honesty forced her to acknowledge she hadn’t exactly given him the chance—but this man must know by now she was innocent of sinister intentions towards his nephew.
‘Tell me, are you planning to use that?’
‘What…? Oh.’ She followed the direction of the inclination of his head and flushed deeply as she saw the trowel she was brandishing in her hand. ‘I didn’t realise…it was in my pocket,’ she mumbled in explanation.
‘Got anything else muddy and lethal I should know about in there?’ he asked, sounding insultingly amused as she shoved the tool back into the capacious pocket of her warm fleece.
‘Not muddy.’ She took exception to this slur; she was scrupulous about caring for the tools of her trade. ‘I’m a gardener—a landscape gardener—freelance.’ ‘Freelance’ sounded more impressive than ‘worried about where her next job was coming from’ besides, things weren’t really like that any more. Under the circumstances, she had no qualms about making her business sound a lot grander than it was.
After her parents had died she’d had to scale down her plans for the future appropriately. Starting her own garden maintenance business had been a far cry from the degree in landscape architecture she had planned, but what had started as little more than hedge-trimming and lawnmowing had gradually led to better things.
She knew the turning point had been the roof garden she’d created for Adam Sullivan the previous year. He’d been delighted with the results and generous with his praise. And Adam had a lot of upwardly mobile young friends who were keen to employ her services.
‘You sound very intense about it,’ Drew remarked.
The only evidence of the make-up she’d worn earlier was a slight dark smudging of soft grey kohl around her eyes. Lucky girl. Those eyelashes were a natural ebony that matched her hair. He could think of several women who would kill for those lashes. He took a step closer and noticed the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose that had been concealed behind a layer of foundation on their last meeting. She had that rarest of all complexions, a genuine peaches and cream one.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ she countered, suspecting condescension in his voice. ‘Aren’t you intense about your work? Is it only the financial wizards in banks who juggle millions who are allowed to take their work seriously?’ It was easy to be a big cheese when Daddy Cummings owned the bank, she thought scornfully. How well would he have done if he’d had to fight his way up the ladder?
‘My, my, Dan has been talking, hasn’t he?’ Drew mused, mentally adding another subject he needed to bring up with his nephew in the near future. ‘But point taken.’
‘I’ll tell you what I do take seriously, shall I, Mr Cummings?’
His only visible response to her aggressive tone of voice and scornful glare was a quirk of one well-defined brow. ‘Feel free, Miss…’ What had the boy called her? Just how much of his personal history had Daniel supplied to this young woman? he wondered grimly. He was a man who guarded his privacy zealously, and there were some episodes in his personal history he preferred stayed within the confines of the family.
Well, didn’t I make a big impression? He doesn’t even remember my name! ‘I take people assaulting my brother seriously.’
‘Assault! You’ve got to be kidding, lady! What the hell is your name anyway?’
Eve was pleased to see his air of vaguely amused condescension had vanished. He sounded extremely irritable.
‘Eve Gordon.’
‘Well, Eve Gordon, I didn’t lay a finger on your brother. But if I can’t get his blood out of my sister’s carpet I might just oblige you.’ He gave the bucket at his feet a frustrated kick, and some of the sudsy water splashed on his leather boots.
All he was bothered about was blood on his rotten carpet, when poor Nick might have been scarred for life or bled to death! ‘You should have left well alone and got it professionally cleaned.’
Drew, who had just come to this conclusion himself, gave her an unfriendly look. ‘I had enough trouble finding a French polisher who’d come straight out and repair the damage your young thug did to the table.’
‘I’ll tell him you were asking after his health. He’ll be so touched by the concern.’
Drew’s lips tightened at this dose of irony. ‘He looked fine when he left here.’
‘I doubt that very much,’ she snorted. ‘I don’t suppose it occurred to you to take him to the hospital. I call it the height of negligence to let an injured boy walk out of here in that state.’
‘He didn’t walk. A pretty girl picked him up.’
That sounded about right, she grudgingly conceded. Pretty girls were always picking Nick up. Eve suspected pretty girls would be running around after him most of his life. In that respect he probably had quite a lot in common with this man.
‘Sara,’ she said, not looking mollified by this information.
‘If you say so. She was the hysterical type too,’ he said dismissively.
‘Meaning she couldn’t look at the mess you’d made of Nick without displaying some emotion?’ She could hardly trust herself to speak at this display of callousness.
‘I thought I’d already told you I didn’t touch your brother. I was the victim of the assault. A fact you appear to be conveniently forgetting. What was I supposed to do? Stand there and let him batter my brains in?’
‘One look at you and a person can see straight off how savagely you’ve been battered,’ she observed scornfully, looking at his perfect profile with an expression of disgust.
‘Lightning reflexes,’ he agreed complacently. ‘But come back after my sister sees I’ve managed to let her house get trashed,’ he suggested drily. ‘And if she even suspects I’ve allowed her son’s morals to be tainted…’
He chose to ignore that Katie’s initial response when he’d offered to step into the breach had been to advise him to get a baby of his own if he wanted to play father, or to buy a dog. ‘I don’t want you practising on mine, Drew,’ she’d said frankly.
He still wasn’t entirely sure why he’d opted to spend his well-earned holiday here rather than join his friends on the ski-slopes. When Katie had put forward the ridiculous proposition that he was bored he’d laughed, but the more he considered it, the more he was inclined to believe there might well be more than a grain of truth in that accusation.
Eve was unaware that she was chewing her lower lip as she met his taunting look with a belligerently stubborn one of her own. Her blushes were held in check by sheer will-power. ‘Not by me.’ I probably couldn’t taint a moral if I tried, she pondered gloomily—and at twenty-three that was quite an indictment.
Drew shrugged, giving the distinct impression that the minutiae of the incident were of no interest to him. ‘Let’s just say it’ll take more than reflexes to save me then.’ He shook the excess moisture off his hands with an expression of distaste. ‘When I agreed to keep an eye on Dan I wasn’t expecting any of this.’
‘Perhaps,’ she muttered, ‘if you spent more time listening to Daniel and less
