the client, after all…
“Too formal,” she said solemnly. She tapped the end of her pen against her bottom lip, while those eyes of his kept watching her.
“You’re right.” His mouth barely moved when he talked. Everything came out as a cynical, tight-lipped drawl. “How do I put it more simply?”
“You had different life goals?” she suggested. “Or, no, differing life goals.”
He gave a brief, crooked grin. “That’s not bad, Dr. Madison, not bad at all. You’re right. Ing. Differing. A subtle but significant improvement. It implies polite, ongoing disagreement. And says nothing whatsoever about what really happened.”
What did really happen? she wondered.
“Needs a little more, though,” he went on. “A kind of one-two-punch approach. Any thoughts on that?”
“But the two of you will always remain friends. That’s what you’d say if you were movie stars. And you’d still say it even if you couldn’t stand being in the same city as each other at the same time.”
“We would. We’d say exactly that. Heather will love it. Maybe I should write it down for her.”
He was still smiling at her, in his crooked, cynical, smoky-eyed and almost dangerous way, and all at once it was too much. It seemed more like flirting than anything else, and Dr. Rowena Madison just did not do flirting.
She didn’t know how.
And she didn’t want to learn.
He was standing too close. Rowie could sense his superior height and strength and bone-deep confidence like a gravitational pull. She could detect the finer nuances in the delicious way he smelled. The tantalizing scent of expensive male grooming products floated on the clear, dry Southern California air and seemed to belong there. It gave Rowena a dangerous, illusory sense that she belonged, too.
Belonged where, exactly?
The adrenaline rush generated by her earlier boldness was ebbing fast, leaving her with a million familiar doubts.
“You can stop teasing me now, Mr. Radford,” she said stiffly.
“I told you to make it Ben.”
“Yes, but I’m withdrawing to a more formal level to save us both from embarrassment later on.”
“You mean because of this uncomfortably personal conversation? Even though on the surface we’re treating it as a joke?”
“Yes.”
He heard a noise and glanced through the old gate to where he could just glimpse the driveway that curved in front of the house. A car sped around the curve and jerked to a halt.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to get even more personal any second,” he said. “And a lot less of a joke. This is Heather now.”
Chapter Two
Heather Radford caught sight of Rowena and Ben standing by the courtyard gate just as she stepped out of the low-slung yellow sports car, so she came along the side of the old adobe toward them, instead of going to the front door.
“My lawyer’s valuation of joint assets,” she announced by way of a greeting, and dumped an impressively thick binder of papers into Ben Radford’s hands.
Rowena felt almost comically inadequate when she considered the thin quantity of papers on her own clipboard. It was like a two-door compact car owner coming bumper to bumper with someone driving a brand-new Ferrari.
This woman had serious paperwork!
And if it wasn’t an actual Ferrari she was driving, it was something with the same flair.
“I’ll take a look at it later,” Ben said. “Heather, this is Dr. Rowena Madison, who’s doing some work on the garden.”
His voice had changed since their flirty conversation a minute or two ago. It was harder, tighter, with his English origins prominent in the clipped vowels. His face had changed, too. In the space of an hour, Rowena had seen him as the arrogant, impatient businessman, the intelligent connoisseur and the charmingly cynical flirt. Now she was shocked to see him as a human being through and through, with a beating, vulnerable heart.
He minded about the divorce, she realized.
Minded horribly, in a whole lot of ways that went bone deep and that he hadn’t even begun to come to terms with, yet.
For a moment there, she’d thought his light approach to the subject meant the opposite—that he didn’t care a bit. But now she could see she’d been wrong. He made those drawling jokes about it to mask the anger and failure and pain—mask them from others and from himself. He talked about it because he was still too raw to keep it to himself. He shrouded himself in a successful businessman’s arrogance because this was probably the first, and certainly the worst, failure he’d ever had to deal with in his life.
And at some level, he had no idea that this was what he was doing.
“Dr. Madison?” Heather echoed sharply. “You’re a doctor and you have to take a second job as a gardener to make ends meet?” She was a tiny, gorgeous blonde with bright-blue eyes, flawless porcelain skin and a pert nose, and she wore a cream silk trouser suit that would have taken out Rowena’s monthly dry-cleaning bill in a single hit. “Boy, did you pick the wrong specialty!”
It would have been a funny line, if the sarcasm level hadn’t been so high. Rowena had the impression that Heather could be a very funny woman when she wanted to be—funny and clever and captivating and even more ruthlessly cynical than Ben.
“I’m not a medical doctor,” Rowena said, her awkwardness rising back to where it had been just before she’d let fly at Ben Radford half an hour ago. “I have a Ph. D.”
“Ah, now it makes sense. There’s no money at all in academia. Wait a minute, though. You have a Ph. D. in actual gardening? You can do that?”
“I design and restore historic gardens, yes. My Ph. D. dissertation involved—”
Heather wasn’t interested in the subject of Rowie’s dissertation. She trained an accusing look on her not-quite-ex-husband. “How much work are you having done in the yard? You’re bringing in someone like this. I bet you’re landscaping the whole damn thing!”
“Not quite the whole damn thing, Heather. I’ve decided to leave the cattle runs alone,” Ben drawled. “The beasts seem happy enough with grass. I’m just doing the section behind the house.”
“Just? That’s an acre! More! And, let me guess, we’re not just talking about a few deliveries of dirt and flowers. This is going to be hugely expensive, isn’t it? You’re pouring yet more money into this impossible place, and it’s going to mess up the valuation and slow down the divorce. You’re doing it deliberately. I’m not fooled, Ben! Not for a second!”
“And I’m not doing it to be difficult,” he said tightly. “For heaven’s sake, Heather! You knew I wanted to restore the whole place when we bought it.”
