Garden of Dreams (14 page)

He thought he discerned more of her breasts than hitherto revealed beneath a T-shirt advertising the one hundredth Fancy Farm picnic, but he wouldn't let himself fall into that trap. Grumbling about taking a shower, he stumbled back down the hall, wishing he were in his antiseptic modem home where spike-haired fairies didn't materialize at dawn.

A little later, he returned to the kitchen, his hair washed, his clothes in respectable order, to find the kitchen empty except for the fresh pot of coffee. Frustrated that he'd cleaned up for nothing, he poured a big mug of coffee and wandered outside. Somehow, he knew the sprite had disappeared into the morning dew. He had the unreasonable belief that he deserved her company after going to the trouble of showering and changing clothes.

He found her frowning up at the supposedly dying birch tree while she ran water from a hose at its base.

“Isn't it a little early in the morning for playing nursemaid to a tree?” He wanted to woo the damned woman, not snap at her, but lack of sleep made him grouchy.

“Aunt Hattie planted this tree for my twenty-first birthday. Do you suppose it knows that I'm declaring her incompetent? Maybe it's dying in protest.”

JD squinted at her through the bright glare of the morning sun. He thought Miss Nina Toon might be a twig short of a full tree. “That's the craziest thing I've ever heard,” he said. Then what she said finally sank in. The famous Aunt Hattie had been shuffled off to a nursing home, and this sprite meant to have her declared incompetent. Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs, he studied her more carefully.

“Alzheimer's?” he guessed.

She shrugged. “Senile dementia, whatever you want to call it. She's closing in on ninety. She has a right to check out of the real world, I suppose. I had just hoped to take care of her the way she took care of me.”

JD sipped his coffee and contemplated the brilliant dawn and the mockingbird singing its foolish head off in the holly tree. Anything was better than feeling this diminutive female's pain.

How was it that he could feel her pain when he never noticed any other's? He had been known to work through an earthquake while people ran screaming from the building around him. Hell, his alcoholic old man had taught him all about ignoring pain, including his own. Trees died. People got old. Life went on. Why worry?

For some reason, his usual careless attitude didn't work this time. Watching his landlady gnaw her bottom lip and frown, JD had the ridiculous urge to console her.

“From what you've said,” he ventured tentatively, “you are taking care of her. That tree is your Aunt Hattie. This house, this land, everything around it. They're all your aunt. You're doing what she wanted you to do.”

She gave him a brief, unhappy look then nodded. “Maybe. I can live with that, I suppose. I just hate going into court and declaring her incapable of taking care of herself or her property. But it's the only way I can keep it.”

“You'd lose it otherwise?” He told himself it was just an idle question, something to keep the conversation rolling while he rested his brain and drank his coffee. Once he solved his little snag, he'd be on the road to California.

He snorted. Sure, and who was he fooling? That's why he'd dived headfirst into her idea for a botanical garden—because he was bored and needed a hobby. First thing he'd do when he returned to California would be to hire a shrink.

‘The cell phone company wants a tower on Hattie's Hill. They're threatening to have the land condemned if I don't give them right-of-way. I can't fight them unless I have power of attorney.”

Hattie's Hill. What in hell was Hattie's Hill? And that's when it came to him. He only knew the bare bones of law as it affected him. But phone companies and powers of attorney struck a chord, and all the little pieces of one of his problems began snapping into place.

“Don't worry,” JD informed her, his mind already back at the computer. “If you don't have power of attorney, you can't sign their damned right-of-way either.”

With that, he strode off, leaving her staring after him.

“Yeah, JD's not bad,” Jackie replied noncommittally to an earlier question as he swung his weed hook through the vines and brambles beneath an old pin oak. “He's only grounded me for the week. This work stuff stinks, but there's not much better to do.”

His companion in travail stopped and wiped the sweat from his brow with a filthy rag, then rested on his long-handled shears. “Why doesn't Miss Toon just hire a bulldozer? That's what my dad would do.”

Secretly relieved that the other guy had quit first, Jackie stopped working and took a deep drink of his bottled water. He glanced around at the small dent they'd cut in the thick undergrowth and gave a mental groan. “I don't know. She's pretty weird.”

“Yeah. I remember last year she ran out of the classroom and yelled at the guys topping the trees in the school yard. Told them they were murdering the trees. She threw a fit when they wouldn't stop, and she got the principal. My dad said she told him that even if they didn't stop murdering the trees, the bucket truck was about to break down and the guy could get stranded up there.”

Jackie grinned. “Yeah, she's got a thing about trees, for certain. What happened?”

His companion shoved the rag in his pocket and reached for the water. “The bucket broke down, and it took the volunteer firemen an hour to get the guy out. And the trees they topped died the next year. My dad says she's a witch.”

“My dad would say she put sugar in the gas tank.” Jackie promptly shut his mouth, remembering he shouldn't talk about JD that way. Reluctantly, he swung the weed hook at the next stand of brambles. He had mixed feelings about JD. The man had abandoned him and his mother and left them living on the limited generosity of his grandfather. It looked like a man ought to know when he had a kid. But he was angrier at his mother for not telling JD in the first place, so they could have been living in luxury all these years. The angers kind of balanced out. He just knew JD had rescued him from the rotten old man his mother had finally married. That didn't square things exactly, but it helped.

Of course, now JD thought he should act like a father, yelling at him to pick up his room and eat his meals and help out around the house, grounding him for drinking a little beer. But it wasn't any worse than what his mother had him do. His mom would have killed him for the beer thing. And living out here was pretty cool with the lake and all. He just wished Miss Toon would get air-conditioning. He was about to croak from the heat.

“Sugar in the tank. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Miss Toon is weird enough to do something like that,” Laddie agreed. “What's she gonna do with all these old trees when we get the junk cleared out?”

“Make a garden. She wants a tourist attraction like they've got down in Florida. JD said he'd take me to Disney World if we had time, but with the truck broke, I guess it ain't gonna happen.”

“She's gonna make a Disney World here?”

Jackie gave his friend a look of disgust. Brains weren't the biggest part of Laddie's character, he was discovering. “She's gonna make a garden, like Cypress Gardens, I guess. A place where all the rich people go and ooh and aah over the flowers. I heard her talking to JD. They think it will draw enough people that the town will need hotels and McDonald's and things like that. Miss Toon gets all excited when she talks about it.”

“McDonald's! Cool. This place ain't got anywhere to go. Wait till my dad hears that. Maybe he'll let me work there so I can buy my own truck.”

Vaguely uneasy that he might have said too much, Jackie swung his hook a little harder. It didn't matter what Miss Toon did about the garden or McDonald's or anything else. He and JD would be out of here before anything interesting happened.

Not certain how he felt about that, he gave the sapling in front of him a particularly vicious cut.

***

Nina was cleaning the spaghetti sauce off the burner when Jackie slumped in, clothes drenched and forehead dripping, stinking to high heaven of sweat and cut grass. She raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Did you jump in the lake, clothes on?”

“Nah. We shoulda.” He reached in the refrigerator and helped himself to a can of root beer. “Can me and Laddie get paid so we can go into town and have a pizza?”

“I don't think JD plans on cutting payroll checks until Friday. That's how business works. You have to hold out until payday. Is Laddie still outside? You both need to write down your hours so he'll know how much to pay you.”

“He's out sticking his head under the hose.”

Nina watched Jackie gulp the foamy soft drink, and her own stomach heaved in protest at the thought of the gas intake. Grimacing, she reached in the freezer and pulled out a couple of Eskimo Pies. “Why don't you take these down to the lake and cool off? Mama Rosa's isn't open until four, anyway.”

Looking surprised, the boy accepted the ice cream. “Mom doesn't let me eat dessert until I've had lunch.”

“So, you're on vacation. You're probably too hot to eat right now anyway. Cool off, then come back up here for hot dogs later. You'll be more ready to eat then.”

Brightening, Jackie swiped his face with the kitchen towel and loped out the back door holding his prize. It didn't take much to please teenage boys sometimes. Food and a physical task worked wonders.

The hair on the back of Nina's neck prickled, and she realized JD had entered the room. She supposed he wouldn't approve of her sending his brother out with just ice cream for lunch, but she didn't care. After the strange comments he'd made this morning, she wasn't certain what to expect.

“Do you ever cook real food?” he asked, opening the refrigerator door and examining the contents.

He was barefoot and sleep-tousled. She'd decided he must have stayed up all night working and had taken a nap after he'd disappeared back into his room this morning. Jackie had probably wakened him with his door slamming. She tried not to look too closely at the way JD's jeans slid down his hips as rummaged through the refrigerator. She was grateful he actually wore a shirt. She'd never realized just how attractive a man's hairy chest could be.

Feeling the odd sensation in the pit of her stomach again, she returned to cleaning. “I've not starved yet,” she answered his question. “I find eating as boring as combing my hair. I only do it because I have to.”

The refrigerator door closed. A second later, masculine fingers were running through her choppy hair. The intimate touch shot right through her nervous system, and Nina swung around, wielding the bottle of cleanser like a sword.

JD dropped his hand and set a jar of peanut butter on the counter. “If you eat as infrequently as you comb your hair, it's a wonder you don't starve. Are there any good restaurants in this town?”

“Carla's, if you want country-fried. That's about it.” Still feeling his hand in her hair, Nina returned to polishing the stove, although she'd already eradicated all traces of spaghetti sauce.

“Country-fried,” he groaned, rummaging for the bread. “It's a wonder everyone out here doesn't drop dead by the age of forty. Let's go to the grocery and see if we can't find something edible. I'll buy.”

Thinking of Howard's Piggly Wiggly and the dearth of anything this man would consider edible, Nina grinned. “By all means, let's complete your education. Shall I draw up a grocery list?”

He gave her a suspicious look as he slathered the peanut butter on the bread. “What makes me think this will not be a pleasant experience?”

“Just call it a learning experience. Give me a minute to wash up. I'll be right with you.”

JD watched her go with a hunger that had nothing to do with the peanut butter in his hand. She practically bounced when she walked. Her hips swung like a young girl's. That loose cotton dress swished around her knees and clung softly in all the right places. He suddenly realized tight tops and short cutoffs weren't half as feminine and enticing as that breezy halter dress. He didn't care what size her breasts were anymore. He just wanted that bundle of energy wrapped in his arms and her spacey attention focused on him.

Sighing with defeat, he finished his sandwich and drifted back to his room to put himself together before facing the Piggly Wiggly expedition. He couldn't believe anyone would call a store by that ridiculous name. Maybe he should call his new software program Higgledy-Piggledy.

Still grouching, he brushed his hair and checked his e-mail. Still no reply from Jimmy. That wasn't like him. He was usually on any problem JD sent him like a duck to water. He considered calling the office. Could Uncle Harry and his cohorts actually summon the means of tracing a phone call?

Deciding he couldn't put Nina and Jackie at risk just so he could find out, JD typed out another urgent message and sent it while he waited. Jimmy might have a fresh approach to the program snag. With that solved, they could get the program canned and processed while JD manipulated legal strings to keep it out of DiFrancesco's hands.

Visions of gutting Marshall Enterprises, declaring it the corporate equivalent of incompetent, and leaving the shell in his enemy's hands danced in JD's brain. Aunt Hattie would never know what a good turn she'd served him.