He looked at her card without seeming to read it. For a moment she thought he might hand it back to her or tear it up. But he kept it in his hand. The man was rude, but perhaps not rude enough to do that. Most likely he would bin it when he got inside.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Her grandmother’s words came back to her. At least she’d tried.
‘Close the gate behind you when you leave,’ the man said, in a voice so cool it was as if he’d thrown a bucket of icy water over her enthusiasm for the garden.
‘Sure,’ she said through gritted teeth, knowing she would have to fight an impulse to slam it.
As she walked back down the path she snatched the opportunity to look around her to see more of the garden than she’d been able to see over the fence. Up closer it was even more choked by weeds and overgrowth than she’d thought. But it was all she’d ever see of it now.
Strange, strange man, she mused.
Strange, but also strangely attractive. The dark hair, the dark clothes, those brooding blue eyes. He was as compelling as the garden itself. And as mysterious. Maybe he didn’t own the house. Maybe he was a movie star or someone who wanted to be incognito. Maybe he was a criminal. Or someone under a witness protection plan. She hadn’t lived long enough in Sydney to hear any local gossip about him. But why did it matter? She wouldn’t be seeing him again.
* * *
She looked like a female warrior. Declan watched the gardener stride down the pathway towards the gate. Her long, thick plait of honey-coloured hair fell to her waist and swayed with barely repressed indignation. She was tall, five ten easily, even in those heavy-duty, elastic-sided work boots. The rolled-up sleeves of the khaki shirt revealed tanned, toned arms; the man-style trousers concealed but hinted at shapely curves and long legs. She looked strong, vigorous, all woman—in spite of the way she dressed. Not what he thought of as a gardener. He glanced down at her card—Shelley Fairhill.
The old-fashioned name seemed appropriate for a lover of flowers, all soft focus and spring sunbeams. But the woman behind the name seemed more like the fantasy warrior heroine in the video games that had brought him his first million when he was just eighteen—the assassin Princess Alana, all kick-butt strength, glistening angel wings and exaggerated curves born of his adolescent yearnings. With her deadly bow and arrow Alana had fought many hard-won battles in the fantasy world he had created as a refuge from a miserable childhood.
He could see in this gardener something of the action woman who had kept on making him millions. Billions when he’d sold Alana out. Right now Shelley Fairhill was all tense muscles and compressed angst—seething, he imagined, with unspoken retorts. He could tell by the set of her shoulders the effort she made not to slam the gate off its hinges—he had no doubt with her muscles she could do that with ease. Instead she closed it with exaggerated care. And not for a second did she turn that golden head back to him.
Who would blame her? He’d rejected her pitch for employment in a manner that had stopped just short of rudeness. But Shelley Fairhill 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,