can work while they talk.”
“She doesn’t need the distraction.”
“Oh, lighten up, Rose,” Olivia insisted right back. “It’ll take all of a minute.”
“Will do,” he called back, intending to talk to Addie, anyway, and let the door bump to a close on their debate.
Taking a sip of Olivia’s wonderfully strong coffee, he stepped into the late-September sunshine. The spicy scent of petunias drifted on the warming morning air. Huge pots of the thick white blooms lined the sprawling verandah with its wicker tables and lounging chairs. The lawn spread like a thick emerald carpet past the reflecting pond and formal gardens lush with color.
Addie would have been responsible for all of it, he thought, crossing the freshly swept boards to step onto the lawn.
His long stride, normally so purposeful, began to slow as it tended to do whenever he entered the immaculate gardens or the pathways in the woods beyond. Often when he came home, no one was there other than his parents. In the summer, when his parents left for their house in the Hamptons, there was only staff present. Addie’s father, who had been the groundskeeper until he’d passed away five years ago, had been the one person he had always looked forward to seeing there.
He still missed the guy. The seclusion of the estate was Gabe’s refuge when he faced decisions or needed to work a problem through. It always had been. During breaks from college and as a young man getting his feet wet in local politics, he had spent hours talking—and listening—to Tom Lowe. While the older man had tended the grounds, Gabe had followed him around the property soaking up his earthy, plain-spoken wisdom, pestering him with questions, challenging him and being challenged. Addie had been there, too, a small shadow trailing after her adored father. Because they lived in such different worlds, the man who had once owned his own farm had provided a down-to-earth candor that his own father and his uncle could not. No Kendrick knew what it was like to earn a living from the land, to suffer the whims of nature or have nothing but wit, grit and common sense to fall back on.
His mother’s side of the family might be royalty, but his father’s side had always been rich.
Taking another sip of much-needed caffeine, he watched Addie where she crouched by a border thick with golden-yellow chrysanthemums. Without looking behind her, she dropped dead blooms in the galvanized bucket by her knee and reached out again to check for anything faded. In the bright sunshine, her short brown hair gleamed with hints of ruby and topaz. Her shoulders and hips were as slender as a young girl’s.
There was a fragility about her that seemed entirely too feminine for the denim she wore, and the work she did. A pair of clippers hung from the narrow waist of her slim jeans. The sleeves of the blue chambray shirt tucked into them were rolled up to expose her tanned and slender arms.
As if sensing his presence, or maybe realizing she was being stared at, she glanced over her shoulder. Genuine pleasure lit her delicate features. Her darkly lashed brown eyes glowed with welcome.
“I’m glad to see you’re surviving my mother.” Liking the way her smile always made him feel, he raised his mug to her. “I can only imagine how obsessed she’s been about the grounds.”
From a distance came the throaty hum of a riding lawn mower. One of the two part-time men she supervised was mowing the lawns lining the long front drive.
“I won’t mind at all when this is over,” she quietly confessed, checking her watch as if gauging the man’s progress. “I’m already behind on fall pruning because we need everything full and green for tomorrow. I just hope no one looks underneath some of these bushes and plants,” she murmured. “I’ve had to fill in with pots from the nursery.”
Still kneeling, she pushed aside her bangs with the back of her hand. “I’m surprised to see you here so early. I wouldn’t have thought you’d arrive until time for the rehearsal.” The soft smile in her eyes turned to curiosity. “Did you come early to meet with your uncle Charles?”
There were times when Gabe felt she knew him as well as her father once had. Tom Lowe had been the first to recognize that he hated being idle, unless it was on his own terms. He had to be doing, seeking, accomplishing. He gave a hundred percent to whatever he needed to do once he got wherever he needed to be, but he scheduled himself so tightly that he was never ahead of schedule without a purpose.
“We met for a while last night. It’s time to bring a professional strategist on board,” he confided, wondering if Addie didn’t actually know him even better. Tom used to warn him about burning out if he didn’t learn to pace himself. Addie seemed to understand that he thrived on that pace. “Dad thinks one of the lawyers in Charles’s firm might be just who we need. I’ll meet with him in a couple of weeks to talk about my campaign.”
Rising, she moved with her pail to the next section of flowers, her eyes on her work, her attention on him. “Is he here, or in Washington?”
“Washington. I thought I was aggressive,” he admitted, moving with her, “but this guy’s got even me beat. He told Charles he thinks we should start positioning for the presidency at the start of my term as governor.”
A wrinkled leaf hit the bucket, along with a handful of browning blossoms. “What do you think?”
“It sounded good to me.”
“Shouldn’t you win the election as governor first?”
He could always count on Addie’s practicality to keep his ego in check.
“I suppose it might help,” he conceded, thinking it wouldn’t have killed her to offer just a little stroke of confidence.
“Might,” she echoed with a little smile. “You always are getting ahead of yourself.”
“I think of it more as planning ahead.”
She lifted one shoulder in a faint shrug.
“What?” he asked, knowing there was something she wasn’t saying.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she mused, curiously touching a potato bug and watching it roll into a ball. “I was just thinking that you don’t seem happy unless you’re dreaming huge. There’s nothing wrong with that,” she qualified, sounding as practical and pragmatic as her father might have, “so long as you don’t overlook what needs to be done in the meantime.”
The reminder gave him pause. He did tend to set big goals. And he did sometimes fail to notice obvious details in his preoccupation to reach them. But last night’s talks had been heady stuff. Rumor had it that he was a shoo-in for his party for governor. The other major party couldn’t even find a candidate willing to run because no one wanted to lose to Virginia’s favorite son. He had his detractors, of course, people who believed he would be nothing without his family’s money or name. But he would push himself as hard as necessary to prove himself worthy of people’s faith in him. Pushing himself was what he did best.
In the meantime, however, there were things that needed to be done. For one, he apparently needed to find himself a wife.
The thought had him frowning into his cup. Years ago he would have asked her father what he thought of that idea. Now he considered picking Addie’s brain about that particular obligation.
He didn’t know if she had learned from her dad as he had, or
