“By the looks of things, I don’t think anyone has tended to this for years. Even Hollis hasn’t been here since the days he was with my mother. A storm must have knocked over the tree back there and obscured it from view.”
“Maybe this place held too much meaning for him,” she said. “And it hurt to come back.”
Beau considered that. Hollis had mentioned the garden in an offhand way, and when Beau had questioned him about it, he’d seemed distinctly uninterested in discussing it further.
She paused, putting her nose into another flower, then carefully inspected its leaves. She treated these plants with such tenderness and reverence, Beau was practically jealous.
“This garden was very carefully designed,” she said, walking slowly to negotiate the path, which was obscured in many places by a carpet of vines and overgrown bushes that forced her to duck or push them aside. Rather than be taken aback by the wildness, Miss Murray seemed to revel in it. “It’s overgrown, but you can see there are no straight lines. It allows you to always be discovering what is along the next curve.”
Beau followed, his mind wandering to forbidden places, like the curves of Madeline Murray’s body.
“This must be the garden from your grandparents’ journals,” she said. “How exciting for you.”
It was an unexpectedly difficult question for Beau to answer. His grandparents obviously wanted this to be part of Beau’s life—they’d willed this to him, after all. But he had commitments to the da Silva lumber empire, and even if Frank wasn’t his father, he’d raised Beau and trusted him to run it. After a lifetime of chasing the excitement of the next dollar, the next contract, the next distraction from a life that was wanting something that he couldn’t quite see, couldn’t quite reach, Beau wasn’t sure if he knew what to do if he stopped. Or how empty he would feel if he did.
And then he watched Madeline bending over a clump of plants, her long, red braid draped around the back of her neck, and realized he wasn’t feeling empty at all.
“Your grandparents must have had curious, open minds,” she said after a moment, interrupting his woolgathering.
Beau frowned. “What makes you say that?”
“It’s all around us,” she said, gesturing to the landscape, somehow able to decode the message in the unruly mass of green that surrounded them. “Look at these plants.”
Unlike the family business, which seemed to delight in going into the wild places and leaving destruction in its wake, this little garden was nature run riot. Butterflies and moths flew from one plant to another, unperturbed by the presence of what may have been the first newcomers to their domain in years. Sunshine glinted off the ethereal threads of spider webs. The hum of bees, busy gathering pollen, made the air come alive. It looked like chaos. Beautiful chaos. A garden fit for the faerie queen that stood in its midst.
“I’m looking,” he said. “But I’m not sure what I’m looking at.”
“Here,” she said, holding up a spindly branch between them, beckoning him closer. Beau ducked under the brush, standing next to her. It was the first time since they’d arrived that Madeline Murray seemed at ease. Maybe even happy. And since he’d arrived here—after years of being unable to live up to scratch in the eyes of the men in his family, years of toiling in pursuit of another man’s dream—it was the first time he’d been, too.
“See these?” she said, pushing back an overgrown brush. “These are milkweed. Many people tear them out, because they think they’re weeds, but the butterflies love them. And next to them are Tickseed. They don’t do well in my garden, but being up against this stone probably helped. And these—” She moved past them to a mass of plants with green heart shaped leaves and larger green husks. “I’ve only seen these once before, in a book. They are called winter cherries. You have to be careful with plants. Some can come in and take over, smothering out everything else. That’s what this is, unfortunately. But we could dig it out, I think.”
“We?” Beau asked. “The last time I came near a plant of yours, you nearly took my head off.”
She turned and gave him a sheepish look.
“But these are yours,” she said, holding out her arms, encompassing the magic around her. “This is your magical kingdom, Prince Charming, not mine.”
This was his kingdom. A kingdom that he’d been offered a respectable amount of money to sell.
“I have one more thing to show you,” he said, pushing past the discomfort of an idea that a mere fortnight ago had seemed like the best way to get rid of a property he had no interest in.
“Do I have to close my eyes this time?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Follow me.”
On impulse, he held out his hand again, and she took it without hesitation. He suppressed the thrill and led her past an obelisk, its iron form covered by a crawling ivy. Along the way, she paused to fawn over some blossom or another, or tsk at a planting she may have felt was a mistake. He stood dutifully, trying to pay attention even as he was fixated on the fact that she’d not let go of his hand. Heat wound through Beau’s body, making him hard in all the usual places, while somehow leaving a soft, breezy feeling inside of him. Did she feel the same?
At last, they approached a stone wall, thoroughly covered by a thick verge of creeping roses save for an opening directly ahead. He heard her gasp and smiled as he turned to see her own mouth in a tidy little O.
“I think this section was the rose garden,” he said as they ducked under the canopy of green leaves. “Some of them are more thorns that flowers but?—”
Whatever explanation he had planned to offer—which as far as information was concerned, was very little—stopped as the most unexpected thing happened.
Madeline Murray kissed him.
And it wasn’t just a peck on the cheek, or even a short kiss on the lips owing to some overwrought excitement at seeing a mass of roses in more shades of pink, white, and yellow than he thought possible.
Her lips were on his mouth, pressing hard, her hands on his shoulders, holding herself steady. The sensation of it nearly weakened his knees. She broke the kiss suddenly as she’d initiated it.
