in rosy scenarios, after Dad’s lymphoma diagnosis and his reaction to it. Life wasn’t sunny and effortless. Life wasn’t about going where the winds of emotion blew you. Life was struggle. Given a choice between believing in easy miracles and believing in solid work, Tucker chose the hard yards every time.
Daisy didn’t fit. Daisy was an illusion.
She was oblivious, and it was better that way.
“You’re right,” he told Lee. “After dinner. After we’ve put in as much time as anyone could expect. We do need to get out of here and get a couple of hours to ourselves.”
“Or I’m going to explode.”
“Me, too.”
“We need to talk, and—”
“Yes, work things out. Think. Out loud. To each other.” The words didn’t come easily. Frustrated by the difficulty of coherent speech, he grabbed her shoulders and squeezed her and felt the breath come out of her as if she’d been holding it for too long. She squeezed him back.
“Yes. Yes. We really do,” she said, and blinked back what could have been tears.
Shoot, he was giddy with relief!
Giddy, and thirsty, he realized. He’d been out of doors from six until two at the garden center, where he worked three days a week on top of his hours at the hotel. He’d repotted grafted plants, unloaded new stock and supplies, planned his own future landscaping business inside his head while his body lifted and carried and stacked and sorted. He’d grabbed a burger and a sugar-filled soda for lunch, but hadn’t had a real, thirst-quenching drink since before noon.
Thinking only of a long glass of clear, icy mountain water, he made for the kitchen, and there was Daisy stirring a pot that bubbled with sweet, fragrant syrup. He could smell it the moment he walked in.
And the moment he walked in, he was far too aware of her—of how pretty and exotic she seemed, so freshly arrived from France, with that indefinable nuance of Frenchness about her. She looked a little steamy at the hot stove, with pink in her cheeks and several tendrils of fine, golden-blond hair curling around her face in the humid warmth. She brushed one back behind her ear then looked up and caught sight of him.
They looked at each other.
He froze inside and looked away before either of them could even blink.
This was not important. This was not what was making him jittery about his future with Lee. The jitters had been building for weeks, when Daisy was just a name and a vague reference.
He’d seen her in family pictures as a cute toddler and then a gangly-limbed teen, and right up until their meeting ten minutes ago he’d still been thinking of her as a kid, as Lee’s kid sister.
Someone he might tease a little about boyfriends.
Someone with a boyfriend—a local guy she’d known since high school who’d been texting and calling and emailing her faithfully the whole year she was in France.
She didn’t have a boyfriend, he’d learned.
Not that this was important, either way.
But still, they’d looked at each other for that tiny moment before he’d flinched his gaze away.
“Thirsty,” he said, to explain his presence.
“Beer or soda?” she offered, smiling. “There’s both in the refrigerator.”
“Actually, water...”
“Bottled or tap?”
“Tap is fine. I’ll help myself.”
“Thanks. I can’t leave this glaze right now, or very bad things will happen to it.”
“No problem.” He ran the faucet, and cold mountain water gushed into his glass. And then he took it outside to drink it, because he didn’t trust himself to stay anywhere near her.
Chapter Three
Present Day
Out in the yard, Daisy saw Tucker in worn jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up his arms the same way—although it was not the same shirt—as they’d been in the photo on the wall inside.
He was shifting a large paving stone into place in an open-air alcove that formed one of Reid Landscaping’s displays. There were five of these alcoves, each designed to show what could be achieved with barbecue areas, ponds and fountains, raised garden beds and a dozen other features.
He straightened, stepped back to judge his work and was apparently satisfied. He paused for a moment to stretch his shoulders and check his phone, then turned to begin striding across the large yard, sliding the phone into his back pocket as he caught sight of her. She waved at him and came forward to meet him before he got too close to the building. She really didn’t want to end up back inside, with the possibility of their conversation being overheard.
Just in case Mary Jane was right about the kind of person he was—the nasty kind, like Mary Jane’s ex. After her long experience with Alex Stewart, maybe Mary Jane was a really good judge of scumbag men. Maybe there really was a good reason, even after all this time, not to contract Tucker’s company to relandscape the Spruce Bay grounds, and it was all bound up in Lee’s accident and Tucker’s response.
Daisy wondered again about the second reason, the one Mary Jane hadn’t spoken.
The one that had put a stubborn, shuttered look onto her face, as if the second reason was something she wouldn’t confess even under torture.
Tucker saw her and stopped to wait until she reached him, watching her with a steadiness that unnerved her, given how uncomfortable she was already feeling. Those memories of his unreadable presence ten years ago were fresher and more vivid than they should have been.
She hadn’t been too impressed with strong and silent back then, but she’d learned to appreciate it in the years since, and the Tucker Reid of today was even more impressive in the flesh than he’d been in the photos on the main office wall, hard and solid and strong, with the kind of maleness that only belongs to a man who works hard with his body in the open air.
Daisy knew she would be incredibly disappointed if she couldn’t manage to like him, if he was exactly what Mary Jane claimed him to be, or worse.
Superficial. Unkind. A womanizer. All of the above.
“Daisy,” he said when she was close enough. He gave her a brief smile, but it didn’t last. She started to hold out her hand, but he turned his palm up and showed the dirt and they both gave an awkward shrug and dropped the idea. “It’s been a while.”
“It has.”
“Jackie says you’d rather talk out here?”
“Oh, she—?”
“Sent a text about ten seconds ago. Weird how we do things now, isn’t it?” Most people would probably have smiled with that line, but he didn’t.
“Weird...”
