LITMIR.BIZ

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room was her favorite, possibly because of its spectacularly wonderful messes. A board-plank table functioned as a work area, but every inch of space was used. Herbs dried from the ceiling and cubbyholes held rolls of ribbon and linen bags and string, while potting soil and tools and pots took up another heap of space. “And this is one of my serious treasures.” She motioned to the climate-controlled aquarium that took up one complete wall. “I created this for a teaching tool. It’s just a miniature woods to show some of the endangered species in our area. Like this plant, Gray’s Lily … and the Glade Splurge here … and this is Mountain Bittercress….”

      Her voice trailed off. She completely lost her train of thought. She glanced up and found him watching her. Until that instant she hadn’t realized how close he was, how tall he was, and damn, if he didn’t have the most wicked eyes. Alarm thrummed in her pulse. It was one thing to admit she had a crush, another to fool herself into believing he was looking at her with interest. That kind of interest.

      She covered the awkward moment with a sudden quick laugh. “Well, I’ve been talking your ear off, haven’t I? You didn’t come here to hear about all this.”

      “Only because I didn’t know what all you were doing here. I knew about the shop. Everybody does. But I didn’t know you did all this interactive stuff with your customers. I mean, all the hands-on learning, side education, the whole shebang.”

      Garnet could feel a flush climb her neck, embarrassing the devil out of her. She just rarely heard praise.

      “Well, isn’t that similar to what you do?” she asked swiftly. “I know, you don’t have a shop. But you have some kind of private school …?”

      “Not a school. A camp and retreat center. I sort of fell into it. Had to do something with my mountain … I mean, there’s some real beauty up top, a small lake, waterfalls, creeks, rocks, woods. It’s too damned special not to share. So I take in groups. Boys in trouble. Companies having trouble with employees getting along. People wanting to start a new venture, make sure the whole new staff can cleave together.”

      “And then …?” She ambled back outside with him, exiting from the shop’s back door. A slatted roof covered the breezeway to her bungalow, which provided shade but no mercy from the heat. Tonight, though, the oppressive temperatures had finally eased. A pale haze was stealing across the sky, softening the bright edges of the day.

      “Well, what I do after that depends on the group,” Tucker said. “I tend to start them out with some exercise—not work exercise, something fun. That gives me a baseline to work with. I get a picture of what the group can do—what the group might want to achieve together. I don’t teach. I wouldn’t know how to teach. But it’s a little like what you created here. I try to expose people to things they haven’t seen and done before. Hope to challenge them, to engage their natural interests. When something works, I build on that. Garnet …?”

      She’d been listening, but when he said her name in a question, she lifted her head.

      “I’d like to see everything you’ve got going outside, but maybe another time? I can see you’re favoring that right foot. How about if we find a place to park for a few minutes?”

      She wasn’t going to deny her sore foot again. “You have no idea how well the limp’s been working for me. I’ve been playing it up all day, making everyone else do the work, while I do the lazy Queen of Sheba routine.”

      He grinned. “Somehow I believe that, like I believe in the tooth fairy.”

      He had an odd way of making her feel comfortable … when she’d never imagined being comfortable around Tucker. He gravitated toward her front porch, where he probably spotted the old Adirondack rockers nested in the shade. It was a favorite spot for her. She couldn’t see the road or the shop; she just had her private view of the mountain … and the acres she’d cultivated with greenhouses and raised gardens.

      Tucker took it all in, as if the view were sipping whiskey. “Wow. You’ve got a lot to do here. Major work.”

      “It’s taken a long time to get it this far. But I love it,” she admitted.

      “Is that a padlock I see on the far greenhouse?”

      “Yes … it’s pretty much the only thing I keep locked around here.”

      “For a special reason?”

      “Oh, yeah. My vanilla plants are in there. It’s the specialty of the whole place … not that I’m doing anything so brilliant. But it’s a strain of vanilla I developed, so I need to guard it.”

      He’d cocked up a leg, started a slow, lazy rock. “Speaking of stuff that smells beyond irresistible—like vanilla—what’s the thing I’m smelling around the porch?”

      She motioned to the pots around the doors and steps. “Mint. It takes over if you just let it grow, but in pots it’s easy enough to contain. They’re not such pretty plants, but according to folklore, flying bugs and insects just don’t like the smell, so they stay away.”

      For a second—just a small, small second—a silence fell. Because she’d never had the brains God gave a goose, she suddenly thought of a local folklore legend. Old-timers claimed that Whisper Mountain got its name from a “whispering wind” that only lovers heard.

      In that small, small second of silence … she heard it. The whisper. The silken-soft whisper in the air. The achy sweet hum of yearning.

      How stupid could she be? Annoyed with herself, she stabbed the porch floor with a heel and set her rocker at a creaky pace.

      Tucker broke that dangerous silence. “How bad’s the head?”

      The bump on her head wasn’t a problem. The brain inside her head was the problem, particularly if it was going to continue to respond to him like mush. “Our sons,” she said, and thankfully the words functioned like a trigger to remind him why he’d stopped over.

      “Yeah, I figured we’d better get into that.” Tucker sighed, scratched an ear, made a comical face. “Mrs. Riddle scares the devil out of me, has from the first day of school. She makes me feel like I’ll end up standing in the hall for some unknown wrongdoing. Anyway, she had a problem with my Will. Said for the last few months, he’s become painfully shy around girls. Really miserable. Sweating, stumbling, can’t talk.”

      She had to smile. “Don’t you think all kids go through that?”

      “Yeah, I do. But Will hit a massive growth spurt this year, shot up four inches, and I expect the mountain of hormones hit him before I was ready.”

      Out of nowhere, a cat showed up at the corner of the porch. Garnet instantly recognized it as the feline Pete had mentioned, because it was a she. A very, very pregnant she. There was some invisible sign on her property that invited only the critters who were pregnant and hungry. The cat was the color of mud, with a little Georgia red dirt thrown in, and eyes as gold as topaz. She started washing a paw, as if it was her porch and she’d always washed a paw there.

      “Your cat?” Tucker asked.

      “Absolutely not,” she said firmly.

      As if the cat sensed she was the subject of discussion, she twitched her tail and ambled over to Tucker’s side. She hesitated for all of a millisecond, and then leaped on his lap.

      “You’re sure it’s not yours?”

      “Trust me. That cat will never be mine.”

      “Hmm. She doesn’t seem wild.”

      He probably got that impression because the ornery, hardscrabble cat sleepily closed her eyes and started purring loud enough to wake the dead. Tucker shot her an amused look. He also gave the cat a long, soft stroke under her chin.

      “Do not laugh at me. I’m learning to say no to Pete. It just doesn’t happen to be a skill I’m particularly good at. But we simply have to stop adopting strays.”

      “Uh-huh.

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