by Lee McKenzie
“Speaking of the girls,” he said, not wanting to leave her with another opening. “I need to check on them. Thanks for calling, Alice. I’ll talk to you later.”
He set his phone on the table and stared at it, picturing it impaled by the garden trowel. Instead he measured the next plant and updated the spreadsheet while he shoved the conversation with Alice to the back of his mind. He had more important, and appealing, things to think about. Like the woman currently inside his home.
He could kick himself for forgetting she was coming here this afternoon. A colleague at the university had recommended Ready Set Sold, so he had called them from his office and scrawled the appointment on a notepad, which by now was buried on his desk beneath everything else he’d been working on—the syllabus for the summer school course he was teaching next month, a draft of a research paper he was coauthoring with a colleague and the latest edition of the American Journal of Botany. He really needed to be better organized, but he could scarcely remember a time when his life wasn’t out of control.
In the months after his wife died, he had welcomed the help and support he’d received. Even relied on it. Over time, his family had backed off, but not Heather’s. They meant well, at least that’s what he wanted to believe, but their good intentions frequently overstepped the boundaries. Without coming right out and saying it, Alice often implied that he should be doing a better job of raising her granddaughters, of keeping the house tidier, of being two parents instead of just one.
She insisted Molly and Martha were old enough to look after their own things, and part of him acknowledged that might be true, but he couldn’t bring himself to make them do it. They had already lost their mother, so it didn’t seem right that they be stuck with an overbearing father who made them earn their keep. Alice was also of the opinion that Martha was too old to be sucking her thumb, and she was now pressuring him to put an end to that by entering her in a beauty pageant of all things.
Heather would have known exactly how to handle her mother and their daughters. Why didn’t he? He was a bright guy with a PhD and a career as a scientist. When it came to family, he felt hopelessly in over his head, and he was also smart enough to know that reflected his own upbringing. His mother had kept house and raised him and his sister. His father had been the family’s sole breadwinner and his fallback approach to child rearing had always been “go ask your mother.” Over the years Nate had learned a lot of things from his dad, but parenting skills weren’t among them.
These days Nate rarely thought about the weeks and months after Heather died, leaving him with a pair of toddlers and a fledgling career as a professor of botany at the University of Washington. When he did reflect on those dark days, they were blurred by grief, and even a little guilt. His two-year-old daughters had needed his undivided attention, 24/7, and that had kept him going. The university had even granted him a semester’s leave. Many people, including his family and Heather’s, thought he should have taken more time off but he had wanted to get his life back to normal.
Now, two years later, he was probably as adept at juggling his family and his professional life as he would ever be, and it felt as though the ship had sailed on establishing boundaries for his in-laws. Selling the house and moving to another neighborhood might not be the best solution, but right now it felt like his only one. And it was better to do it now. The girls wouldn’t stay little forever. They’d be starting school next year, and this would get easier. It had to.
He knew the future would bring different demands, not fewer, but a smaller house would be more manageable, and a fresh start might make it easier to lay down some new ground rules. But first he had to sell this house, and he was definitely smart enough to know he needed professional help with that. Heather had planned to decorate right after they bought the place, but she was already pregnant, and then she got sick. The girls were born six weeks early, and then she got even sicker. Curtains and cushions had never been on his list of priorities, and they had dropped off Heather’s. Once he’d made the decision to sell the house, Ready Set Sold seemed like the perfect solution. Alice might think “home staging” was a waste of money and phony as hell, but Kristi Callahan seemed like the real deal. Even her blond hair looked natural. Nice curves, great legs—
“Nate?”
He dropped his calipers.
“I’m sorry,” Kristi said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Oh. No, you didn’t.” Like hell she didn’t. His imagination had been on the verge of conducting a closer examination of those legs. He hoped his red face didn’t give that away. “I’m just clumsy,” he lied.
Her laugh sounded completely genuine. “Clumsy is my middle name. I’m afraid I spilled your dog’s water bowl. It was in front of the door between the dining room and the kitchen, and I can’t find anything to clean it up.”
He bent down to pick up the calipers, came face-to-knee with the hem of her skirt and jolted himself back to the upright position. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll come in and mop it up.”
“So, this is your greenhouse,” she said, looking around. “It’s not what I expected.”
“It’s technically not a greenhouse. It was built as a pergola and the previous owners converted it into a pool house by adding the change room at the back. We don’t use the swimming pool.” He gestured at the bright blue cover. “So I closed this in with heavy-gauge plastic and use it as a greenhouse instead.”
“I see.”
He could tell she didn’t, but at least she hadn’t called it an eyesore like his mother-in-law had.
“You have a lot of plants,” she said. “Is this what you do for a living?”
He surveyed the rows of asters. “I teach botany at Washington U. I’m collecting data for a senior undergraduate course I’ll be teaching this fall.”
“So, you’re a university professor.” She was still looking at the plants as though she wasn’t quite sure what to make of them.
“Yes, and I also do research.” Oh, geez. As if she would care.
“What are you researching?” she asked, probably because she felt she had to say something.
“The poor reproductive barriers in species of angiosperms.”
“Really?” She looked puzzled. “I didn’t think plants had sperm.”
Nate laughed. “I said angiosperms. That’s the botanical term for flowering plants. You’re right that plants don’t have sperm. At least not in the strictest sense of the word.”
Her cheeks flared pink. Her comment had been innocent enough and he wished he had let it go.
“I thought you might be a gardener,” she said.
Now it was his turn to be puzzled.
“You were wearing garden gloves when you answered the door and your T-shirt—” She glanced at his chest and away again. “So…”
He liked that she was still blushing.
“It’s the equation for photosynthesis,” he said. “I got this at a conference I attended last year.”
“I thought so. I mean, that’s what it says on the back. So, about the mop…” She hiked her thumb toward the house. “I need to clean up the water I spilled and finish looking through the other rooms.”
He also liked that she was outwardly more flustered than he felt on the inside. “I’ll clean it up. It’s my fault for leaving Gemmy’s bowl in front of the door.”
He set the calipers beside the next plant he needed to measure, saved the spreadsheet and closed his laptop. “Moll
y? Martha? I’m going inside for a couple of minutes.”
“We’re playing school,” Molly yelled back. “An’ I’m the teacher.”
“Good for you. I’ll be right back. Gemmy, stay,” he said, giving the dog the palm-out signal for “stay.” She rolled onto her side with her back firmly pressed against the playhouse door and her eyelids slowly slid shut. She wasn’t going anywhere and neither were the girls.
“I take it Gemmy is a girl,” Kristi said as they circled the pool together and walked toward the house.
“She is. It’s short for Hegemone.”
“That’s an unusual name. I’ve never heard it before.”
“Hegemone is the Greek goddess of plants. The botany connection seemed like a good idea when I got her. Then the girls came along and they couldn’t pronounce it so they shortened it to Gemmy. She also responds to Gem. And Milk-Bone treats.”
“My dog’s name is Hercules. That’s a Greek god, too. I think.”
“Roman, actually. Borrowed from the Greek Heracles, son of Zeus. He was half mortal and half god.”
“Oh. We thought he was the god of strength or something.”
She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring so he’d assumed she was single. The “we” implied otherwise.
“He was, among other things,” Nate said. He resisted the urge to elaborate. She probably already thought he was a complete nerd. No point sounding like a walking encyclopedia and removing any doubt. “What kind of dog is Hercules?”
“A Yorkshire terrier.”
He laughed. “Good name. Does he live up to it?”
He slid the patio door open for her and waited for her to go inside.
“Only in that he has me and my daughter completely wrapped around one of his tiny little paws.”
“But not your husband?”
She met his gaze head-on. “I don’t have a husband.”
“I see.” He had wanted it to sound like an innocent question. It was anything but, and they both knew it. For a few seconds they stared awkwardly at one another, then she looked away.
“So…I’ll just grab the mop.”
He left her waiting in the family room and sidestepped the massive puddle on the kitchen floor. He looked in several places before he located the mop in the mudroom and the bucket in the garage.
In the kitchen, Kristi stood at the end of the peninsula that separated the kitchen from the eating area. She had set her enormous cupcake bag on the counter next to her and was looking at the monitor of the camera in her hands. The bag was a light purple color and printed with wildly colorful cupcakes, which the girls had gushed over. It was also large and completely stuffed. He’d heard all the jokes about the contents of a woman’s handbag, but this was over-the-top. How much stuff did one woman need to carry around with her?
“You have a great house,” she said, without looking up from the camera.
“Thanks.” You have great legs, he thought as he quickly looked down and up again, past the purple skirt and short, matching jacket with the big black buttons, relieved she wasn’t watching him.
He set the bucket on the floor, and Kristi reached for the mop.
He shook his head. “I’ll look after it. It was my fault anyway. I keep the door closed, so I put the water there because it was out of the way.”
As he ran the mop over the floor, he kept a surreptitious eye on Kristi. She wasn’t paying any attention to him. Instead something on the fridge door had caught her attention. The latest strip of pictures of him and the girls from the photo booth at the mall.
“Cute photographs,” she said.
“Thanks. We started taking them when their—” When their mother was dying. Daily visits to the hospital had become too much of a strain for her and too stressful for the girls, so he’d started taking the photographs to her instead. He couldn’t tell that to a stranger. “We started taking them a couple of years ago. It’s sort of become a tradition.”
“I think it’s lovely,” she said.
He worked the mop across the floor, keeping what seemed like a safe distance from her. Safe, that is, until his gaze sought out the shapely curve of her calves, the slender ankles....
The mop handle connected with something.
He whipped around in time to see her enormous cupcake bag slide off the counter, but he was too slow to catch it. Like a slice of buttered toast, it flipped and hit the floor upside down, and then there was no need to wonder what was in the bag because its contents were strewn across the damp kitchen floor. “Dammit.”
Kristi set her camera on the counter, laughed and knelt at the same time he did, the tip of her blond ponytail brushing the side of his face as she tossed it over her shoulder. She smelled like springtime and lilacs.
She started cramming her possessions back into the bag.
He gathered as many things as he could and handed them to her. A notebook, several pens, an empty Tic Tac box, a hairbrush, two tampons and…oh, geez…a condom? The warmth of a flush crept up his neck, but he was sure his red face was no match for hers. She held the bag open and he dropped everything inside, avoiding eye contact.
“Thanks.” She stuffed a bunch of receipts and a wallet into the bag. “I think we got everything.”
He stood up, and she stood up, wobbling a little on account of her heels. He grasped her arm to steady her, reminded of how she’d nearly tripped on Martha’s boot. She smiled up at him, and when he looked into the depths of her green eyes he felt like a cliff diver plunging headfirst into an unfamiliar sea.
“So…” she said, then stopped as though she wasn’t sure what else to say. A lot of her sentences started that way.
“I should get back outside. The girls are out there, and I still have work to do.”
“Me, too.” She flung the overstuffed bag over her shoulder. “Inside, not outside. It won’t take me long to finish up, then I was thinking I could just let myself out. Would it be okay if I come back tomorrow? In the morning, maybe, say around nine, if you’re not too busy. That’ll give me a chance to look through the photos I’ve taken, talk to my partners.” She stopped, drew a long breath.
She was embarrassed, probably in a hurry to get out of here, and it was his fault. If he’d been paying attention to what he was doing instead of admiring her legs, he wouldn’t have knocked her bag off the counter. And then, if he’d been paying attention, he would have left the little plastic packet for her to pick up and pretended not to see it.
Now the stupid condom had become the elephant in the room—
The bad analogy practically had him groaning out loud.
“Tomorrow morning’s good,” he said. “Nine o’clock. I was planning to work at home anyway.”
“Great. I’ll put together a proposal tonight and we can discuss it then.”
She reached for her camera, and as she got close he backed away, sensing it was a bad idea to get too close to a woman who smelled like a cross between an English country garden and a Hollywood starlet’s boudoir. Not that he knew anything about the latter, but he was a man after all, and he did have an imagination. She must have been thinking the same thing…about getting too close…because she hastily backed away, too.
“Thanks. And, um, I’m sorry about the water, and for taking you away from your work. I’m usually not this clumsy.”
He didn’t believe her. In spite of her polished appearance she seemed to have a knack for running into things, tripping over them. Oddly, it made her even
more captivating. He had no business being captivated, though. She might not have a husband, but the condom in her bag meant she was involved with someone. And if she wasn’t…well, he didn’t want to know what it meant.
“Is there anything else I can tell you about the house?” he asked, not knowing what else to say.
“I don’t think so. I’ll just take a quick look at the bedrooms and let myself out. I assume they’re down the hallway off the foyer.”
He nodded.
She whirled around and once again his nose filled with her heavenly scent.
She crossed the family room like it was a runway, the flippy hem of her skirt flirting with her knees and the heels of her shoes making a crisp, sharp sound against the hardwood. Just before she left the room, she smiled at him over her shoulder, as if to say she knew perfectly well why he was still standing there.
“See you in the morning.” And then she was gone.
You’re wasting your time, he told himself. She’s not your type.
Did he even have a type? He’d thought it was Heather. She had been every bit as attractive as this woman was, just in a more down-to-earth, practical way. No swirly skirts and purple cupcake bags for her. Heather had been studiously working toward a doctorate in psychology when they’d started dating. They hadn’t talked about marriage, but it was the obvious thing to do after they’d found out they were expecting.
The pregnancy had taken a heavy toll on Heather’s health, but then the girls arrived and they seemed like such a gift, such a natural extension of their lives that neither of them had given much thought to any scenario other than Heather getting better. She hadn’t.
He’d been left with a lot of questions. Would she have married him under any other circumstances? Would he have married her? Those were questions with no answers, only regrets. Would she still be alive if not for the pregnancy? Of course she would. It took two people to make a baby and the rational scientific part of his brain knew that. The part that housed his conscience was another matter. It ate at him with a relentless appetite.