“It looks like you’re marking things out?” he asked, looking away from Graeme and across the herb garden, which had several stakes planted in some of the old beds and around the perimeter.
“That’s the plan,” Graeme said. “Though I keep running into overgrowth and unexpected structures. That’s why I’ve been digging up some of the beds to see what’s in there.”
“Well, hand me a shovel and I’ll help,” Ryan said with a smile.
Graeme turned back to him from assessing the garden. His gaze swept Ryan from head to toes, making Ryan feel like he was being judged. Possibly in a good way?
But no, it wasn’t anything more than a quick assessment of his capabilities, he was sure. Especially when Graeme said, “You’re dressed awfully nice for gardening.”
Ryan glanced down at his clothes. True, his jeans were designer and his shirt was a button-down instead of a t-shirt. But he shrugged and said, “It’ll be fine.”
Graeme looked doubtful, but he took a quick breath and said, “I’m trying to decide whether to change my design for this herb garden or to keep the basic structure as it exists right now. If you could help me dig out the weeds from each bed and cart off the refuse to the pile I started just beyond there, I’d be grateful.”
“I’m here to help,” Ryan said, stepping to the side, where a wheelbarrow and several other gardening implements that he vaguely recognized stood.
It was easy to get into the work. Nothing that needed doing required much skill. It was just digging, pulling, and loading up the wheelbarrow to take brambles and brush out of the herbgarden and through an old, brick archway into the slightly more open space beside it.
“Your designs call for transforming this entire lawn into a garden, right?” Ryan asked as they dumped one load and headed back for another.
“Right,” Graeme said. “As far as I could tell from the plans Mr. Hawthorne gave me, there hasn’t been anything in this spot but grass and wildflowers for hundreds of years.”
“That’ll take a while, though,” Ryan said. “I don’t know much about plants, but just grass and wildflowers have deep roots, right?”
Graeme sent him a look over his shoulder as they walked through a brick archway and back into the kitchen garden. “Yeah, but I’ll be here all summer,” he said. “Maybe longer, if I can’t find a crew to help.”
“All summer?” Ryan tried to tamp down his excitement about that. “You don’t have other jobs to manage, do you?”
Graeme sent him another shy smile. “This is my only job at the moment,” he said. “Mr. Hawthorne is paying me well for it.”
“That’s good at least,” Ryan said. “And I’ll be around all summer to help, too.”
Would he? Should he really be making promises to refurbish an entire, vast garden when he needed to be busting his arse to design a fall collection. Not to mention sucking up to the right people to get a spot showing in February’s fashion week.
“I thought you were a fashion designer,” Graeme asked as they picked up their shovels and went to work digging out the next bed. “Shouldn’t you be, er, fashion designing?”
For whatever reason, after months of hiding the truth from his family, Ryan felt compelled to tell at least a portion of the story.
“I lost my job designing for a big fashion house in Milan,” he said, focusing on slamming his shovel into the choked garden bed instead of looking at Graeme.
“Oh. Gosh. I’m sorry,” Graeme said, digging into his own work.
“It was stupid and ignominious,” Ryan hissed, jamming his shovel into some particularly tough roots. “I had been getting all sorts of acclaim, really making a name for myself. I was one season away from leaving Esposito, that’s the name of my old boss, Giorgio Esposito’s, fashion house and starting my own company. People were already interested, a few of the designers I’d come up through the ranks with had said they wanted to come with me to start a new house.”
Ryan paused, his stomach suddenly turning as he remembered the intense frustration of everything falling apart.
“What happened?” Graeme asked. He stopped his digging and stood, leaning on his shovel like he’d done before. He was sweaty from work, and his t-shirt stuck to his impressive body.
Even that couldn’t distract Ryan from his remembered agony. He stood and mirrored Graeme’s position, gripping his shovel tightly. “Giorgio didn’t want to let me go, or so he said. He gave me an ultimatum, three choices, really. One, I could stay where I was with my reputation intact, but always under his label. Two, I could suck his dick and make myself available at his beck and call as his fuckboy and he’d let me start my own business. Three, I could set out on my own without sucking his dick and he’d ruin me.”
Graeme looked alarmed. Maybe even disgusted. “That’s horrible.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. More horrible was the sudden worry that, despite working for the Hawthornes, Graeme was the sort who thought any kind of homosexuality was horrible and predatory.“Guess which option I chose?” he finished, jamming his shovel into the ground to avoid any potential disappointment.
Graeme didn’t answer right away. He went back to digging, and only after about a minute did he answer, “Three. It always has to be three. But at least you left with your integrity.”
Ryan huffed a humorless laugh. “And a fat lot of good that’s done me,” he sighed, though he immediately felt bad for unloading his career frustrations on an innocent bystander. That didn’t stop him from going on with, “Don’t tell my family this, but I’m back here at Hawthorne House not by choice, but because, thanks to my sterling integrity, a lot of fashionable doors were slammed in my face. I’m here because I have to start over, and I’m fresh out of inspiration and fight.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Graeme said. “Sometimes doing the right thing feels like the wrong decision.”
