His hand twisted in her thick hair, making her head tilt to one side. Suddenly, with one small, sexy, sliding adjustment, their lips fit together and the kiss was right. Absolutely, deliciously right.
“How…” Gussy murmured, but Jed’s warm mouth closed again over her lips and then she didn’t care. She only wanted to kiss him, kiss him until the sky fell and the waves washed over them and the world came to an end, because for just this one moment in time, she was a star, a brilliant celestial body, and it was far more wonderful than she’d ever dared dream.
Perhaps all that was asking too much of a kiss. As abruptly as she’d thrown herself at him, Jed dropped his arms and stepped away. Feeling dazed, as if she’d been struck by lightning and left standing, Gussy swayed slightly back and forth, a vacant look on her face.
Jed tapped her on the shoulder, a buddy-buddy gesture if she’d ever felt one. “Thanks for dessert,” he said with a jolly camaraderie, and disappeared into the night.
Eventually Gussy teetered two steps over and slumped down onto the pink granite rim of the fountain. The thorny brambles that clung to its base snagged her hose and scratched her legs. She didn’t notice. She was trying to wrap her mind around the gargantuan difference between the way that Jed had kissed her and the way that he had treated her afterward.
For her, the earth had moved. For him, apparently, the earth had continued on as before without even a wobble.
Goodness gracious. Was this how Andrews had felt when they’d gone all the way on the deck of his sailboat the night of Gussy’s sixteenth birthday because April was leaving for college in a week and Gussy had been afraid that the world was passing her by? When afterward she’d barely managed to withhold her disappointment and the tears that had sprung to her eyes, and then the next day told Andrews she thought they should be only friends?
If so, poor Andrews.
Poor Gussy.
ON THE MORNING of the second day of the rest of her life, Gussy was not so giddily optimistic. She’d spent ten minutes with Great-grandfather, listening to him complain about the drafts that whistled beneath his door and the wind that rattled the windowpanes despite closed shutters and drapes of wool-lined velvet. That was followed by breakfast with Grandmother, who was in an unusually querulous mood and had fretted endlessly over what to do with April’s butler. Godfrey, apparently not one to wait for directions, had already taken over the kitchen. In his usual insidious, butler-type way, Thwaite had let it be known that he was not a happy camper, but Gussy thought the French toast was delicious.
“Put on your gum boots, Augustina,” Marian said as she directed the reluctant Gussy toward the mud room. They were to meet Jed in the front garden at 8:00 a.m. and Marian was never late. “Where’s your sweater, child? The weather’s nippy.”
“I am not a five-year-old, Grandmother. And besides, it’s plenty warm outside. It’s almost the end of July, for pity’s sake.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you lately.” Marian wore an ancient balmacaan draped around her shoulders like a cape and beneath it, a wool crepe suit and a Barbara Bush three-strand pearl choker. “You’re as nervous as a cat.”
Gussy shoved her feet into the boots without answering. “I’m going to let Percy out,” she said shortly, and escaped to the outdoors. Sending pebbles scattering in her wake, she ran through the parking court and then across the lawn to the kennel with her hair streaming loose, her fierce expression an echo of the times in her childhood when the estate’s woods, meadows and shoreline had seemed her only refuge. April had preferred curling up with a book of fairy tales or an old black-and-white movie on TV, but staying indoors had stifled Gussy to distraction. All she’d ever craved was to be as free as the wind.
However, today she was escaping a more adult dilemma—the memory of Jed’s casual dismissal of their kiss. A kiss that had meant everything to Gussy at the time, but was now just another humiliating moment in the exceedingly humiliating saga of her life. All she could hope was that Jed had no inkling of her feelings and she would be spared that embarrassment when they met up again five minutes from now.
Percy, bless him, greeted her ecstatically. There was a good reason people became so attached to their dogs, Gussy decided, gratefully hugging the retriever’s furry golden body. Percy squirmed free and nosed past the kennel door to bound across the damp lawn, barking at the gulls that rose, flapping and screeching, from the craggy cliffside.
Gussy gave herself a minute to compose herself as she studied the monochromatic sky and water. Although it was a damp gray morning, the sun, presently a flat disk paled by the mist, was doing its best to make an appearance.
She decided that she’d be friendly but remote, relaxed yet no-nonsense. Jed would see that their kiss meant as little to her as it did to him. If he should ever happen to mention it, she’d toss her head and laugh like Vanessa Van Pelt. Why, Jed, she’d say, did you kiss me? Why, Jed, I’m kissed so often, I couldn’t possibly recall yours specifically!
Percy raced toward the house. Moments later, Gussy, still staring out to the sea, heard Marian’s disgruntled exclamations. “Down, Percy, down! Augustina! Augustina!”
Time to face the music.
Resigned, she trudged back up the slope to the front garden. Her grandmother was pointing at the herbaceous border and pontificating on how she wanted it maintained. Jed was kneeling beside Percy, letting the dog lick his hand while he, by all appearances, watched for Gussy. She hesitated, then came around the corner of the house with her head hung low and her fists shoved deep into the pockets of her baggy chinos, but looked up defiantly when Jed rose. “Good morning, Mr. Kelley,” she said, squeezing the words out of her tight throat.
His eyebrows went up a notch. He nodded. “Good morning to you, Miss Fairchild.”
“Shall we tour the garden?”
“Lead on.”
Gussy’s lips pursed. This wasn’t going the way it should. She hadn’t meant to come off like a prissy, rejected virgin. She wanted Jed to be confused, not amused. But what could she do—exclaim that she didn’t care one whit that he hadn’t enjoyed kissing her as much as she’d adored kissing him? In front of Grandmother?
Marian stepped to the front, tapping her umbrella on the stone steps. “Come along. We’ll look at the rose garden first. Do you know your roses, Mr. Kelley?”
“It’s not my strongest point, I’ll admit. Jellicoe didn’t use many roses.”
“Jellicoe?” Gussy repeated with surprise. “Broadnax Jellicoe, the British gardening legend? You worked with him?”
“For him,” Jed said. “Nobody works ‘with’ Jellicoe.”
“I believe I gave you Mr. Kelley’s résumé, Augustina.”
“Uh, yes, Grandmother, you did.” Gussy couldn’t remember reading it, though; she’d been too shell-shocked by other developments. She shot Jed a suspicious look. “I thought you were a hockey player.”
“From ages sixteen to twenty-two, I spent every summer as Jellicoe’s lowliest horticultural apprentice, after he’d moved to New England to set American gardening to rights. He was a little peeved when I gave it up for professional hockey. I think his last words to me were you’ll never plant another pine or pot another petunia.”
“Oh, dear,” said Gussy. “Does he hold a grudge?”
Even Marian looked a tad worried. Jellicoe’s legendary reputation as a horticultural dictator was firmly intact even though he’d been retired for several years. If he’d laid down the law, Jed Kelley would be persona non grata to the society of gardeners for miles around. He’d have to be fired.
Jed seemed unconcerned. “Not to worry. He always growled the most at the favored workers. It was the only way an apprentice knew he’d been noticed.”
They’d come to the rose garden, softly glowing in shades of rose, cream and lemon in the limpid morning light. The jeweled greens of the foliage glimmered with dew. A pristine white lattice gazebo overlooked the ocean, where the brisk wind blew away the last of the lingeri
ng fog. The sun winked brighter in between banks of scudding clouds.
They entered the garden through a wide arched arbor thickly cloaked with pink roses. “New Dawn,” Marian said, pointing with the tip of her umbrella as she led the way. “And the apricot ones are Queen Margot. Very fussy.”
Gussy hesitated beneath the shadowed archway. It was the perfect location for a sweet, stolen kiss, but when Jed came up from behind and touched her shoulder she darted through to the other side, her boots skidding on the stone path. Marching around the hexagonal layout of the rose garden, listening with one ear to her grandmother’s favorite recipe for aphid baths, Gussy decided that she must rid herself of such romantic notions as stolen kisses if she was to marry for freedom and not love. Although it had been an easier task before Jed’s appearance on the scene, imagining herself as the very proper and very dull Mrs. Andrews Lowell ought to do it.
Jed was being very quiet. Gussy wasn’t sure if that was because of last night’s somewhat truncated kiss or if it was his usual method of operation. Obviously Grandmother liked the unquestioning quality of it; Gussy sensed that in Jed’s case silence did not necessarily mean compliance, as it often did with herself. He would do as he wanted without a lot of discussion or confrontation—something for her to consider. Maybe she didn’t have to become Mrs. Andrews Lowell…
“Black spot,” Jed said suddenly.
“What?” Marian was insulted at the mere possibility.
Gently Jed twisted one of the canes to show them the spots growing on its inner leaves. Gussy bent to look closer, her attention caught by the sure but careful movements of Jed’s hands rather than fungus problems. Without speaking, he took her hand and brushed her fingertips over the fuzzy leaves, then thankfully released it before the arousal that was rolling through her body could erupt in potentially embarrassing ways.
“He’s right,” she said to her grandmother, her voice cracking. He’s absolutely right, echoed her heart. “Oh, dear,” she sighed, mostly to herself.
“Why, I never.” Marian hung the handle of the umbrella on her wrist and peered through her half-moon reading glasses. “Black spot! In the Throckmorton rose garden!”
“I can take care of it with a simple spray. Nothing to it.”
“It seems I hired you just in the nick of time, Mr. Kelley.” Marian snapped the glasses back into their needlepoint case. “Let me show you the rhododendron allée. It’s getting rather ragged. And we should inspect the hydrangeas that are threatening to overtake the terrace wall.”
Jed’s glance slid to Gussy. Today his eyes were the soothing blue of a calm ocean, lapping her with a look that was as gentle as his hands. She smiled bravely, despite her quaking resolutions. So much for Andrews and their convenient marriage.
So much for detachment.
Gussy knew that wanting Jed, choosing Jed, would put her in a worse quagmire than before. One that would take more than gum boots to get out of.
5
Sweet Poison
“VERY CAPABILITY BROWN,” Jed said, overlooking the vista of the parkway with its smooth, rolling turf and majestic, encircling woodland.
Gussy recognized the name of another renowned English landscape designer, before even Jellicoe’s time. “You know your stuff.”
“I get the feeling you thought there were other reasons your grandmother hired me.”
Remembering, Gussy blushed. “I told you—it was only a temporary mix-up.”
Marian was striding along the allée, flapping her balmacaan at Percy to shoo him out of the rows of tall, decades-old rhododendrons. Every time she succeeded in chasing the dog from one end, he crashed through elsewhere in a confetti of leaves, barking with exuberance, oblivious to Marian’s ire. Gussy knew she should go and retrieve Percy before he did too much damage, but she wanted only to stand in the sunshine and smile at Jed.
She’d forgotten that she was going to be cool toward him. She’d forgotten that he wasn’t appropriate for the Throckmorton heiress’s husband. She’d definitely forgotten to call herself Mrs. Andrews Lowell.
Marian gave up. “Augustina, please lock Percy in the kennel.” She brushed at her suit, straightening the braided trim. “I must leave for my luncheon appointment. I can see no reason why I shouldn’t put Godfrey to good use by employing him as my driver.” After folding her coat over her arm, she marched up the gravel path to the house, using the folded umbrella like a cane, saying over her shoulder, “And why don’t you accompany Mr. Kelley to the Sheepshead Bay Nursery to introduce him around, Augustina? I don’t want old Padgett thinking he can palm off second-rate conifers on our new gardener.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Gussy replied obediently, her mind immediately reeling with thoughts of being alone with Jed for at least an hour. Maybe two. The steam heat that had collected inside her rubber boots transferred itself to her face. She turned as pink as a boiled shrimp.
Jed also agreed readily. “I’ll get my pickup and meet you at the front door.”
Was Gussy imagining it or did he looked pleased at the prospect? “I—I…okay,” she mumbled.
After a moment of silence, Jed said, “About that kiss…”
She tried to laugh with gay abandon and wound up sounding more like one of the squawking gulls. “Why, Jed, it was nothing!” she insisted. “A mere trifle! A momentary whim!” Her hands fluttered frantically; she was too nervous to notice Jed’s clouding expression. “I’ve already forgotten it!”
“Then so will I,” he vowed.
“A silly impulse! A lapse in—”
“You have five minutes, Miss Fairchild.”
“—good judgment,” Gussy finished in a whisper, watching the hard-as-granite cut of Jed’s shoulders as he walked away.
She doubted that Vanessa Van Pelt ever felt such regret.
THE QUAYSIDE SPARKLED with color and activity. Jed and Gussy sat at one of the Bobber & Buoy Inn’s outdoor tables, on a weathered wood deck built over a jumble of boulders whose mollusk-speckled skirts of wet green moss were temporarily revealed by the outgoing tide. The marine smell of kelp and salt thickened the dazzling sunlit air.
Gussy felt easier in her skin. They’d spent an hour at the local greenhouse, talking stiffly at first and then finally more comfortably about the Throckmorton Cottage plantings and what Jed needed to replace before fall. Jed had spoken straight but respectfully to Tink Padgett, the crafty owner who didn’t suffer dumb greenhorns gladly, and had come away with a truck bed full of trees and shrubs at a very good price.
Gussy’s presence had been superfluous. Riding back through town in Jed’s red pickup, she’d even started to wonder if he was suffering her, maybe not so gladly, either, on the say-so of her grandmother. Certainly he didn’t seem to need her college-botany-degree advice.
Still, if he was suffering, he didn’t show it. She’d try to do the same, even though what she was suffering was her own misgivings. The need to continue her quest for independence without betraying her suddenly resoundingly romantic heart had her all twisted up into knots inside, knots as tight, swollen and encrusted as the sailor’s hitches hung in loops on the board-and-batten walls of the saltbox inn. Gussy had to smile to herself at the predictable motif; if she was in a cage, it must be a lobster trap. They were also employed as decor, painted vivid turquoise and orange by the inn’s transplanted city-folk owners, dangling from the deck railing in between flower boxes bursting with geraniums, lobelia, petunias and pinks.
Jed had relaxed back in his chair, his face turned toward the harbor as he watched a sloop set sail. The cuffs of his chambray work shirt were turned up over his forearms, where short dark hair curled against his tan skin.
Gussy dipped her head to reach the plastic straw of her soft drink. “Your glasses look just like mine.”
“I forgot I had them on.” He plucked off the wire-frame glasses and casually tossed them onto the silvery wood tabletop.
Gussy reached out, drew back her hand, then when Jed looked again at the sailboat, furt
ively let one fingertip slide along the gold wire earpiece. It was warm from his skin; her toes flexed beneath the leather straps of her sandals. Again she withdrew, taking up her cup and stirring the straw, stabbing at the ice. She was acting entirely too besotted!
Jed rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I wear them mostly for driving. Remember Howitzer O’Hallihan?” He tapped his. scar. “Howitzer also temporarily detached my retina when he split open my temple. Once in a while I still have a bout with blurred vision.”
“Did the league put Howitzer in jail?”
“Hell, no.” Jed laughed. “He probably got a trophy for making the Hit of the Week.”
“But that’s terrible!”
“That’s hockey.”
Gussy squinched her nose. “I’m not much of a hockey fan, so as far as I know you’re a major superstar with billion-dollar endorsement deals, Jed Kelley trading cards and what all. Should I be awestruck to be having lunch with you? Should I get your autograph?”
He made a dismissive snort. “I’m just a regular guy.”
Hardly that. She smiled to herself. And hockey has nothing to do with it.
“How did you land a summer job with Jellicoe?” she asked. “I’ve heard that he turns away droves of applicants, even now that he’s retired.”
“Connections. He was consulting with the group that was overseeing the restoration of an historic estate garden in Massachusetts. My mother was the chairperson. He liked her because he couldn’t intimidate her.”
Gussy was eager for gossip. “Did Jellicoe really snub both Princess Grace and Babe Paley? And is it true that he only hires men?”
Jed shrugged. “He snubs everyone.”
“And?”
He leaned back even farther, playfully tipping the chair out of her reach. “Don’t take off my head, but, yes, it’s true. He won’t employ women. Says they’re amateurs, should only putter in their own backyards.” He held up his hands, palms out. “Not that I agree.”
The Amorous Heiress Page 6