should never have breached that gate. He’d only buzzed it open in a moment of distraction. He’d been working for thirty-six hours straight. The gate was kept locked for a reason. He did not want intruders, especially a tall, lithe warrior woman like her, crossing the boundaries of his property. And he liked the garden the way it was—one day the plants might grow over completely and bury the house in darkness like a fortress. He wanted to be left alone.
Still, she was undeniably striking—not just in physique but in colouring with her blond hair and warm brown eyes. He couldn’t help a moment of regret torn painfully from the barricades he had built up against feeling—barricades like thorn-studded vines that twined ever tighter around his heart stifling all emotion, all hope.
Because when he’d first seen her on his front doorstep for a single, heart-stopping moment he’d forgotten those barriers and the painful reasons they were there. All he’d been aware of was that he was a man and she was a beautiful woman. He could not allow that boy-meets-girl feeling to exist even for seconds.
For a long moment he looked at the closed gate, the out-of-control tendrils of some climbing plant waving long, predatory fingers from the arch on top of it, before he turned to slouch back inside.
DECLAN GRANT. SHELLEY puzzled over the signature on the text that had just pinged into her smartphone.
Contact me immediately re work on garden.
She couldn’t place the name. But the abrupt, peremptory tone of the text gave her a clue to his identity.
For two weeks, she had pushed the neglected garden and its bad-mannered—though disturbingly good-looking—owner to the back of her mind. His reaction to her straightforward offer of help had taken the sheen off her delight in imagining how the garden could blossom if restored.
The more she’d thought about him, the more she’d seethed. He hadn’t given her even half a chance to explain what she could do. She’d stopped walking that way to the railway station at Edgecliff from the apartment in nearby Double Bay she shared with her sister. And drove the long way around to avoid it when she was in the car. All because of the man she suspected was Declan Grant.
Her immediate thought was to delete the text. She wanted nothing to do with Mr Tall, Dark and Gloomy; couldn’t imagine working with him in any kind of harmony. Her finger hovered over the keypad, ready to dispatch his message into the cyber wilderness.
And yet.
She would kill to work on that garden.
Shelley stared at the phone for a long moment. She was at work, planting a hedge to exact specifications in a new apartment complex on the north shore. By the time she crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge to get back to the east side it would be dark. Ideally she didn’t want to meet that man in the shadowy gloom of a July winter nightfall. But she was intrigued. And she didn’t want him to change his mind.
She texted back.
This evening, Friday, six p.m.
Then to be sure Declan Grant really was the black-haired guy with the black scowl:
Please confirm address.
The return text confirmed the address on Bellevue Street.
I’ll be there, she texted back.
* * *
With the winter evening closing in, Shelley walked confidently up the pathway to the house, even though it was shrouded in shadow from the overgrown trees. The first thing she would do if she got this gig would be to recommend a series of solar-powered LED lights that would come on automatically to light a visitor’s path to the front door. Maybe he wanted to discourage visitors by keeping them in the dark.
She braced herself to deal with Declan Grant. To be polite. Even if he wasn’t. She wanted to work on this garden. She had to sell herself as the best person for the job, undercut other gardeners’ quotes if need be. She practised the words in her head.
But when Declan opened the door, all her rehearsed words froze at the sight of his outstretched hand—and the shock of his unexpected smile.
Okay, so it wasn’t a warm, welcoming smile. It was more a polite smile. A professional, employer-greeting-a-candidate smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. Even so, it lifted his face from grouch to gorgeous. Heavens, the man was handsome. If his lean face with the high cheekbones and cleft in his chin didn’t turn a woman’s head his broad shoulders and impressive height surely would.
She stared for a moment too long before she took his proffered hand, his hard warm grip—and was suddenly self-consciously aware of her own work-callused hands. And her inappropriate clothes.
He was attractive—but that didn’t mean she was attracted to him. Apart from the fact he was a total stranger and a potential employer, she liked to think she was immune to the appeal of very good-looking men. Her heart-crushing experience with Steve had ensured that. Too-handsome men had it too easy with women—and then found it too easy to destroy their hearts.
No. It was not attraction, just a surge of innate feminine feeling that made her wish she’d taken more care with her appearance for this meeting with Declan Grant.
After work, on a whirlwind visit back to the tiny apartment in Double Bay, she’d quickly showered and changed. Then swapped one set of gardening gear for another—khaki trousers, boots and a plain shirt without any place of employment logo on the pockets. When she’d told her sister she was going to see the potential client in the mysterious overgrown garden in Darling Point, Lynne had been horrified.
‘You’re not going out to a job interview looking like that,’ Lynne had said. ‘What will any potential employer think of you?’
‘I’m a gardener, not a business person,’ Shelley had retorted. ‘I’m hardly going to dress in a suit and high heels or pile on scads of make-up. These clothes are clean and they’re what I wear to work. I hope I look like a serious gardener.’
Now she regretted it. Not the lack of suit and high heels. But jeans and a jacket with smart boots might have been more suitable than the khaki trousers and shirt. This was a very wealthy part of Sydney where appearances were likely to count. Even for a gardener.
She’d got in the habit of dressing down in her male-dominated work world. Gardening was strong, physical work. She’d had to prove herself as good as—better than—her male co-workers. Especially when she had long blond hair and a very female shape that she did not want to draw attention to.
But Declan looked so sophisticated in his fine-knit black sweater and black jeans, clean-shaven, hair brushed back from his forehead, she could only gawk and feel self-conscious. Yes, her clean but old khaki work clothes put her at a definite disadvantage. Not that he seemed to notice. In fact she got the impression he was purposely not looking at her.
‘Let’s discuss the garden,’ he said, turning to lead her into the hallway that had seemed so dark behind him in daylight.
She tried to keep her cool, not to gasp at the splendour of the entrance hall. The ornate staircase. The huge chandelier that came down from the floors above to light up the marble-tiled
