by Anne Marsh
Lily stopped, because, honestly, she didn’t know where she was headed anyhow. Just away. Away from Jack. Away from the complications she didn’t think she could deal with right now. “Jack,” she said tightly, “doesn’t know when to quit.”
“None of them do.” The woman smiled. “They didn’t introduce us, did they? You were a couple of years ahead of me in school, and then I lit out for a couple of years.” She held her hand out. The nails were polished but short. “I came back when Ma’s landed in my lap.” With a wry twist of her lips, she added, “Not that running a bar was quite the way I imagined my future.”
“You’re Ma?”
There was no mistaking the mischief in the other woman’s eyes. “That’s me. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t pick the name. I inherited it. It’s one of the risks of a family-run business. Most folks call me Mimi. It avoids unfortunate Oedipal moments.”
“You’re seeing Rio?” She had no business asking questions, but this whole morning was headed toward surreal. Besides, she figured the eyeful Mimi had gotten from the back of the Harley justified her curiosity somewhat.
Mimi shrugged. “He’s a good man,” she said quietly. “Once you get past the playboy-pretty of that face. That kind of man doesn’t grow on trees, not even around here. Strong’s a decent place, but it’s low on excitement. The Donovan brothers—well, they know how to heat things up.” Her gaze slid from Lily to somewhere behind her. Jack. “You know how they are. I wasn’t going to say no. Rio’s not the sort to ask twice. And he’s only back in town for the summer.” She made a little face. “So I don’t have time to waste.”
Rio was playful, but he only played with women who’d agreed to those terms. If he’d hooked up with Mimi, he believed she understood the score. Right now, he was closing up shop, sliding the last bits and pieces into his bag. Slinging the bag over his shoulder, he threw a leg over the waiting Harley and turned to look at the two of them.
“That’s my cue,” Mimi said regretfully. “Beer truck’s coming in a half hour anyhow. Come on down for a drink sometime, and we’ll catch up. Or share war stories.” She walked over to the bike, all long legs and sexy saunter. Sometimes, Lily decided, watching Mimi slide behind Rio and wrap her arms around his waist, life just wasn’t fair.
What would it be like to not worry about anything but the moment? Mimi had decided she wanted Rio Donovan, and she was taking him. When it was over, it would be over. No worries. No regrets.
Maybe she needed to take Jack the same way.
By the time Jack had finished up with Rio’s equipment and hit the porch, his temper had cooled, and he was ready to manage Lily. By God, she’d stay safe on his watch—whether she liked it or not. Based on her reaction earlier, he was betting she’d make this difficult. Turned out, Lily had grown a stubborn streak while he’d been away. Or maybe, he admitted wryly, closing the screen door behind him, that stubborn side had always been there, but she’d had him so wrapped into knots, he hadn’t noticed.
Lily was already surrounded by buckets of water half-filled with lavender stalks. By noon, those buckets would be chock-full of fresh-cut lavender. His Lilybell cut like a madwoman. Setting down his coffee cup, he fingered a handful of purple and white flowers. She’d cut the lavender long, preserving a tall, flowering spike of color.
“You take all the leaves off?” Flowers were, he decided, pure mystery. These smelled fine, but the bottoms of the long stems were just bare wood. Why take half the plant off?
“Florists don’t care about the leaves.” She shrugged. “They’ll strip all the leaves off the lower ends anyhow, to make up their own arrangements. It’s the color that matters most. The color and the length of the bud. The longer, the better.”
“Length.” His slow, heated grin let her know exactly where his thoughts had gone. “I could be on board with that, baby.” She elbowed him, and he grinned right back at the mock indignation on her face.
Her skin was sun-kissed, a creamy gold except when she bent over and he caught a glimpse of a paler area beneath the waistband of her shorts, where a minuscule scrap of a bikini had—barely—covered her. That pale hint of hidden skin was unfamiliar. Exotic. She seemed to glory in the heat. Tipped her head back to soak in the sunshine beneath her battered canvas hat with its whimsical ribbons. He’d have fantasies about what she must look like in that bikini, dream about wicked little scraps of white crochet that came apart in a man’s hands.
“How does this work?” Lily’s porch had a perfect view of the fields surrounding her little farmhouse. Lavender on three sides, with a woody upslope on the fourth. The outbuildings were close together, which posed a problem. Anyone could wait there, park his ass in the shadows. Lily wouldn’t see an attack until it was well launched. “You can actually make a living growing lavender?”
“Not a huge one,” she admitted, and he wanted to lean down and kiss that look of chagrin right off her face. Lily, he was discovering, didn’t do failure. She just kept on going until she succeeded. “So far,” she continued, “it’s paid the bills. I do mail-order, and I have an online store. People seem to want lavender buds and bundles clean across the country, so I cut and ship. And I sell lavender soaps. All my lavender comes fresh from these fields,” she said proudly. “I’ve sent my flowers for photo shoots and weddings. All sorts of places.”
“But you’re not open to the public.” He made her nervous, he realized. Ten years ago, she’d been nervous, too, but he’d thought time and distance would erase that sweet awareness. “Promise me you’re not open to the public, Lily. I don’t want to hear that you put out that kind of welcome mat for whoever’s after your ass.”
“No.” She licked her lips. “I’m not open for tours. I’ve been thinking about it, but it’s not a step I’m ready for yet. Maybe next year I’ll do it.”
So no public access. That was good. The fewer defensive angles he had to work, the better. “How many people work here?”
“Two, sometimes three.” She twisted a tie around the base of the bundle. “The farm foreman and two seasonal hands. They won’t really get started for another couple of weeks, but I’ve got them doing odd jobs now and then.”
“How long have they been with you?”
“Since I started, Jack.” Her huff of exasperation warned him she was done with this conversation. “They’re good men. Good men who can probably prove they’ve never been to San Francisco.” Deliberately, she changed the subject. “You got plans for today?” she asked, for all the world as if they were some old, married couple parked on a porch they’d picked out together. Surprisingly, that cozy little domestic picture didn’t have him headed for the hills or dreaming of the next fire call. “This conversation is over, Jack.”
“It’s not over until I say so,” he said tightly. If she wanted him to take the gloves off, he would. “There is someone after you, Lily. He was right out there, watching you. I can take you to see the tracks for yourself if you want, but you’re going to listen to me.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” she said sweetly, putting the shears down on the porch. “Whatever Rio found up there on the ridge, it doesn’t change the fundamentals, Jack. You’re not in charge here.”
He squatted down beside her, putting himself on eye level with her. He was bigger and meaner, and he’d use his size to intimidate her if that was what it took to keep her safe. Yeah, but he wasn’t stupid. He nudged her pruning shears out of the way and planted his hands on either side of her. “I’ll say this just once.” His eyes watched her, hard and knowing. “Your ass doesn’t set foot outside this house, Lily, unless one of us is with you. You got that?”
“Loud and clear,” she said bitterly.
“I mean it, Lily. I’ll paddle your ass if I catch you taking risks.”
“I know how to take care of myself.” She tried to scoot backward, but he tugged her forward. Up against him. Hell, she had to feel the hard press of his erection straining against his jeans. His body was ready to move on to ot
her things. “I lock all my doors, Jack. I carry a gun.” Her voice made it plenty clear she didn’t enjoy the latter. “I think I’m pretty damned safe.”
“He got to you in San Francisco,” Jack pointed out, because it had to be said. “Whoever he is, he’s not sane. He’s gone out of his way to burn things that mean something to you. What makes you think he’ll leave your farm alone, Lily? If he’s watching you, he knows precisely what this place means to you. He’ll take a match to it sooner or later, and I’m going to be ready for him.”
“Fine.” She smiled slowly, and he knew he wasn’t going to like what came out of her mouth next. Lily Cortez thought she’d figured out a way to one-up him. He’d set her straight and enjoy every minute of it. “You want to stay here and be my own personal fireman, you do that. I’d be happy to tell you precisely what needs doing around here.”
If she thought she’d be giving him orders, she needed to rethink things real quick. He didn’t take orders.
“Let me do my job, Lily, and we’ll get along just fine. Right now, I’m going to clear a firebreak.” Because either he worked off some of his temper chewing through that iron-hard California soil over there, or he took Lily upstairs and showed her what she’d been missing all these years.
“Excuse me?” Those brown eyes of hers stared up at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. This time, when she inched backward, he let her go. He could wait. And she definitely needed a firebreak.
“All this”—he gestured toward the rows of purple that swooped and curved around the field fronting her property—“is kindling, pure and simple.”
“That’s not kindling.” She grabbed a new bucket and a pair of lethally sharp hand shears. She could skewer a man with those. “You’re looking at twelve thousand instances of extremely happy Provence lavender. You have any idea how long it takes to turn a mail-order plug into a plant that makes pretty purple flowers, Jack?”
Hell, he didn’t even know what a plug was, although he suspected it had nothing to do with chewing tobacco.
“You take a little, stubby, two-inch bit of a plant.” She held up a dirt-streaked thumb and forefinger to demonstrate. “And you put it into the ground if you’re feeling really lucky. Maybe you keep it holed up in a greenhouse for a couple of months while you coax it along. Then summer comes along and fries the hell out of it, while you curse the weather and the irrigation piping and anyone who comes along and tells you you’re a fool for thinking you could make a going concern of a lavender farm.” The grin she shot him was pure deviltry. “Then, after you’ve got that cursing out of the way, you sit back and wait for the lavender to grow up and flower. It takes two years, Jack, before there’s anything to cut.”
She loved the sheer, cussed stubbornness of lavender. The shrubby, woody clumps of purple and silver were so tough at heart that even the deer didn’t bother them. She didn’t know why she bothered some days, but there was magic in those plants. The pure heaven of the aroma had convinced her of that with the very first breath she’d sucked in. Yeah. She’d wanted acres of lavender, and that’s what she’d gotten.
“I won’t let you lose your farm.” His hand wrapped around her wrist. She looked down at his fingers for a moment. Maybe he understood. Maybe he didn’t.
“It’s not up to you,” she said. “It’s up to me. I didn’t plant all those plants down there, but I’ve got their brothers and sisters sitting in my greenhouse. I will plant them,” she said fiercely. “I’m going to be happy here.”
No missing that use of the future tense.
“I’m going to clear out some of this grass, then dig a line between your lavender and the trees.”
It would be ugly as hell, so he figured she’d protest, but it would make her farm safer, which made it the right thing to do. He’d dug line before, lots of line. The more you trained, the more you reacted correctly when you were in a fire situation. Sometimes thinking was a luxury. Sometimes a man had to go on his gut, had to trust that all the training would pay off in spades and he’d do the right thing instinctively.
“Don’t touch my lavender,” she warned. When he didn’t say anything, she aimed a trowel at the nearest field. “That one’s all Grosso lavender. Over there, behind the house, the previous owner put in some French plants, so I’ve got Hidcote Giant and Provence, as well.”
He narrowed his eyes. Maybe those clumps did have different shapes, colors. Still, lavender was lavender, wasn’t it?
The plants she’d pointed out looked pretty damned scruffy to him, woody stalks where the purple blooms hadn’t burst through yet. They had the prettiest names, though, and there was no denying that her face lit right on up talking about them. That was enough to keep him nodding.
He’d done more than his share of gut-churning, nausea-inducing runs. If you couldn’t make the time, you were off the team. No excuses. Up there on the mountainside, when the fire was roaring all around you, you needed to know that every man jack on your team could run like hell if he had to. Fire didn’t care about age or injuries or even just a bad fucking day at the races. Fire burned, and that was that.
“So go ahead and dig.” She was fussing with those bushes of hers, all her attention focused on a handful of scraggly gray-green plants poking up out of the dirt. Still, she’d stopped talking about getting him to leave, and she seemed, for the moment, to have forgotten their argument about her ability to protect herself. So he damned sure enjoyed the look of confusion on her face when he made to hand back her little Beretta.
“You certain you know how to use this?” He slid the safety into place, his fingers running over the gun with easy familiarity. A man didn’t spend five years with the Marines without learning his way around firearms. “If not, I’ll take you down to the range. You can get some practice rounds in.”
He offered the gun back to her, grip first, and she took it. “I know how to use it. I’m not taking any chances, Jack. That’s your job.”
He just watched her. “Probably,” he acknowledged. “But I don’t take unnecessary chances, baby.”
The little snort of disbelief was out before she could stop it. “Then tell me why you jump. Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy it.”
He wasn’t a fool. He knew what the risks were. “It’s a love-hate thing,” he said. Carefully stacking his tools by the fence, he vaulted over it, one-handed. “Nothing better than the jump itself, the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach as you fall through the air and you’re waiting to pull the cord. But then there’s the fight waiting for you down below. And it’s going to be a good fight, but there are never any guarantees. We might win the battle; we might lose.” He shrugged. “But we have to fight it. We can’t just let it burn, knowing what might happen to the towns and the people in the fire’s way. People have moved into areas nature never intended for us to live in, and now we’re paying the price. My job is to keep that price as low as possible.”
She nodded slowly, sinking down onto her heels as she pulled on leather work gloves. “But it’s dangerous.”
“Men die,” he acknowledged quietly. “But it doesn’t happen all that often, and I know how to jump,” he said quietly. “I know the where, the when. How to read fire signs and use the equipment. It’s not voodoo. It’s science. Practice, training, discipline. And experience.”
The sleepy drone of early-morning insects filled up the air around them as the critters checked out the bright orange stalks of daylilies jabbing up into the warming air behind the beds. God. Jack talked so matter-of-factly about death and dying, but she didn’t want to imagine him facing that kind of threat. It scared her. She could admit that. Not as much as her stalker did, but enough. Jack Donovan was so very alive and confident. She couldn’t imagine him caught in a burnover, all that life extinguished in a few agonizing minutes.
He must have read her thoughts on her face. “I don’t plan on dying out there, Lilybell.”
“Promise?” she asked lightly, trying to move away from the dark tone of the conv
ersation.
He smiled. “Promise. You can take that one to the bank. Besides, I don’t jump every day. Today, I’m all ditch-digger.” He pulled the shirt off over his head. “We spend lots of time digging ditches. One of the best-paid occupations a man can have in the summertime. But don’t romanticize it,” he warned. “Unless you’d like to.” Winking, he dropped the T-shirt onto the ground. “The goal is to pen the fire between two strips of raw dirt. In the middle of a fire, the faster you dig, the better your chances of containing it. You dig a fire line and pray the fire hasn’t gone up into the crowns of the trees, where the heat and flames can flash over and just fly between treetops and screw all your efforts down there on the ground.”
Lily’s head nodded in all the right places as he gave her Firefighting 101. But those eyes of hers—those eyes were all over him. He hadn’t missed the flash of worry when she’d thought about him dying. That little wrinkle forming between her eyebrows assured him he was getting somewhere with her. Slowly. But he was making progress, and that was all that mattered.
He’d dug firebreaks for years, slowly pinching the vee of the line closed until the fire, trapped, had nowhere left to go but out. It was basic physics—pick your point and pick it well, and anchor the line in some unburnable bit of the landscape. Place it where there were too many rocks to burn or the groundcover had already been burned out.
But Lily Cortez had him on unfamiliar terrain, looking to fan a fire instead of put it out. If looks were anything to go by, taking off his shirt had been a damned fine start. Whistling, he picked up his shovel and got down to work.
Loading up the car and heading into town turned out to be harder than it should have been.
Lily had left Jack shirtless, cutting away at the grass ringing her lavender fields. Man was a walking fantasy, always had been. That was the problem.
His truck had been an old, growly beast of a machine, even then. Beat-up but faithful, she’d heard him tell one of his brothers. The paint peeled because he’d put his time and his money where it counted—beneath her hood. That motor purred when he turned the key, and she’d never let him down.
