“So you can relax,” she murmured. “Looks like I’ll be going solo for the next little while.
three
HE HUNTED HER up the next day, mid-morning. But he had to be sly about it. He knew her well enough to be sure if she thought he was trying to help, to get her mind off things, to give her any sort of break, she’d brush him off.
Hayley Phillips was the original I’m-fine-don’t-worry-about-me girl.
Nothing wrong with that, Harper thought. In her place, a lot of women would have been happy to take advantage of his mother’s generosity, or at least to take that generosity for granted. Hayley did neither, and he respected that. He could admire her stand—to a point. But plenty of times, to his mind, that point tripped over into just mule-headed stubborn.
So he kept it casual, even when he had to poke into two greenhouses, work his way to the main building before he found her setting up a new display of houseplants.
She was wearing one of the nursery’s bib aprons over black camp shorts and a V-necked tank. There was damp soil on the apron, and on her forearm. Only repressed lust could be responsible for him finding it so absurdly sexy.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Not too bad. Had ourselves a little run on dish gardens. Customer just came in and bagged five as centerpieces for her sorority reunion lunch. And I talked her into taking the sago palm for her own sunroom.”
“Nice going. Guess you’re busy then.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Not too. Stella wants to make up more dish gardens, but she’s tied up with Logan, which isn’t as sexy as it sounds. Big job came in, and she’s locked him in the office until she gets all the details for the contract. Last I walked by, he wasn’t all that happy about it.”
“Ought to be at it for a while then. I was going to do some chip-budding. Could use some help, but—”
“Really? Can I do it? I can take one of the two-ways in case Ruby or Stella need me.”
“I could use another pair of hands.”
“Mine’ll be right back. Hold on.”
She dashed through the double glass doors, and was back in thirty seconds, shed of the apron and hitching a two-way to her waistband. And giving him a quick peek at smooth belly skin.
“I read up some, but I can’t remember which is the chip-budding.”
“It’s an old method,” he told her as they started out. “More widely used now than it used to be. What we’re going to do is work some of the field stock, some of the ornamentals. Mid-summer’s the time for it.”
Heat hit like a wet wall. “This sure is mid-summer.”
“We’ll start on magnolias.” He picked up a bucket of water he’d left outside the door. “They never stop being popular.”
They walked over gravel, between greenhouses, and headed out to the fields. “Things stay quiet last night?”
“Not a peep after that little show we were treated to. I’m hoping she doesn’t plan an encore of that trick. Gross, you know?”
“She sure knows how to get your attention anyway. Okay, here’s what we do first.” He stopped in front of a tall, leafy magnolia. “I’m going to pick some ripe shoots, this season’s wood. You want one not much thicker than a pencil with well-developed buds. See this one?”
With an ungloved hand, he reached up, gently drew a shoot down.
“Okay, then what?”
“I clip it off.” He drew pruners out of his tool bag. “See here, where the base is starting to go woody? That’s what we’re looking for. You don’t want green shoots, they’re too weak yet.”
After he’d cut it, Harper put the shoot in the water bucket. “We keep it wet. If it dries out, it won’t unite. Now you pick one.”
She started to move around the tree, but he caught her hand. “No, it’s better to work on the sunny side of the tree.”
“Okay.” She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth as she searched, selected. “How about this one?”
“Good. Here, make the cut.”
She took the pruners, and since he was close he could smell the scent she wore—always light with a surprising kick—along with the garden green.
“How many are you doing?”
“About a dozen.” He stuck his hands in his pockets as he leaned in to watch her, smell her. And told himself he was suffering for a good cause. “Go ahead, pick another.”
“I don’t get out in the field much.” She drew down another shoot, looked toward Harper and got his nod. “It’s different out here. Different than selling and displaying, talking to customers.”
“You’re good at that.”
“Yeah, I am, but being out here, it’s getting your hands into the thing. Stella knows all this stuff, and Roz, she knows everything. I like to learn. You sell better the more you know.”
“I’d rather ram that shoot in my eye than have to sell every day.”
She smiled as she worked. “But you’re a loner at heart, aren’t you? I’d go crazy holed up in the grafting house day after day like you. I like seeing people, and having them talk to me about what they’re looking for and why. I like selling, too. ‘Here, you take this pretty thing, and give me the money.’ ”
She laughed as she put another shoot in the bucket. “That’s why you and Roz need somebody like me, so you can squirrel away in your caves and work with the plants for hours, and I can sell them.”
“Seems to be working.”
“That’s a dozen, even. What next?”
“Over here, what we’ve got is rooted shoots I got from stool-grown stock plants.”
“Stooling, I know what that is.” She stared down at the nursery bed and its line of straight, slim shoots. “Um, you hill the ground up to stimulate rooting, and cut them back hard in the winter, then you take the roots from the whatdoyoucallit, parent plant, and plant them out.”
“You have been reading up.”
“I like to learn.”
“Shows.” And was just one more click for him. He’d never found a woman who’d interested him physically, emotionally, who shared his love of gardening. “Okay. We use a sharp, clean knife. We’re going to trim off all the leaves from the budstick—the shoots we just cut. But we’ll leave just a little stub, just about an eighth of an inch of the petiole—the leaf stalk.”
“I know what a petiole is,” she muttered, and watched Harper demonstrate before she took her turn.
Good hands, she thought. Quick, skilled, sure. Despite—or maybe because of the nicks and calluses—they were elegantly male.
She thought they reflected who he was perfectly, that combination of privileged background and working-class.
“Cut the soft tip from the top, see? Now watch.” He angled around so she could see, and their heads bent close together. “We want the first bud at the base, that’s where we’re going to cut into the stem, just a little below there. See how you have to angle the cut, going down, then another above, behind the bud toward that first cut. And . . .” Gently, holding the chip by the leaf stalk, he held it out.
“I can do that.”
“Go ahead.” He slipped the bud chip into a plastic bag, and watched her work.
She was careful, which was a relief to him, and he heard her whispering his instructions to herself with every move.
“I did it!”
“Nice job. Let’s get the rest.”
He did seven in the time it took her to do three, but she didn’t mind. He showed her how to stand astride the rootstock to remove the sideshoots and leaves from the bottom twelve inches.
She knew it was a maneuver, and really, she’d probably feel guilty about it later, but she deliberately fumbled her first attempt.
“No, you need to position it between your legs, more like this.”
As she’d hoped, he came over to stand behind her, in a nice vertical spoon, his arms coming around, making her belly dance as his hands closed over her wrists.
“Bend down a little, loosen at the knees. That’s it. Now . . .” He guided her hand for the cut. “Just a sliver of the bark,” he murmured, and his breath breezed along her ear. “See, there’s the cambium. You want to leave a lip at the base where the chip will layer.”