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“I’ve never been divorced,” she blurted out. “Or married. Or engaged. Or even very serious.”

“You strike me as very serious.”

“About a man. Was what I meant.”

“I’m teasing you, Rowena.” She felt foolish until Ben added, “Because if I don’t undercut your advantage a little, I am about to make myself very, very emotionally naked, telling a virtual stranger what went wrong with my marriage.”

“Oh, please don’t feel you have to do that!” She pressed a hand to her cheek, stricken at the fact that she seemed to have drawn out a vulnerable side to Ben Radford that she wouldn’t have thought could exist.

He was still smiling at her, in his cynical, smoky-eyed and almost dangerous way, and all at once it was too much. It seemed more like flirting than anything else, and Dr Rowena Madison just did not do flirting.

She didn’t know how.

And she didn’t want to learn.

LILIAN DARCY

has written more than seventy-five books. Her first novel appeared on the romance bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married, with four active children, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do – including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and travelling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at: PO Box 532 Jamison PO, Macquarie ACT 2614, Australia, or e-mail her at: lilian@liliandarcy. com.

The Millionaire’s
Makeover

Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter One

Rowena gritted her teeth and held her clipboard more tightly, as if attempting to get a literal and physical grip on her fast-disappearing patience. “And one final question…” she said.

“Final? Really? Thank heaven for small mercies,” muttered the man who stood beside her.

Without so much as a glance in her direction, he reached into the inner jacket pocket of his perfectly tailored business suit and brought out a cell phone. Apparently empires might crumble if he didn’t have it pressed to his ear within three seconds.

And apparently he’d already dismissed Rowena as the slightly prim, conservatively dressed, uninteresting academic type that she was—which, actually, she was quite comfortable being most of the time—and didn’t look at her for long enough to revise this impression. His steely gaze missed the region of her face by at least two yards.

She ignored his rudeness and persisted, “Do you like barbecues?”

“Do I like what?”

“Um, when you have friends over, there are salads and beer, you cook outside on a grill…? Bar-be-cues,” she articulated clearly and helpfully, as if speaking to someone who’d begun learning English yesterday.

“I know what barbecues are, Dr. Madison.” He favored her with a quarter-second gaze, at last. “Listen, I’m a very busy man—”

“Yes, and you’re exactly the kind of man I don’t like,” she cut in. The words spilled out before she’d consciously decided to speak them. Her tone sliced into the balmy Southern California air like an icicle splintering onto a concrete driveway. “I understand very well that you’re busy. And seriously, radioactively important. And that I’m not. Please don’t feel that you have to parade the fact, with your cell phone as a prop, in order to get it through to me. I’m not stupid, and I don’t appreciate being treated that way.”

Feeling the angry heat creep into her cheeks, she threw the clipboard onto an ancient wooden workbench that had been abandoned for no discernible reason on the adobe brick veranda. The clipboard’s attached pages, covered in her neat blue handwriting, fluttered. Ben Radford dropped his cell phone into his trouser pocket in surprise at her frank speaking and took a shocked step back.

The mouse had roared. Who knew?

His reaction almost made Rowena laugh out loud. His well-shaped mouth had fallen open and then snapped shut again. He was wiping the back of his neck with his lean fingers as if he’d begun to itch or sweat. He was sinfully good-looking and dressed for unquestioning success, and there was something quite shocking about seeing him out of his depth, even for a few seconds.

Should she try harder to choke back her anger, she wondered, or make this potential client aware of exactly how she felt? Roar some more or creep back into her warm, familiar mouse hole?

She went with her gut.

“You’ve bought this historic, exceptional, wonderful place,” she said. “Spent twenty million on it, I should think. You’ve asked me to consult with you on the restoration of its garden, and as you know, my rates are commensurate with my expertise. High, in other words.”

Don’t splutter, Row, she coached herself. Stick to the point. Believe in yourself. You’re in the right.

“All I’m doing,” she went on, “is attempting to gauge your priorities, your budget, your needs and your concerns. How important is historical accuracy? How do you plan to actually use the garden? What is your wish list of features? How much do you want to spend? Those are not trivial issues, and yet you have made it painfully apparent from the first minute of our meeting that I’m an irritant, and that you have more important things to do.”

“Dr. Madison—”

“May I remind you that you arranged my visit here today. If a fantastic opportunity such as the one presented by this property is no more than an afterthought to you, I do have to wonder why on earth you’re proposing to employ me. Why not get on the phone, get a bulldozer in and order a bulk delivery of geraniums and precut turf instead!”

She snatched her clipboard up from the ancient bench. Actually, the bench was so ancient that it might be worth keeping as an antique. Not that she’d be a part of such decisions now, after such a frank expression of her attitude.

Was she sorry that she’d said so much?

She pondered the question as she snapped her way over the worn adobe in her neat, sensible shoes, her unbuttoned tailored jacket flapping open at the front like two gray bird’s wings and the black fabric of her synthetic-blend trouser legs catching at her calves and generating megawatts of static cling, thanks to her haste.

There was no point in going back through the magnificently restored house. She could take the side exit from this overgrown mission-style courtyard and proceed directly to her car. She would invoice Ben Radford for her travel expenses today, regard their short-lived business relationship as over, and, just by the way, she would never wear these horrible, clingy trousers again.

No, she decided, she wasn’t sorry that she’d spoken the way she had. She’d defended both her own professional worth and the worth of Mr. Radford’s neglected and unloved piece of ground, and she was proud of having spoken her mind.

It was a huge personal milestone, and her whole body still tingled with the triumph of having reached it.

Two years earlier she would have burst into speechless tears, paralyzed by the very thought of a confrontation with a forbiddingly arrogant and successful man like this, no matter how much justice was on her side.

She would have rushed home to hide and not answered the phone for a week, in case it was Mr. Radford calling. She’d have relived the encounter over and over, exaggerating it in her memory until it froze her completely and stopped her from leaving the safety of her home.

This time she’d actually said what she really thought.

She felt a little dizzy, bubbling over with the need to share the victory and to celebrate it somehow. Putting the clingy trousers into a charity rag bin wouldn’t be celebration enough. She decided to call Rox—her identical twin—with a full report as soon as she could. Rox would probably send her champagne.

Losing the chance to work on such a fabulous garden restoration gave her some regrets, true, but it couldn’t be helped. If Ben Radford was this difficult to deal with at their first consultation, he’d be a nightmare further down the track. She should consider this as a lucky escape.

“Wait a minute, Dr. Madison!” he said beside her, just as she was about to push on the rusty iron gate that led out of the courtyard.

She hadn’t realized he’d followed her. He studied her in silence for a long moment, as if deciding how she should be handled. Bomb-disposal experts and pest exterminators probably studied suspiciously ticking packages and enormous wasp nests in the same way. “You’re being too hasty,” he said at last.

“I wasn’t the one rushing us through the consultation.”

“No, but you’re the one bailing out now.”

“With good reason. This project has to mean something to you, or there’s no point in hiring me.” Sheesh, she was going all out today! She’d had no idea it could feel so good. She lifted her chin and stared him down.

To be met with a silence that stretched and stretched.

“You got me at a bad moment,” he said abruptly at last, his dark eyes half-hidden by lowered lids. “I’m sorry.” He sounded seriously uncomfortable, and Rowena guessed that he hadn’t felt the need to apologize for anything in a long time. She had the strong suspicion this was because he very rarely did anything wrong. “You’re right, you are a professional. And this project is important to me.”

“Okay, good,” she murmured vaguely, not knowing how else to respond to such a surprising admission from such a man. Then some devilish part of her that she barely knew existed added, “I hope there’s more.”

“More?”

“More to your excuse.” She dared a smile. “How often might I expect these bad moments, if you contract me for the project?”

Since she was by now quite certain that he wouldn’t, it didn’t matter if she burned her boats. Meanwhile, the satisfying sense of having shattered her past limitations hadn’t yet begun to fade. It was probably the closest she was ever going to get to jumping out of an airplane and going into free fall with a parachute on her back.

“I was on the phone with my ex-wife just before you arrived,” Ben Radford said slowly, “and it was a miserable conversation, as usual. Is that good enough? Divorce is stressful.” He said the D word as if he was never going to get used to the bad taste it left in his mouth. “But I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. That was wrong of me.”

His expression remained wooden, distant and severe, which somehow showed his unhappiness more clearly than a grimace of misery would have done.

He continued. “And you’re quite right about any garden designer’s need to know my priorities and tastes if this project is going to be done the way it should be. So can we start again?”

He gave a tight, suffering smile, and something kicked in Rowena’s stomach. The man was tall, well built, dark-haired, good-looking, and she guessed he could have a great deal of personal charm if he ever chose to use it. Evidently, he wasn’t quite ready to use it now.

Still, he had apologized at manful length, she had to concede.

Then realized, good grief, that she was almost disappointed about the concessions he’d just made. What was happening to her? She would have very much liked a good excuse to do some more yelling. It felt…so exhilarating.

Suppressing such an inappropriate emotion, she said a little awkwardly, “We don’t need to start again. I’ve already taken pages of notes.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He smiled again, dark eyes smoky, charm level rising, vulnerability totally gone, hair catching the morning sunlight for a moment as he lifted his head, and this time the kick in her stomach was stronger and held a warning.

Stay cool, Rowena…

A familiar impulse to run and hide began to well up inside her, but she fought it down. She could handle this. Handle him. His charm, his eyes, his wealth, his unsettling moment of honesty about his divorce, the whole package.

And if she couldn’t totally handle it, yet, then she had to practice and learn.

“Back to the barbecue question, then,” she said lightly, smoothing down the lapels of her jacket. “Could I have an answer?”

He rested his hand on the rusted wrought iron of the gate and surveyed the courtyard. A frown tightened on his brow. He didn’t look like an Englishman, with those dark eyes and the natural olive tint to his skin. He didn’t even sound like one, some of the time. He’d been in Southern California for a while, and he had the American vowels to prove it. But Rowena knew that he had come from England, originally, because she’d looked him up on the Internet.

He’d come from a comfortable, classy background and had attended a very expensive school. He’d earned two degrees at Oxford University and married an American bride. He’d made his fortune in the field of biotechnology, sold his company a year ago and moved into new and more-varied business interests. He now owned an art gallery, a Hollywood casting agency and a restaurant, amongst other things.

The Internet hadn’t told Rowena that he was in the middle of an obviously unpleasant divorce.

“I wish I could tell you,” he murmured.

“You don’t know whether you like barbecues?”

“I don’t know whether my liking for the occasional barbecue means we should build a barbecue in this courtyard, if that’s what you’re trying to work out. Look at it!” He gestured at the wild, intimidating jungle in front of them, sounding…daunted? Surely not. He didn’t look like the kind of man who could be daunted by anything. “I’m fascinated by the idea of restoring the place, but can’t begin to imagine how it will work.”

“That’s why you’re considering the possibility of hiring me,” she reminded him.

They both stood in silence, contemplating the sprawling space. It was bracketed at one end by the three sides of the old adobe ranch house, already well on its way to being a showpiece thanks to the injection of Ben Radford’s money and effort.

He was still in the process of restoration, but the rooms that were already finished were spectacular without being overdone, and with a personal touch that had spoken to Rowena immediately as she’d passed through them. Clean lines, unexpected colors, well-chosen antiques, pockets of warmth and coziness that made you want to curl up in them with a good book.

The contrast between the yard and the house was almost shocking.

Barring one or two dusty pathways, the entire expanse—well over an acre—was a towering tangle of cactus, some of it probably a hundred years old. Rowena had identified prickly pear, several species of agave, ocotillo, barrel cactus and half a dozen other species. The plants twisted together like some bizarre maze. Dead husks rattled on the ground, painful spines reached out to snag the unwary. There would be birds’ nests in there, insects of all kinds and snakes…

“You mentioned bulldozers a minute ago,” Ben Radford said. His voice held a thoughtful note.

They were both standing quite still. San Diego, Oceanside and La Jolla were each less than an hour’s drive away, along with the urban sprawl that marched farther in from the ocean year by year. Here, beyond the vineyards and nursery plantations closer to the coast, the old Spanish-land-grant ranch sat poised at the foot of the mountains, surrounded by air you could really breathe. The house seemed more a part of the earth than a human creation. There were cattle grazing in the distance and horses inhabiting the old stables, and it was very peaceful.

“I wasn’t serious,” Rowena said quickly.

“Why not?” He frowned at her. He wasn’t the kind of man to accept setbacks or contradictory opinions.

“Because we don’t know what’s beneath all this,” she explained, knowing she wouldn’t have much opportunity to convince him. “It would be a crime to come in with heavy machinery. There could be a treasure trove destroyed in the process. Old household items that would belong in a museum, and heirloom plant strains that might be very hard to find now. Do you see these powdery silver-white patches on the prickly pear?”

“They look like damp erupting behind whitewash in a mildewed basement,” he said.

“They do, but take a bit of it and crush it in your fingers.”

He reached out and did so, then looked up at her in astonishment at the brilliant crimson red that had stained his skin. “That’s amazing. What is it?”

“Cochineal. Those white patches are colonies of living creatures—a kind of scale insect. They store the red pigment in their bodies. Before the Spanish arrived in Mexico, the Mixtec Indians farmed these insects on the cactus and used them to make dye. There were periods when it was almost as precious as gold. It was used as a food coloring, too, for a long time, in jams, medicines, candy.”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“You’ve probably eaten it.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“This might sound strange,” Rowena went on slowly, “but I have a feeling that the whole garden could provide the same experience as you’ve just had with the cochineal. Nothing to get excited about at first glance, but if you take a closer look, if you approach with delicacy, you discover its magic. I’d hate to bring in a bulldozer, Mr. Radford—”

“Call me Ben,” he ordered. “I won’t need to tell you that again, I hope.”

“Ben,” she repeated, and that warning thunk hit her stomach again, more powerfully than ever. Why did she like the idea of calling him Ben? “Um, I hope you won’t. And, uh, Rowena, for me. Or Rowie.” Why had she added that? It was the nickname her sister called her by, and sometimes Mom and Dad. A client had no need to know it.

He was still looking at the crimson stain on his fingertips, and he had incredible hands—strong and lean and smooth. Sure hands, the way almost everything about him seemed sure.

Oh, except for that one very telling moment when he’d mentioned his divorce.

She could smell the aura of soap and coffee and clean male skin that hovered around him and it did something to her, quickened the blood in her veins and muddied her thoughts in a way that was unsettling but—like her outburst a few minutes ago—exhilaratingly new.

“We could lose some really valuable things,” she finished vaguely.

He nodded, instantly decisive. “No bulldozer. It’s a deal. So you’d use a team to clear the cactus by hand? Machetes and whatnot?”

“I’d be here myself the whole time, to oversee the work so that nothing important was damaged. If this place was mine, I’d let the design of the restored garden evolve over a period of some days as we began to discover what lay beneath. I wouldn’t plan it on paper in advance. It would be a unique, fascinating exercise.”

She ran her gaze over the mazelike expanse and felt a ridiculous itch to get started at once, like a kid in a candy store. Was that the curve of a stone well housing she could glimpse between the forests of cacti? Even if the well didn’t produce water, the old stone would make a dramatic accent with the right surroundings. She could see brilliant yellow flowers, too, but couldn’t make out what they were. It would be wonderful to work on this garden.

“Tell me more, Rowena,” Ben Radford invited her softly. “Make me see it. Paint it for me.”

“Oh, um…” she began awkwardly, and even when she relaxed and grew more fluent, she kept waiting for him to lose interest and signal that she’d said enough.

But he never did. Instead he stayed silent. He followed the gestures she made, nodded when she emphasized a point, smiled and even laughed with her once or twice when she invited him to picture an incident from a previous project. Like the time she’d briefly mistaken a late-twentieth-century lost toy for a Civil War belt buckle because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She’d made an appointment to get contact lenses the next day.

She didn’t mind telling an anecdote against herself if it made a man laugh. Ben Radford’s laugh was deep and a little rusty, as if he didn’t use it often enough.

“I really think that’s about all I can tell you for the moment,” she finished, after several minutes.

Ben nodded slowly, and made up for his disdainful failure to glance in her direction earlier by studying her with a disconcerting intensity now. What was he looking at? The too-dreamy expression in her eyes? The way her smile wobbled when she felt doubtful about something she’d said? Or was he seeing something else? Had she gone way over the top just now? What did he see? How much was he judging her?

“That’s not what I envisaged when I decided to bring you in,” he said.

“You expected to start with a blank canvas, so to speak, and lay the whole thing out according to a plan on paper, right off the bat.”

“I guess I did.”

“I could do it that way,” she conceded slowly.

“But you’d rather not.”

“No, because it’s such a fabulous opportunity!” She clasped her hands together, then quickly separated them again. Her body language would say she was begging. “With what you’ve done to the house so far—that’s wonderful, by the way, such a great blend of modern comfort and warmth, and authentic historical references. I’d love to do the same with this yard. To stay true to the Hispanic and pre-Hispanic heritage, while developing a space that’s beautiful and usable and welcoming at the same time. You’d love it, too. I know you would.”

His smile was crooked and cynical this time. “You know I would? What if I said it doesn’t fit my idea of the place at all?”

She’d let her personal feelings show too clearly, and she’d assumed way too much about her prospective client. Putting on a blank, polite face, she told him, “Then we’ll do whatever you decide. You’re the client, Mr.—Ben. Or you would be,” she corrected herself quickly, “if you decided to contract me for the project.”

She didn’t think that he would. Their initial dealings with each other this morning had been too awkward, and he was the kind of man who made quick, incisive decisions that he didn’t rethink.

Even now, after they’d found some common ground, there was something in the air that she couldn’t put her finger on, a kind of tension that made her uncomfortable and which she wanted to escape from as soon as she could. Her therapist, Jeanette, would probably want her to identify the tension’s exact origin in their next session, but Rowena wasn’t convinced she should risk taking a closer look at it.

“Tell me why I’d love this idea of yours,” Ben said. “How can I know? Convince me. How do you know? You seemed pretty sure just now.”

“Because I saw what you’d done with the house,” she explained simply. “That couldn’t just have been the work of decorators. I could see one person’s unique vision there. I assume that person was you.”

“You’re right. It was me. I said no to half of what the interior designer wanted, not to mention—” But he stopped.

He narrowed his eyes, looked down at the tips of his fingers and rubbed them together almost without seeing them. Was he still thinking of the picture Rowena had painted? Or was this an absentminded interest in the brilliant color of the dye that stained his skin.

“My wife thinks this whole idea is insane,” he said abruptly. Then he swore under his breath and muttered, “I have to start remembering to call her my ex!”

Rowena didn’t know what to say.

Ben picked up on her awkwardness. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t planned to say that out loud.” He gave her a sharp glance, as if wondering what on earth had made him apologize to someone like her for the second time in the space of half an hour.

“It’s fine.” She kept the polite facade in place.

“But you probably didn’t expect to find yourself discussing my divorce,” he persisted.

“No. Your bio that I found on the Internet said you were happily married,” she blurted out, then mentally swore. Oh, shoot!

Ben Radford swore right out loud, and he didn’t say anything so mild as shoot. “We maintained the fiction for quite a while, but I’m afraid the Internet information is out of date. If I sound bitter about it, there are reasons.”

“So what went wrong?” she blurted again. Oh, this was getting worse and worse! Just because he’d let a couple of details that he clearly regretted already slip, that was no reason for her to keep this same conversational ball rolling. It was as if his forthright Irish housekeeper had slipped truth serum into their coffee. “Forget I said that,” she added quickly.

“I’ll answer, if you want.”

“No, no please.”

“Let me answer,” he insisted lightly. “I need the practice.”

She laughed before she could stop herself—oh Lord, what would he think now?—because it was the same thing she’d thought about him, some minutes ago, when they’d reached their first uneasy truce.

In dealing with men like Ben Radford, she definitely needed the practice.

“You have to laugh, don’t you?” he said. He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t even smiling. “Either that or punch walls. Which hurts, I’ve discovered.” He rubbed his knuckles to illustrate the point and made her laugh again.

Like Ben Radford himself, she wasn’t all that accustomed to laughter.

Her twin, Roxanna, laughed a lot.

Rox was bright and bubbly and confident, as well as creative, disorganized and quirky. She lived in Tuscany now, having fallen hard for a wealthy Italian businessman who loved her sizzling personality. She’d been the stronger, healthier twin at birth, while Rowena had been in and out of hospitals for years as a child, with respiratory problems and a heart defect that had required more than one operation to correct.

Formed by these childhood experiences, the differences between them had persisted into adulthood. Where Rox enjoyed parties and music and crowds of interesting people, Rowena liked the meditative silence of the research libraries where she tracked down her garden history and the fresh air and beauty of the gardens themselves. Where Rox turned men’s heads with her dazzling smile, Rowena became flustered and confused at male attention.

A serious clinical anxiety disorder had taken her out of the dating game completely for the past couple of years, and despite the huge progress she’d made under the guidance of her therapist, she knew she had some distance still to travel.

“I’ve never been divorced,” she blurted out. “Or married. Or engaged. Or even very serious.”

“You strike me as very serious.”

“About a man. Was what I meant.”

“I’m teasing you, Rowena.” She felt foolish, until he added unsmilingly, “Because if I don’t undercut your advantage a little, I am about to make myself very, very emotionally naked, telling a virtual stranger what went wrong with my marriage.”

“Oh, please don’t feel you have to do that!” She pressed a hand to her cheek, stricken at the fact that she seemed to have drawn out a vulnerable side to Ben Radford that she wouldn’t have thought could exist.

He wasn’t listening. “After I sold Radford Biotech, our divergent money styles became irreconcilable. I could phrase it that way.”

“Mmm,” she agreed politely.

“Do you think? How does it sound? I need more feedback than that.” He looked at her, and only now did she see that those dark eyes had softened, crinkling at the corners, inviting her to take this lightly.

She still didn’t fully understand the man’s motivation, but okay, sure. He was the client, after all…

“Too formal,” she said solemnly. She tapped the end of her pen against her bottom lip, while those eyes of his kept watching her.

“You’re right.” His mouth barely moved when he talked. Everything came out as a cynical, tight-lipped drawl. “How do I put it more simply?”

“You had different life goals?” she suggested. “Or, no, differing life goals.”

He gave a brief, crooked grin. “That’s not bad, Dr. Madison, not bad at all. You’re right. Ing. Differing. A subtle but significant improvement. It implies polite, ongoing disagreement. And says nothing whatsoever about what really happened.”

What did really happen? she wondered.

“Needs a little more, though,” he went on. “A kind of one-two-punch approach. Any thoughts on that?”

“But the two of you will always remain friends. That’s what you’d say if you were movie stars. And you’d still say it even if you couldn’t stand being in the same city as each other at the same time.”

“We would. We’d say exactly that. Heather will love it. Maybe I should write it down for her.”

He was still smiling at her, in his crooked, cynical, smoky-eyed and almost dangerous way, and all at once it was too much. It seemed more like flirting than anything else, and Dr. Rowena Madison just did not do flirting.

She didn’t know how.

And she didn’t want to learn.

He was standing too close. Rowie could sense his superior height and strength and bone-deep confidence like a gravitational pull. She could detect the finer nuances in the delicious way he smelled. The tantalizing scent of expensive male grooming products floated on the clear, dry Southern California air and seemed to belong there. It gave Rowena a dangerous, illusory sense that she belonged, too.

Belonged where, exactly?

The adrenaline rush generated by her earlier boldness was ebbing fast, leaving her with a million familiar doubts.

“You can stop teasing me now, Mr. Radford,” she said stiffly.

“I told you to make it Ben.”

“Yes, but I’m withdrawing to a more formal level to save us both from embarrassment later on.”

“You mean because of this uncomfortably personal conversation? Even though on the surface we’re treating it as a joke?”

“Yes.”

He heard a noise and glanced through the old gate to where he could just glimpse the driveway that curved in front of the house. A car sped around the curve and jerked to a halt.

“Unfortunately, it’s going to get even more personal any second,” he said. “And a lot less of a joke. This is Heather now.”

Chapter Two

Heather Radford caught sight of Rowena and Ben standing by the courtyard gate just as she stepped out of the low-slung yellow sports car, so she came along the side of the old adobe toward them, instead of going to the front door.

“My lawyer’s valuation of joint assets,” she announced by way of a greeting, and dumped an impressively thick binder of papers into Ben Radford’s hands.

Rowena felt almost comically inadequate when she considered the thin quantity of papers on her own clipboard. It was like a two-door compact car owner coming bumper to bumper with someone driving a brand-new Ferrari.

This woman had serious paperwork!

And if it wasn’t an actual Ferrari she was driving, it was something with the same flair.

“I’ll take a look at it later,” Ben said. “Heather, this is Dr. Rowena Madison, who’s doing some work on the garden.”

His voice had changed since their flirty conversation a minute or two ago. It was harder, tighter, with his English origins prominent in the clipped vowels. His face had changed, too. In the space of an hour, Rowena had seen him as the arrogant, impatient businessman, the intelligent connoisseur and the charmingly cynical flirt. Now she was shocked to see him as a human being through and through, with a beating, vulnerable heart.

He minded about the divorce, she realized.

Minded horribly, in a whole lot of ways that went bone deep and that he hadn’t even begun to come to terms with, yet.

For a moment there, she’d thought his light approach to the subject meant the opposite—that he didn’t care a bit. But now she could see she’d been wrong. He made those drawling jokes about it to mask the anger and failure and pain—mask them from others and from himself. He talked about it because he was still too raw to keep it to himself. He shrouded himself in a successful businessman’s arrogance because this was probably the first, and certainly the worst, failure he’d ever had to deal with in his life.

And at some level, he had no idea that this was what he was doing.

“Dr. Madison?” Heather echoed sharply. “You’re a doctor and you have to take a second job as a gardener to make ends meet?” She was a tiny, gorgeous blonde with bright-blue eyes, flawless porcelain skin and a pert nose, and she wore a cream silk trouser suit that would have taken out Rowena’s monthly dry-cleaning bill in a single hit. “Boy, did you pick the wrong specialty!”

It would have been a funny line, if the sarcasm level hadn’t been so high. Rowena had the impression that Heather could be a very funny woman when she wanted to be—funny and clever and captivating and even more ruthlessly cynical than Ben.

“I’m not a medical doctor,” Rowena said, her awkwardness rising back to where it had been just before she’d let fly at Ben Radford half an hour ago. “I have a Ph. D.”

“Ah, now it makes sense. There’s no money at all in academia. Wait a minute, though. You have a Ph. D. in actual gardening? You can do that?”

“I design and restore historic gardens, yes. My Ph. D. dissertation involved—”

Heather wasn’t interested in the subject of Rowie’s dissertation. She trained an accusing look on her not-quite-ex-husband. “How much work are you having done in the yard? You’re bringing in someone like this. I bet you’re landscaping the whole damn thing!”

“Not quite the whole damn thing, Heather. I’ve decided to leave the cattle runs alone,” Ben drawled. “The beasts seem happy enough with grass. I’m just doing the section behind the house.”

“Just? That’s an acre! More! And, let me guess, we’re not just talking about a few deliveries of dirt and flowers. This is going to be hugely expensive, isn’t it? You’re pouring yet more money into this impossible place, and it’s going to mess up the valuation and slow down the divorce. You’re doing it deliberately. I’m not fooled, Ben! Not for a second!”

“And I’m not doing it to be difficult,” he said tightly. “For heaven’s sake, Heather! You knew I wanted to restore the whole place when we bought it.”

“When you bought it, against my wishes. When you sold a brilliant, high-profit company for half or even a third of what you could have gotten if you’d waited another few years, just so you could mess around with money pits like your precious gallery and your precious casting agency and your restaurant and this wretched historic ranch that’s already soaked up a gazillion dollars. It makes zero sense! And don’t tell me again that you were bored.”

“I was, though,” he said curtly. “Horribly bored. I’d done everything I wanted to do with Radford Biotech. I’d made plenty of money and I didn’t want to hang on to it just so I could wear myself out making even more money doing more of the same thing. Heather, we’ve been through this a hundred times.”

“Yes,” she said bitterly. “And nothing changes. Which is why we’re getting divorced.”

“Is it?”

“Yes! So please, if you have any vestige of feeling left for the time we spent together, don’t mess up my lawyer’s incredibly careful and conscientious and fair valuation with this insane landscaping plan.”

She snatched the binder back from him, turned on a heel that was way too high for such a maneuver and stalked back to the car with her shoes cracking like gunshots on the paving.

Wa-a-ay better gunshots than Rowena’s own shoes had made when she’d attempted a similar exit, she noted with a twinge of self-mocking envy. It was the Ferrari versus the two-door compact, all over again.

Ben followed his not-quite-ex-wife, with that familiar, vinegary feeling flooding into his stomach.

They used to be happy, the two of them. Heather could bewitch a man, when she wanted to. Twelve years ago, as a very focused and overserious biotechnology student, he hadn’t had a clue why she’d chosen to bewitch him.

“I just fell for you,” she’d said later, but had added something that was possibly more honest. “I saw the potential.”

Fell for him, saw the potential, then made improvements.

He’d already spent most of his adolescence building up his body as an antidote to the crippling loneliness and brutality of his expensive British boarding school, but he’d never taken any interest in clothes. Heather supervised his grooming and his wardrobe, boosted him out of his solitude and seriousness in a hundred energetic and very determined ways. And since he didn’t like failure, he had recognized that everything she wanted for him was necessary and important.

On the business front, she supported him in applying for commercial patents on his ideas instead of his original plan of going into academic research, and helped him start his company while he was still completing his master’s degree.

He’d respected her for all of it and had kept the respect for years. He’d loved her, and considered their marriage to be as close to ideal as marriage could get. Practical. Workable. Companionable. A success. In fact, he still didn’t want to deny the years they’d been happy together. Why backdate their failure that far?

Heather was no airhead herself. She’d come to England on a college scholarship, and she had ambition as well as brains. When she’d shelved her own plan to become a research chemist in order to put her energy into helping him build Radford Biotech, he’d seen it as a sacrifice on her part.

Now he wasn’t so sure. Had she viewed him as nothing more than a diamond-encrusted meal ticket all along? The prospect galled him, and made him question his own judgment.

He’d first put forward the idea of selling the company around two and a half years ago, at a time when he’d also begun to think seriously about starting a family. Heather had been against the sale from the beginning. “As far as I’m concerned, the company’s still in its infancy. Its potential is barely tapped.”

“Look at me, though, Heather,” he’d argued from the heart, in a way he rarely did. “I’m in a business suit sixteen hours a day. My frequent-flyer miles could get me to the moon and back on a free first-class ticket. I never even get into the labs to play around with ideas anymore, let alone have a chance to do anything else that interests me. You used to tell me I was too serious when we first met, now you want to push me right back into that box. I’m not interested in that box anymore. There are other challenges out there, other frontiers. What’s it all for?”

“Oh, around five hundred million in pocket change, maybe?”

“Don’t we already have more money than we can spend? I never get time to spend any of it. And I’ve never cared about cold cash for its own sake, you know that.”

He’d talked about wanting to enjoy his business interests, wanting to apply his mind and his energy to something new, wanting to give a percentage of their growing fortune to carefully chosen charities, wanting to have kids who would actually know what he looked like because he would have time to spend with them occasionally, wanting to buy a house and some land that was unique and really worth something, not just a mega mansion amongst a dozen others in the billionaire version of a gated community, but Heather had hated all of those ideas.

She’d almost been frightened of them.

And she’d been adamant that she didn’t want kids.

She’d come from a difficult background. An unhappy family, poverty and debt and struggle. She’d made herself into the woman she was through sheer gritty determination, brains and hard work. She wanted to keep climbing the ladder of success higher and higher, and she seemed terrified by the idea that Ben might invest in business interests that didn’t pay off—that they might have a few million dollars less in the bank, five years from now, rather than a hundred million more.

She had an unrealistic, gut-level fear that they would lose everything and end up in the gutter. He began to understand that no fortune would ever be large enough for her, no financial security blanket ever thick enough.

He tried to get her to see why she was like this, that it was sourced in unresolved feelings about her childhood, and that it was a problem. He suggested therapy, but she wouldn’t listen. “I’m a strong person, Ben. I know what I want and what I don’t want, and I don’t intend to change. Is that wrong?”

He’d kept trying, for almost two years, but their dealings with each other only became angrier and more distant, with no compromise possible on either side. When he’d sold Radford Biotech, Heather had yelled at him for three days, then didn’t speak to him at all for a month. When he’d bought the Santa Margarita ranch and tried to share with her his vision of how beautiful it could be, she’d started threatening divorce.

Even then he didn’t give up on his marriage. His own father had bullied his mother for years. They’d been a terrible match, after the first sizzle of desire wore thin. They’d divorced when Ben was fourteen. That was why he’d been packed off to boarding school, to keep him away from the ugliness. The fact that he’d been utterly miserable at boarding school wasn’t an issue for his parents. They’d never asked if he was happy, and he’d never told them. But he’d vowed then with an icy kind of idealism that he wasn’t going to repeat any of their mistakes.

He wasn’t a quitter, he wasn’t used to failure, and he wanted to turn this around.

But marriage required commitment from both parties, not one, and Heather wasn’t interested in trying, just in getting her fair share. That valuation of assets she’d presented to him and then snatched back again just now was the product of months of bitter wrangling between them.

Heather wanted as much liquid finance as she could possibly argue for. When it was safely in her hands, she planned to invest it in a mix of reliable stocks and gilt-edged securities to make it grow and grow for the rest of her life so that, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, she would never risk being hungry again.

Ben suspected she wouldn’t even attempt to marry for love, next time around. It would purely be a business transaction—the best dollar value she could get for her assets of beauty and brains and social ambition. He was bitterly angry with her, bitterly disappointed in his own utter failure to get her to change, and deeply sorry for her at the same time. None of these emotions left much room for love, and all of them had shaken him to the core. Hell, he never intended to go through something like this ever again!

“Explain something, Heather. Why does my plan to landscape Santa Margarita affect the valuation?” he asked as she climbed into her car.

“Because you’re going to pour a huge amount of money into it, and that kind of thing never recoups itself in the value of the house. You’ll put in a quarter of a million dollars, and the valuer’s estimate on the house will go up by twenty thousand.”

“Even if that’s true, does it really matter?”

“Oh, you mean, what’s a stray couple of hundred thousand dollars between friends?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

“I want what’s mine, Ben.”

“Aren’t you getting enough already?” Many millions, as he well knew.

“Are you suggesting I didn’t contribute as much as you did to the success of Radford Biotech?”

“Heather—”

“Forget it.” She put up a hand, then turned the key in the ignition, and said above the flare of engine noise, “Our lawyers can talk about this. We’re sure as heck not going to get anywhere with it on our own.”

“No, we’re not,” he agreed. It was one of the few things left in their lives that they did agree on.

“Someday, Ben, your charmed life will come to an end.”

“That’s not a threat, I hope.” Threat or not, it chilled him to think that she wished him ill.

“Of course it’s not. I just hope that when it happens you have the right insurance, that’s all.”

“I think our definitions of the word insurance are probably very different.”

“Very! Don’t give me your spiel on the subject. People and memories and priorities and values. I’ve heard it before. And by the way, I think you’re making a huge mistake with whatshername.” She thumbed over her shoulder in the general direction of Rowena Madison and the derelict garden.

“You mean the project or this particular consultant?”

“Both.” Heather snapped her car into gear, revved the engine again, then spun around with a spray of gravel and dirt that showered desert dust onto his trouser legs and shoes.

“Thank heaven we never had children,” he muttered as he watched her drive away. It was the only piece of positive thinking he could drag from the whole mess.

Then he turned to find Rowena Madison standing quietly nearby, awaiting his attention. She must have come out here through the side gate when she’d heard Heather’s car starting. Her serious, enormous eyes were fixed on him with a troubled expression in their dark-blue depths. Her willowy figure had an angular look. Tightly bent elbows, hunched-up shoulders. The set of her limbs created a force field of distance.

She had a very nice body, he decided, although she didn’t seem to be aware of the fact and certainly had no idea how to dress herself to her own advantage. He assessed her impatiently for a moment.

The severe colors and tailored silhouette were totally wrong, especially with her hair—apart from one wandering strand—folded up so tightly on the top of her head. Her eyes would be incredibly beautiful if she did anything whatsoever to help people notice them. Someone should damn well tell her that she didn’t have to imitate a nineteenth-century schoolteacher in order to look like a competent professional.

The escaped strand of bouncy dark hair blew across her face and snagged against her full mouth. She let it stray between her nicely shaped lips and began to chew on it, and he had a ridiculous impulse to pull the strand away and scold her.

Chewing on your hair, Dr. Madison? An appalling habit. Don’t ever let me see you do it again! And do something about the way you dress!

Suddenly she reminded Ben of how he’d been himself, fifteen years ago, at around eighteen or nineteen—so much going for him in some areas and so clueless in others. If he could change, then so could she.

Heather couldn’t. She didn’t even want to try…

But he wasn’t thinking about his ex-wife right now.

He wanted to grab Rowena Madison and stand her in front of a mirror and tell her, “Look at yourself! Attractive, intelligent, perceptive. Don’t be so afraid to let it show. Don’t be afraid to take risks and to feel. Make an effort. Change. Fight. And please, don’t be afraid to let other people get close to you.”

Although not me, he mentally revised, because I’m not ready to get close to anyone.

Just when he really was about to scold her about the hair chewing, she caught herself at it, frowned in disgust, hooked the strand out of her mouth and tucked it back behind her ear.

“Much better,” he murmured.

“Oh…” She was clearly upset that he’d seen.

“I was about to tell you to stop.”

“Um, thanks. I try not to do it. I’ve almost stopped. But sometimes it happens when I’m thinking about something else.”

Right now, Ben realized, the something else would be his divorce, and that line he’d let slip about not having kids. She’d almost certainly heard him.

Damn.

“But at least I don’t bite my nails anymore.” She held them up for his approval and threw him a wobbly yet triumphant smile.

He gave her what she wanted. “Good. That’s great.” It was like congratulating a five-year-old who’d eaten her green vegetables three nights in a row, but he meant it, too. “Bad habits are pretty hard to let go of sometimes,” he told her.

“Mmm, so how long were you married?” she asked.

“Eleven years.”

“I guess it would be hard to let go, after such a long time.”

“I meant your nails. You let go of biting your nails.”

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry.” She looked stricken again. “I didn’t mean to say that your marriage was a bad habit.”

“Hmm. Maybe it was.”

“Well, you’d be the one to know…”

They’d been so clumsy with each other this morning. Angry. Not listening properly. Saying too much. Laughing when they shouldn’t have. Getting it all wrong. In Ben’s experience this didn’t usually happen with strangers. You were usually too careful and polite to generate that level of complexity and emotion in a conversation when you hadn’t met someone before.

“It’s fine,” he told her shortly. “I don’t like mess, and I don’t like failure. A divorce means both, whether it happens after eleven months or eleven years or half a lifetime.”

She nodded. “And you’re right, it would be so much harder with kids.”

“I’m sorry you heard that.”

“I won’t call the tabloids about it.” She gave a sudden, captivating grin that changed her whole face. She looked mischievous and perceptive and alive. “You can safely stick to the script, Mr. Radford.”

“You mean that Heather and I will always remain friends?”

“That’s the one.”

They smiled at each other again, but the softer moment didn’t last.

Ben didn’t understand, in hindsight, why he’d felt compelled to spill so much to a woman like this—a stranger and someone who surely had problems of her own—about his impending divorce. And he suspected suddenly that she hadn’t been at all taken in by the cynical tone with which he’d tried to mask his sense of bitter failure.

Already, after less than two hours spent in his company, Dr. Rowena Madison knew way too much about him.

Chapter Three

Four weeks after submitting her draft garden plan and costing to Ben Radford, Rowena concluded that he must either have abandoned the project or given the contract to someone else. He hadn’t struck her as the kind of man to sit on a decision for a long time, nor one who would vacillate back and forth. Maybe he’d concluded that his ex-wife was right and that the whole idea was a huge mistake.

Oh, yes, she’d heard that part, too, although she didn’t think Ben knew that.

She wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t chosen her. There had been too much awkwardness between them for one short and supposedly professional morning, too many moments of hit-and-miss understanding. He would choose a landscape designer who hadn’t experienced those instant and unsettling windows into his soul as he talked about his impending divorce—someone much safer, in other words.

Rowie knew she’d never forget his final muttered words as Heather Radford had driven away.

Thank heaven we never had children.

Beneath the arrogant, successful facade suggested by his business suit, he was a complex man. Strong yet with a vulnerable streak that he didn’t like admitting to. Good-looking yet by no means skin-deep. Passionate and creative and alive in a way that hadn’t so far made him very happy, she guessed.

For some reason, he fascinated her and frightened her at the same time. He was very definitely not safe.

Which made it all the more fortunate that she would probably never see him again.

And yet that wasn’t how she felt about it, as time went by. She didn’t want total safety anymore in her life; she wanted some danger.

“What are we going to work on this spring?” Jeanette asked at their next therapy session at her office in Santa Barbara.

“Men,” Rowena told her firmly.

Earghh, why had she said that? She should have disguised it in therapy-speak, at least!

Not that Jeanette was very into that kind of jargon. “You’re dating someone?” she asked, sounding interested and ready to approve.

“N-no. But I think I’m ready. I’m sure I am. Only, I don’t know if the kind of man I’d like to get involved with would see that I’m ready.”

Jeanette laughed. She was a practical woman in her late forties, interested in present-day problem-solving, not endless examinations of childhood influences, traumas and dreams. She expected Rowena to come to their sessions with clear-cut goals they could work on achieving together, and the approach had been wonderfully successful so far.

Rowena had first started seeing her a year ago, after moving to California from Florida and contacting her on the recommendation of Francine, the therapist she’d been seeing back east. The first goal Rowena had expressed to Francine two years ago had been, “Being able to leave my apartment on my own.”

Yes, really. Whether you labeled it agoraphobia or anxiety or just plain wimping out, Rowena had gone through a horrible, paralyzing period when she hadn’t been able to leave the safety of her own or her parents’ apartment without someone she loved and trusted by her side coaxing her through it.

She’d made a lot of progress since then, including the move across the country.

Her parents had been concerned about the move initially. California? All on her own? What if the panic attacks came back?

But Rowena had known it was the right thing. Her twin sister, Roxanna, was living in Italy with her gorgeous husband, Gino. And Rowena was only in Florida in the first place because she’d fled to her parents in their retirement condo after her anxiety problem had become too severe to handle on her own.

It was time to strike out, to find her independence, her courage, her self-sufficiency and her place in the world. Apart from her parents, she’d had no ties in the Fort Lauderdale area, and no important ones in New Jersey, where she and Rox had grown up. As well, the opportunities for the kind of garden design that interested her were few and far between on Florida’s low-lying, sandy terrain.

A couple of major garden design contracts in the Santa Barbara area sealed the deal, and after a year in her new, light-filled apartment, with an office in a building full of dentists and lawyers and architects nearby, she loved it here and felt at home. There was an enormous range of climates and plant life along the Pacific coast, as well as so much fascinating history.

Jeanette was great, too. The therapy sessions worked. Whether it was finding the right person or just a readiness for change in Rowena herself, they worked. She had gone from “Being able to leave my parents’ apartment” to “Being able to speak at professional conferences” and now she felt ready for “Being able to date.”

“Although, to be honest, I think this one’s going to take a while,” she said.

“You’re stronger than you know, Rowena,” Jeanette said.

“Sometimes I might agree with that statement!” She sighed. “But sometimes it seems as if I take three steps forward and two steps back.”

“We all do that. Three forward and two back is still progress. Just don’t underestimate those forward steps. Write them down.”

“And the backward steps, too?”

“Let’s just focus on the forward ones. Let the backward steps go. Dwelling on those doesn’t help.”

Spring unfolded.

Then summer.

And then—

“This is Ben Radford,” said a male voice on the phone on a Monday morning in September. “Are you still interested in working on the garden at my Santa Margarita Ranch, Dr. Madison?”

Ben Radford. Good-looking, wealthy, cynical, forbidding Ben, who’d made Rowena brave enough, in the space of one morning, to want some danger in her life.

Rowena sat heavily into her swivel chair, the brimming mug of coffee she’d just made for herself splashing a small puddle onto the desk in front of her. “I sent you the draft plan and costing for the project six months ago,” she said blankly.

There was a short, impatient silence down the phone, then, “I take it that’s a no.”

“Um, n-not exactly a no.”

“Then what?” More impatience. “Your estimate has doubled?”

“Not that, either. More of a let me consider.”

“If you’re fully booked with other projects, I can wait. Just give me an exact timetable.” His deep, liquid English voice seemed ridiculously familiar, even though they hadn’t spoken in so long. Thank heaven we never had children. The line had echoed in her head for weeks afterward. How often had she heard a man express that degree of emotion in his voice?

She’d been listening to other men’s voices lately, but they hadn’t made her forget Ben Radford’s. She’d been on several dates, and although they hadn’t led to long-term relationships, they’d been a success in her own terms.

She hadn’t panicked, canceled or run. She’d been able to eat and talk and ask questions. She hadn’t felt her own emotions and reactions like the throb of a sore, swollen thumb, the way she used to. She’d relaxed and enjoyed herself. She’d kissed two men, smiled and said good-night to them without feeling that she had to make some stammering, apologetic explanation about not going to bed on the first date and…

Yes.

Progress. Forward steps, which she’d measured and made note of, as Jeanette had suggested, while letting the backward steps go. It was great.

And it all seemed to evaporate in an instant at the sound of Ben Radford’s voice, bringing back all too familiar sensations of breathlessness and agitation that she hadn’t experienced in a long time.

“I’m booked, but there are some windows,” she said. “It’s just…” She trailed off, then found the professionalism that always helped her through. “Most people don’t take six months to make up their mind on whether a design proposal is acceptable, Ben. What’s going on?”

“I decided it was best to get my divorce and property settlement finalized first,” he said. “It took longer than I expected.”

“Oh. Of course. I’m sorry.” Sorry that she’d pushed for his reasons.

“But things are a lot better now.”

For me, too, she almost said.

Although maybe that wasn’t true, because a familiar impulse to cut and run, which she thought she’d dealt with, suddenly surged again inside her. It was all she could do not to gabble without pause for breath while starting to sweat. I’m sorry, I’ve just looked at my schedule, I am fully booked for the next fifty-three years, you’d better find somebody else, goodbye.

Don’t do it, Rowie. Didn’t you want the danger?

“Let me look at my calendar,” she said instead, after a deep breath. Still more flustered than she wanted to be, she dived at random into the ledger-size planner on her desk and found her time heavily booked for the week after next, and the following two weeks after that.

“First, can I ask how you plan to proceed?” he said, before she could turn the pages of her planner again.

Despite the many and varied garden proposals she’d put together since seeing Santa Margarita, Rowena found that her memory of Ben Radford’s place was detailed and acute.

“We’d need to work in at least two phases, and probably three,” she said. “First, I’ll have to see what we’re working with. An exploratory phase, clearing out the jungle that’s there now. Then I’d be able to return here to put together a detailed plan, which is likely to be split between a hardscaping phase—putting in any new structures—and then a planting phase. Costing’s included in all of it, of course.”

“And the exploratory phase could take place when?”

She flipped her planner again, backward this time, to confirm what she’d been ninety percent certain of all along. Apart from two site visits, which she could easily reschedule, the pages in her planner were blank between the day after tomorrow and the end of next week.

He’d been right to wait, Ben concluded two days later, when he saw Rowena Madison cross the tarmac at San Diego Airport’s small commuter terminal down near the water.

If he’d tried to proceed with the garden project while dealing with the messy details of his divorce and property settlement, he would have ended up hating every flower and every paving stone, and probably thoroughly disliking Dr. Madison herself—if she’d managed to last on the job. He would very likely have sent her packing with his negative moods, his distance and his distracted mental state before the project was even half-finished.

And if he’d gone with a larger local landscaping company, he would never have experienced this astonishing kid-in-a-candy-store feeling welling up inside him now.

He realized that he was itching to get started on this thing, and began to understand how much it had to do with the painful failure of his divorce. He wanted the validation of something new, something fabulous, something that worked.

He’d cleared his schedule as much as he could for the next nine days. Just a few business meetings and conference calls, as well as a couple of evening commitments. Dr. Madison might envisage him supervising her ideas from a safe distance with the occasional stroll around the perimeter of the dirty work, but he had a very different plan in mind. He was going to shed his heavy business suits like a snake shedding its skin. He’d put on jeans, T-shirts and work boots, and get his hands dirty right along beside her.

She saw him as she came through the door and into the terminal building, and she smiled. Carefully professional and a little wary, he saw. She had a gorgeous mouth but the smile was wobbly, and her deep-blue eyes were shadowed by her tension-tightened lids.

Well, he couldn’t blame her for the wariness, if her memories of their morning together six months ago were as fresh as his were.

They’d rattled each other that day.

They’d gotten right under each other’s skin.

They’d told each other far too much.

Now they shook hands. The sober gray cuffs of her jacket were too long. They hid her wrists completely, but couldn’t hide the way she’d had to work at her hands to get rid of the garden stains. Manicured in clear polish and softly moisturized, they nonetheless had a slight roughness to the palms that told him she had every intention of getting dirty, too.

“Thank you for meeting me in person, Ben,” she said, visibly struggling with the informality of his first name. “You really didn’t have to. In fact I expected—” She frowned.

“You thought I’d send a car for you?”

“No, I assumed I’d drive a rental. When I return for the next two phases I’ll bring my own car, but this time it was in the shop for some work. I’ve made a rental reservation. We arranged that I’d come out to Santa Margarita for a meeting at three, didn’t we?”

“We’ll cancel the car rental reservation. And as for our meeting, that’s still on, but meeting you at the airport beforehand seemed like a better idea, since I was in the city already.”

“About the car,” she persisted stubbornly, setting that mouth in a straight line. “I will need my own transportation.”

“You can drive my SUV if you need to. That would be easier for you, in any case, with equipment and samples and so forth, wouldn’t it?”

“It would be, yes,” she agreed carefully.

Her caution seemed habitual. Ben compared it with her sharply accurate and quite passionate outburst about his self-importance six months ago and was intrigued.

What would she be like when the polite and bland veneer slipped? It was a veneer, he felt convinced, and in fact it had already slipped a couple of times, when they’d talked about his divorce. She had brains, heart, humor and perception. He wondered why, too often, those things just didn’t show.

“Any bags to wait for?” he asked.

“Um, a couple. As it happens.” She winced slightly, and a few minutes later he understood why.

Three large matching suitcases.

Gray, of course.

Ben wanted to tell her that black, gray and navy weren’t the only colors a professional woman could be seen with in public while still keeping her reputation intact. Some high-flying female executives were daring enough to try cream or burgundy, or even florals. Some of them showed a bit of skin. Instead, heaving her baggage from the carousel, he exclaimed, “What on earth do you have in these? Sample paving stones?”

“Research material.”

“Books?”

“Mainly.”

“They feel like encyclopedias.”

“Well, most of them are about that big, I guess. For some reason, publishers don’t put out small reference books.” The smile was almost flirty for a moment, but then Ben could actually, visibly, see her pulling back, like a scared cat skittering across a slippery floor. The smile turned into a frown, like the sun disappearing behind a cloud. The body language tightened. She stepped farther away.

“We’ll get a cart,” he said, while fighting an out-of-leftfield curiosity to know which of her conflicting personality traits she expressed in what she wore when she was alone.

There must be some occasions when she let her vibrant side free. What did she wear to bed, for example? Flannel pajamas? High-necked cotton nightgown? Strappy satin slip?

Or maybe—a long shot, here—she wore nothing at all.…

“Will I be able to keep some of them at Santa Margarita?” she asked.

Nope. Had to be the cotton nightgown. With full-length sleeves.

“Some of them?” he echoed, having to force his concentration. “Where will you keep the rest?”

“At my motel.”

Oh, hell, they should have worked all this out in advance!

“I thought you’d prefer to stay at the ranch,” he told her. “There’s a separate guest wing, and I’ve had my housekeeper prepare it for you. We won’t be in each other’s pockets.”

“No,” she agreed awkwardly. “I mean, it’s a big house.”

“It’s up to you, of course, but I thought you’d be more comfortable staying on-site, with meals on hand and no driving back and forth. The nearest motel I’d recommend is some miles away from Santa Margarita.”

“That’s…that’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

“You can come and go as you want, of course,” he reassured her again. “There’s a separate entrance. Your private life is your own.”

She still seemed uneasy about it, however, and her ongoing discomfort got under his skin. Why did the damn woman have this effect on him?

Rowena adjusted her thinking.

She ditched the idea of lining the trunk of a zippy little rental compact with a layer of heavy-duty plastic so she could ferry plant or paving samples from garden centers back to Santa Margarita. Ditched the anonymous safety of a budget-priced room at a blandly elegant chain motel. Ditched the prospect of several hours in which to gather her breath and her cool before heading out to Ben Radford’s land-grant ranch at the respectable and prearranged hour of three o’clock this afternoon.

She’d be driving his SUV, staying in his guest wing and, before she got to any of that, it seemed that they were having lunch. He announced the fact in an offhand way as he maneuvered out of the airport parking lot in his midnight-blue European car. Rowena hadn’t taken in the make or model; she was too busy sinking into the luxury of its butter-soft leather seating.

And then he hit her with the lunch thing.

“At La Jolla,” he explained. “Not quite on the way, but almost. There’s a great seafood place that overlooks the ocean. It’s on the market, and I think it might be an interesting addition to the Radford Lateral Enterprises portfolio so I’m scoping it out. We can celebrate the start of the project with some champagne.”

She wanted to ask him if a long, expensive lunch was really necessary, but when she rehearsed the words in her head they sounded prim and disapproving and, really, did she need to be that way? She should remember why she was here.

To work on a really fascinating, historic, possibility-laden Spanish-land-grant ranch’s mission-style garden.

Ben Radford’s garden.

“Great,” she said firmly. “And while we eat, we can talk about some ideas.”

Five minutes before reaching the restaurant, they passed the corporate headquarters of Radford Biotech. The low white building was set in a manicured sea of green turf, mown in a crisscross pattern that made it look like a plaid blanket spread on the ground.

The reflective glass of the windows shone in the sun. The massed plantings of exotic grasses and desert shrubs had a majestic, almost architectural quality, and the asphalt driveway that led into the parking lot was as fresh and smooth as the frosting on a wedding cake.

“That’s my original outfit,” was Ben’s four-word commentary, and Rowena didn’t like to crane her neck to take a backward glance at the building because he seemed so offhanded about it.

And after all, the corporation was no longer his.

It said something about him, though—about his eye for detail and beauty in the building and its surrounds, and the hard work he must have put in to create something so successful.

She didn’t totally buy the offhandedness, either. “You sold it all? You didn’t keep a partial share?”

“I sold it all,” he said, then added almost ruefully, “And then three months ago a big parcel of shares came back onto the market and I bought them for twenty percent more per share than I’d gotten for them last year. Just as my ex-wife predicted, the value’s still going up. So I do have a stake in the old place again, now—around ten percent.”

“You didn’t want to let go.”

“Wanted a way to keep reading the stockholder reports, make sure the new management structure isn’t driving the place into bankruptcy.”

Rowena remained politely silent for a moment.

Ben added on a drawl, “Okay, I admit it, it was pure sentiment. Didn’t seem as if it should still bear the Radford name if I wasn’t a part of it.”

“But you didn’t want a controlling interest or any active involvement?”

He laughed. “With Radford Lateral Enterprises I haven’t got time!”

Inside the restaurant, they were given a table by the windows with a glorious view of the ocean. Rowena took off her suit jacket and let the air-conditioning cool her bare arms below her sleeveless silk top, while she watched the waves.

Watched them, wondering why she couldn’t think of anything to say to the man seated opposite, until she heard him murmur, “No two ever come in exactly the same.”

“Oh, the waves? Yes, I’ve been watching them for way too—”

“I noticed. I always do it, too.” He closed his menu.

“Do you?”

“So don’t stop. We’ll both watch them.”

“All right.”

They smiled at each other, and looked at the ocean meeting the sand until the waiter came back to take their order and Rowena realized she hadn’t even looked at her menu yet. She quickly chose a seafood pasta with salad on the side, and Ben asked for grilled mahimahi with mango salsa. He ordered champagne, too, although he only allowed himself a small half glass.

For Rowena, a half glass was enough to slow the meal down, make it go a little fuzzy at the edges. Or was that the hypnotic effect of the water rolling and crashing onto the beach? She forgot to talk about the garden. At least, she forgot to talk about Ben’s garden. He asked her about other major projects she’d done, and she found herself telling him in too much detail about roses in Italy, fountains in Oregon and orchards in Maine.

This wasn’t the kind of place where they hurried you through so they could slap down fresh sets of silverware and seat the next clients. The two of them could have stayed here all afternoon. It was after two by the time they left, and she walked beside Ben to his car, feeling as if she’d been wrapped in a cocoon of well-being and expectancy.

“I’m looking forward to this, Ben,” she said, on an impulse, forgetting to find him intimidating. “It’s like a treasure hunt. I’m sure we’ll find some fascinating and valuable things in that jungle of a yard.”

“Valuable?” They approached his car, and it gave a little whoop as he unlocked it.

He looked as if he might go to the passenger side to open the door for her, but she beat him to it with a couple of determined strides. She didn’t want him standing there just inches from her while she climbed inside. He went around to the driver’s side instead, without breaking that easy stride of his.

He paused at this point, leaned his forearm on the warm roof of the car and looked at her across the dark-blue expanse, sure of himself as always. “Is that important? That what we find should be valuable?”

She looked back at him, passenger door open, one shoe tip resting on the metal rim beside the seat. “Oh, no, no, I’m not talking sell-it-on-eBay valuable. It’s less tangible than that.”

“Yeah?”

“I…I can’t really explain.”

“Try,” he invited her, and she realized how much he’d gotten her to talk over their meal, rather than talking himself.

He was still doing it. Not over a meal, this time. Over a car roof.

He rested his chin on his arm and watched her, his eyes hidden by sunglasses, while she struggled to find the words. “You know in movies, it’s always about gold, isn’t it?” she said.

Gold… The sun glinting on his hair, reflecting off the sunglasses, darkening the golden tan on his arms and face. He was way too good-looking, even when he frowned.

“Chests of jewels and coins,” she went on, fighting the way he distracted her. “Things that anyone and everyone can see are a treasure, at first glance. But sometimes there’s value in a piece of paper or a chunk of gray rock or a handful of pottery shards, and not everyone sees that. So many people are blind to it.”

“Some things have value purely because you choose to see them that way, you mean. Sometimes you have to look below the surface.”

“That’s right.” She couldn’t tell if he was really interested. “That’s part of it.”

The car roof was pleasantly hot, after the chilly and powerful restaurant air-conditioning. She stroked the gleaming blue metal without thinking too much about the action, just enjoying the warmth, suit jacket still hanging over her free arm.

“Or because they tell a story, maybe.” He was still looking at her, his expression impossible to read.

“That, too,” she said. “I love those kinds of stories. The questions you can’t always answer. The mysteries you can sometimes solve. Who made this? Who broke it? Why is it here?”

“Stories that you yourself can read and understand a little better because of your specialized knowledge, where someone else might toss the item in a garbage pile and never know.”

“Yes.”

“Which only makes the treasure worth more to you, because its value is your own private secret. Like a little girl seeing fairies when no one else can.”

She looked at him in sudden amazement. So few people understood this at all, let alone managed to explain it better than she’d ever explained it herself. “How come you get that?” she blurted out. “Nobody seems to, when I say it, not even my twin sister. But then, I’m not that fluent sometimes. You know, I’m an intelligent woman, I have a Ph. D., so you’d think, wouldn’t you? But no. When I’m nervous, or—”

“Like now?” he said, unexpectedly gentle, because she’d begun to gabble. She could hear it herself. “Why are you nervous now?”

“I wasn’t a minute ago. But you’re making me self-conscious.”

“Not that difficult to do, from what I can work out.” He gave a cynical grin. “I’ve been trying very hard to get you to relax all through lunch.”

“Oh.”

“And you do, for a while, when you talk about the things that really interest you. And then something sets you off again, and we’re back to square one.”

“Me. I set myself off. It’s not your fault.” She slumped one shoulder against the curve of the car roof, disappointed in herself, embarrassed because Ben Radford saw through to the flawed heart of her so easily. Saw through to the awkward, self-doubting, thirty-one-years-old-and-never-been-kissed heart of her being.

She had been kissed.

Of course she had.

She’d been taken to bed, too, a couple of times, but…but…

It had been wrong. Both of those men had been wrong. The wrong guy, the wrong feelings, the wrong time and place in her life. She wondered what it would take for her to get all those things right, and couldn’t see it happening right now.

“Get in the car, Dr. Madison,” Ben told her softly, seeing too much, as usual. “You’re getting car roof dust on your arm.”

Chapter Four

“No, I’m going to love it.” Dr. Madison’s eyes shone. Her gaze darted about, taking in the detail of the newly refurbished guest wing. “You kept the original door. That old wood is so wonderful. I love the colors you’ve chosen.”

Ben hadn’t gone for his decorator’s initial suggestion of classic Southwestern earth tones, and the two of them had done some polite-yet-steely negotiation—“You’re the client, Mr. Radford”—and ended up choosing a mix of white and turquoise and gold.

“I love the coolness and silence,” Rowena finished.

“Because if you truly would prefer a motel…” he said, deliberately leaving the sentence hanging, just to see what she would say.

He could already tell that she wouldn’t prefer a motel, and without wanting to be, he was intrigued by the way her instinctive appreciation for beauty and history changed her face. Her eyes widened. Their deep, beautiful blue went even darker. Her mouth softened. Her lips parted.

She forgot the nervous tension and shyness that seemed to wrap around her like a cloak too often, tightening the angles in her limbs and stripping away their natural grace. The tension and shyness made him angry with her at times. There was no reason for her lack of confidence, and he had a low tolerance for people who let their own flaws hold them back.

Well, her flaws weren’t holding her back right now.

She wasn’t quite smiling, but the expression was better than a smile. Radiant he would have called her, if he wasn’t the cynical survivor of a recent divorce, who didn’t go anywhere near any word that had the slightest association with brides.

She gave a gasp of pleasure at the sight of the nineteenth-century mission-oak hall seat in the entranceway, trailing her fingertips lightly across its waxy patina on her way toward the bedroom. “Oh, this is gorgeous! And this!”

She looked at the painting on the wall—a splash of vibrant colors in a landscape by a modern Italian artist who didn’t really belong here, if you were going to be strict about it, but somehow the painting had seemed to fit. Ben refused to be a purist about such things.

On an impulse that he didn’t examine too closely, he said to Rowena, “Come to the exhibition opening at my gallery tomorrow night, if you like art.” She hesitated, and he added quickly, “I’m serious. You’d enjoy it.”

“But I’m here to work.”

“Not in the evenings. Anyway, your profession is so much about visual appreciation. You should go to galleries. You should gorge your senses whenever you can.” She looked alarmed at his prescription, but he ignored her, impatient with her again. “And don’t tell me you’ll be too tired. It’ll be easy. Just a hop in the helicopter, there and back.”

“Helicopter…”

“Yes. I charter them out here quite a lot. I don’t always feel like driving into town.”

“Oh. Nice not to have to deal with the traffic.” She was looking as if out of her depth again.

“So it’s a deal? Dinner afterward, if we’re hungry. You’ll need to be ready by five-thirty.”

“I…I… Okay.” She spread her hands and gave a helpless kind of laugh, as if she couldn’t believe he’d really been serious.

Ben wondered about the spontaneous invitation, too. What had he saddled himself with for tomorrow’s event? Serial awkwardness, or a really nice night? He had no idea.

The two of them put her bags down on the handwoven rug, and she paused for a moment to assess the queen-size bed, the adjoining bathroom and the other furnishings.

“Thank you,” she said. “I mean, for the suite. It’ll be perfect.”

“Your sitting room needs something, though,” Ben said. “My decorator tried a rolltop desk in there and it looked terrible, but you do need some more surface area to lay out your work. You can use my secretary’s office when she’s not around.” He had some loose arrangements with his staff these days, and people came and went between here and his large office suite in San Diego on an ad hoc basis. “And my conference room when you have something to show me, but I imagine you’ll be wanting to work in here quite often.”

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