The Amorous Heiress

by Carrie Alexander

  In three strides, Jed was in front of her, his hands locked around her upper arms, holding her up as she sagged, cowering inside, afraid to look into his eyes but knowing she had to because they were like magnets, relentlessly drawing her gaze up to the stark emotion of his expression. His face was set in harsh lines.

  “Don’t be sorry, Gussy,” he said fiercely. “Dammit, don’t give up.”

  Her voice wobbled. “But you hate me. You don’t want me.”

  “No.” His arms went around her and she felt the shock of his hot skin burning through her crinkled cotton blouse. “I want you to fight. Go out and become the woman I can marry.” His mouth hovered near hers as his voice softened. “The woman I want very much to marry.”

  Gussy shuddered. She pulled against his grip. “I can’t,” she said miserably. “I’ve tried, and I just can’t.”

  Jed released her. “I know you can, I believe in you, but in the end it’s all up to you.”

  She stumbled, but managed to stay upright. “I’m late.” There was some cold comfort to be found in the regulation of her morning schedule; it told her what to do, where to go.

  She gathered her discarded dress, her nylons, her insideout underwear, feeling puny and humiliated under the laser of Jed’s eyes. “I can’t,” she said again. “Sorry.” And she fled into the living room, grabbing blindly for her glasses on her sweep toward the door, tears welling up in her eyes as she ran down the stairs, clutching her clothes and her spectacles and the shreds of her tattered dignity tight against her chest.

  STANDING AT THE WINDOW, Jed watched her weave through the trees, running toward the haven of Throckmorton Cottage. Percy barked and bounded over to her, his tail a wagging golden semaphore. He was holding something blue in his mouth, ready to play, but she didn’t stop. She slowed to a walk once she’d reached the wide lawn, and Jed could see that her shoulders were slumped. “Gussy,” he murmured, already longing to call her back.

  But, no, he couldn’t do that. Even though now that he was thinking more clearly he realized that she had to have some genuine feeling for him. She would have selected Andrews Lowell for her ticket to independence if she’d truly wanted to take the easy route. In choosing Jed, she’d face more trouble, more confrontation, maybe more than he was worth. Unless she loved him.

  His chest tightened. What were Gussy’s feelings for him? She’d said little, but the passion of her response in bed had spoken volumes.

  Even supposing that she did want to marry him, specifically, there were still her other stated reasons to contend with, reasons that, after knowing Julie Cole, he could never bring himself to swallow.

  Jed moved away from the window, rubbing his palm across his bare chest. His response to Gussy’s tentative proposal had been harsh, but it had been right. She had to find a sense of confidence and independence on her own. That was the only way they could come together as equals and build the sort of combined future he’d imagined as ideal.

  Then why did he feel so bereft, almost forlorn? He shook his head and walked into the bathroom. A long hot—or cold—shower might wash away his melancholy. He swept aside the shower curtain.

  The soap dish was not only empty, it was missing entirely.

  GUSSY MOPED FOR TWO DAYS, sticking close to home and making up excuses to veto Grandmother’s attempts to put Andrews squarely in her path. She knew she couldn’t avoid him forever, but she was hoping for enough time to dig so deep inside she’d finally find her courage.

  Without telling anyone, she began to scout the Help Wanted ads. There were not many positions to be found in Sheepshead Bay—unless she wanted to scoop ice cream or sell souvenirs, and even those jobs were already filled by teenagers—so she began to make tentative personal contacts. Having decided that something in Jed’s field was her only recourse even if that brought them too close for comfort, she asked Tink Padgett at the greenhouse if he was hiring. He eyed her up and down told her to come back in the spring.

  Finding the process slightly easier now that she’d begun, she sucked up her courage and ventured beyond town limits, stopping in at several greenhouses and small landscaping businesses to ask for applications, beginning to think that it would serve Jed right if she wound up working for his competitors. When no positions turned up, she got desperate enough to go to Haversham & Hopewell, the only big-name garden-design firm in the immediate area. It was just her bad. luck to run into Isaac Hopewell, ponytailed but balding, lithe, catty, a landscape architect she’d warily observed at various charity functions in the past. The thought of his infamously witty and spiteful tongue made her fumbling and nervous. He sneeringly skimmed her résumé—such as it was—blinked when he came to the Throckmorton name and dismissed her with the gentle suggestion that she stick to flower arranging and piddling with dinky town parks. Gussy would almost have rather been cut to ribbons by his sharp tongue.

  Vowing to expunge Throckmorton from her résumé, she drove home and parked up at the big house to avoid proximity to Jed’s place. She sat in the car, simmering with dark thoughts. Instead of cowing her, all this rejection was getting her mad, and mad was good. It pushed out the physical cravings and the sentimental simpering of her hopelessly romantic heart.

  Hopeful, she amended. Her heart was relentlessly hopeful, which might have been pure, cockeyed optimism if it wasn’t for the flower she found on her pillow each night. A simple daisy, a fresh rosebud, a sweet lily, a golden coreopsis. She had no idea how they got there, and of course there was no note, but her stubborn, hopeful heart believed what it wanted to believe. Gussy tried not to dwell on the possibilities during the daylight hours.

  Only at night, alone in bed staring up at the chintz canopy, did she let herself think of—yearn for—Jed. She’d held on to a slender thread of hope, but with each day of utter failure she could feel it slipping through her fingers. Sometimes it was only the promise of another flower on her pillow and the knowledge that Jed believed she was capable that made her continue taking her little baby steps toward a new life.

  Yet she was so afraid that she wasn’t woman enough to meet his challenge. She was so afraid that she’d never feel his arms around her again.

  IT WAS Grandmother Throckmorton who gave Gussy the idea of working for Beatrice Hyde. Marian had been waxing rhapsodically over Mrs. Hyde’s floribundas for as long as Gussy could remember, and when she finally thought to ask, her grandmother said yes, Mrs. Hyde was a professional, was in fact the doyenne of Maine gardeners. Her garden-design business had been the most fashionable in town—twenty-five years ago.

  Gussy mulled it over for a day and then decided that she had nothing to lose. It was a long shot, but so was she.

  Beatrice Hyde lived in a Tudor cottage—truly a cottage, the kind that should’ve had a thatched roof—deep in the countryside outside of Sheepshead Bay. There was no proper lawn, only a garden, a glorious riot of brighter-thanbright color behind a split-rail fence. The hollyhocks had grown far taller than Gussy, the climbing vines looked thicker than her wrists and twice as strong and the sunflowers were the size of dinner plates. Whatever Beatrice Hyde was, she was a gardener with a magic touch. A veritable green-thumbed wonder.

  Gussy paused on the meandering stone path that led to the rough-sawn farmhouse door, suddenly feeling wobbly and insignificant among the fantastically oversize garden. Her center of gravity was spinning and her vision was off to a dizzying degree, sometimes wavering, sometimes sharper than ever. Was it the sunlight? The colors? Her glasses? She took them off and put them in her purse; the slight ache that had been building at the front of her skull lessened immediately.

  Still, it was Jed’s fault, she decided. He’d swept her off her feet, then dumped her. Although she’d bolted upright, apparently she hadn’t yet found her balance.

  Gussy had to knock several times before she heard movement inside the cottage. The sharp, yippy bark of a small dog preceded its owner’s cranky mumble.

  “Not interested,” Beatrice Hyde snapped, almost be
fore she’d opened the door.

  Gussy gulped. “I’m not—” The door slammed.

  She wanted to hightail it out of there, but she was down to her last chance and too desperate to give up so easily. She knocked again and started talking the instant the door cracked. “I’m not a saleswoman, Mrs. Hyde. My name is Augustina Fairchild and I’m the secretary of the Sheepshead Bay Garden Club, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to offer you the opportunity of a…well, an opportunity, anyway, to make your comeback. And you won’t have to lift a finger. I’ll do all the work.”

  “A sales pitch if I’ve ever heard one,” Mrs. Hyde sniffed, holding a white toy poodle in her arms. She was white-haired and bigger than Gussy by six inches and sixty pounds, with a dowager’s hump and a rather large, hooked nose. Her manner was so imperious, however, that even in her sensible shoes and baggy tweeds she seemed handsome in a classic Roman way rather than ugly.

  Mrs. Hyde peered down her imposing nose. “Miss Fairchild, is it?” She started to close the door again. “I can’t begin to understand what has made you assume that I need a comeback.”

  “Of course you don’t.” Ego, Gussy thought frantically. Appeal to her ego. “But who could refuse one last magnificent gardening triumph?” she squeaked at the narrowing gap between the door and the frame. “Jellicoe will be involved.”

  Gussy held her breath for the ten-second silence that followed. Mrs. Hyde made a huffing noise, bent and dropped the poodle. It skittered away into the dark interior of the cottage. “What’s this, then?” she asked, opening the door onto the flagged entry. “It can’t be much if that old fool Broadnax Jellicoe is involved.”

  Gussy went inside and told Mrs. Hyde about how the Pequot Heritage Committee was taking bids on the job to redesign the garden of a settler’s homestead, and that through her garden-club connections she’d learned that Jellicoe was to be on the committee that decided among the applicants. She did not tell Mrs. Hyde about Jed, or that he’d worked for Jellicoe and surely would have a leg up on the competition.

  As they went to sit in the crowded living room, Mrs. Hyde said bitterly, “You are aware, are you not, Miss Fairchild, of Broad’s opinion of lady gardeners?”

  Gussy murmured that yes, she was.

  Mrs. Hyde lifted the poodle into her lap. “I should like to show up that insufferable man for the nincompoop he is, but I’m afraid it would be a waste of time.”

  “Jellicoe has only one vote.”

  Mrs. Hyde sneered. “Do you really believe that the others will oppose his choice once he’s made it known?”

  Flailing at her last thread of hope, Gussy said staunchly, “We must try.”

  Mrs. Hyde’s thick, near-black brows lifted. “You have spirit, misplaced though it may be.” Despite the dour tone, her dark eyes gleamed with interest. Or perhaps it was malice. “What did you have in mind, Miss Fairchild?”

  “YOU STOLE MY SOAP,” said a gruff voice in Gussy’s ear.

  She jumped. Her feet actually left the ground. She whirled when she landed, gravel spitting from beneath her heels, elbows akimbo and coming very close to sideswiping Jed’s ribs, which deserved a good jab anyway since he’d sneaked up behind her without warning. She fell back against the car door, closing it with a thunk. “What?” she squawked, then drew herself up with the Beatrice Hydestyle dignity she’d picked up after two days on the job. “Pardon me, what did you say?”

  “You stole my soap. At least it was missing after we…the other night. And again today.” Jed smiled tensely. “You were in the carriage house today, weren’t you?”

  Guilty. Caught red-handed. “I only…Godfrey was after me about the kitchen supplies I left there. He needs them for some la-di-da dinner of Grandmother’s, so I did, yes, I went into your apartment this morning. I made certain you were gone, and I was in and out in ten seconds. I didn’t touch anything—” though how she’d wanted to! “—and I absolutely didn’t steal anything.” Remembering her dignity, she finished with her nose in the air. “Least of all your soap.”

  “Well, it’s gone.”

  “I wouldn’t wonder, with those teeny-tiny, cheapo, hotel soaps you use. It probably slipped down the drain.” Even though her scalp was tingling and her mouth was wet with desire and her knees were melting like butter left in the sun, Gussy filled her arms with the gardening tomes Mrs. Hyde had told her to read, added the snapdragons and gladiolus she’d just cut from the garden and marched to the service entrance as if she hadn’t made love to Jed only eight days and nineteen hours ago. Give or take thirty-some minutes.

  Jed grabbed half the stack and stayed inches behind her, as though she’d bang the door in his face otherwise. Although it was true Gussy liked his broken and mended and broken and badly mended nose, enough cartilage damage was enough. She wasn’t that upset with him. Besides, they were now colleagues, of a sort, and she was big enough to extend him professional courtesy.

  When she wondered what he’d think of her new job—if she ever got up the nerve to tell him—her roller-coaster response went far beyond professional courtesy. It was a lot like the strange perceptions she’d been experiencing off and on for days now, symptoms that subsided when she removed her eyeglasses but which she’d come to believe were the direct result of lovesickness. If so, she was wretched with it, and professional courtesy could take a flying leap!

  Whereas Jed looked hale and hearty, except for the lines of tension bracketing his mouth. The scar stood out in his tanned face—a thin white line with its tail kinked by the early crow’s-feet of the outdoor worker. Stepping through the passageway that led to the kitchen area, Gussy contemplated whether or not she’d develop crow’s-feet now that she more or less had an outdoor job, too. She wouldn’t mind. Maybe they’d give her character.

  Jed wasn’t talking, which was disconcerting. She dumped her borrowed books on a console table, carefully keeping her gaze averted. He followed suit, staring at her with those electric blue eyes of his until she felt charged with enough voltage to zap the Frankenstein monster to life singlehandedly.

  Standing tongue-tied beside the table, she clutched the flowers to her abdomen, fighting the softening of her heart out of fear that she wasn’t ready, that he’d reject her again. Finally Jed glanced away—she still wasn’t looking at him, but she could tell because the heat lessened—and picked up the top book. “Culpepper’s Complete Herbal,” he read off the spine. He looked at the next book. “The Kitchen Gardener’s Instructor for the Medieval Household Whew: Got a little home-garden project going?”

  Was he being condescending? Gussy’s fingers clenched, snapping one of the flower stems. He certainly was.

  “I’ll have you know I’m a professional now,” she announced frostily, and turned on her heel because she didn’t dare wait for his response. She wanted his approval so badly she might as well have sat on her haunches like Percy and begged for it with her tongue hanging out.

  “Gussy?” he said behind her. “Hold on.”

  She banged through the swinging doors and into the larder. “Have to put these in water,” she said, thrusting the glads and snaps into a deep stone sink and twisting the taps full bore.

  Jed rescued the flowers from the blast of water and placed them carefully one by one into the half-filled sink. Watching his hands at work made her brain fog. She couldn’t remember what she’d been mad at, why she was afraid. She could only remember the night when his hands had ignited and then soothed her fiery flesh with the same tender care he was now showing her flowers. It was too much for a suddenly amorous heiress to bear.

  “Gussy?” he said again. “Are you going to tell me about it?”

  She lifted her gaze to the fully stocked shelves above the sink and took a steadying breath. “I have a job.” There was no reason to admit that she wouldn’t actually be paid until the new nineties version of Beatrice Hyde Garden Designs landed its first client.

  “That’s…great.” Jed’s voice had cracked, but it sounded sincere. “Congratula
tions.”

  “You might want to put a hold on that, since we’re going to be competitors.”

  He dropped the last stem with a small splash. “We are?”

  Gussy sneaked a peek at him. He appeared surprised, but not incredulous. “I’m Beatrice Hyde’s new assistant,” she explained. “We’re going after the Pequot job.”

  “Beatrice Hyde?” He scratched his head. “I thought she retired.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Huh,” he grunted.

  “You’re mad?”

  “‘Course not. I hope you do well.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the counter. “Let the best design win.”

  Gussy felt slightly dissatisfied, but at least they’d begun to bridge the gap between them. Maybe the distance she’d had to travel wasn’t as great as she’d supposed and she was ready to meet him as an equal. “Urn,” she murmured, “so, umm, are we…?”

  “Are we…?” he repeated, his voice so low and teasing she grew bolder.

  “Are we friends again?”

  He shook his head. “Unh-unh.”

  No? Why, she’d show—

  “We’re lovers,” Jed said, reaching for her. She took a step back, but he caught her with his finger under her chin and made her look up into his face. His expression was devout, intent only on her. “We’re still lovers,” he added. “We never stopped.”

  She blinked back the wetness that had sprung to her eyes. “Couldn’t tell by me.”

  “So we had a minor interruption.” His other hand curved around her hip, down low, drawing her toward him. “We’ll make up for that.”

  “I want to,” she whispered, breathing hard. The scent of his clean, sun-warmed masculinity sank into her pores. “But…”