady Chatterley would go
quite so goopy over a gardener until now. This gardener had the
slightly scruffy look of a man who hasn’t shaved in a day
or two, blue-gray eyes staring at her as though it were perfectly
all right to stare unabashedly at a stranger.
Naturally, he had broad shoulders and a muscular torso, with
a nice amount of chest hair, now damp from exertion. As she stood
there entranced, a drop of sweat rolled, as slow as syrup, over
his collarbone, tracking a wet streak over his upper chest and
finally disappearing into the damp hair. Her gaze continued to
follow its path as though that drop of sweat had rolled unimpeded,
over the nicely defined pecs, dipping to rib cage and finally
hitting the smooth plane of tawny belly. His jeans were low enough
that she saw the jut of his hip bones. The jeans were grubby and
shapeless, but she saw that his thighs were powerfully muscled
and his feet in disreputable old sneakers were long.
While her eyes had been drinking him in more thirstily than anything
long and cool she’d ever consume on that porch, the gardener
had been doing the same to her. She felt scratchy and overdressed,
and was aware of a wild longing to stand before him as he was,
in a pair of low-riding jeans, bare torso -- she even wanted her
feet bare so she could curl her toes into the rich black earth
he’d churned up.
Her common sense finally asserted itself. “Will I find
Ms. LeBlanc in the house?” she asked in the tone she used
at school when she felt she needed to exert her authority over
students who were no more than five years younger than she.
Those gray-blue eyes considered her for another interminable
moment and then he showed surprisingly white teeth in a quick
grin. “I believe she is.” Very attractive voice. Slow
talking and deep with a slight hint of a French accent.
“Thank you.” If her tone was cool, it was the only
part of her that was.
She turned and made her way to the verandah. Based on the fact
that she heard no sounds of digging behind her and that her spine
prickled, she’d be willing to bet a month’s salary
that the gardener was checking out her back view.
Suitcases and all.
When she got to the verandah and started up the wide steps she
heard a wolf whistle, so soft she could pretend she hadn’t
heard it if she chose.
She did not choose.
She turned to glare at the culprit only to find his head bent
watching the progress as his shovel plunged deep into the fertile
ground. There was something aggressively sexual about the gesture,
which she told herself was her own fault for studying too much
literary symbolism. Suddenly the gardener lifted his head and
she caught the carnal gleam in those eyes. Very deliberately,
while holding her gaze with his, he raised the shovel and plunged
it back into the yielding earth.
Her breath caught and a quiver of arousal struck, so strong it
shocked her. Resolutely, she turned away from the sexiest man
who’d ever planted a tulip bulb.
