He didn’t say anything else, but when Ryan glanced up at him, his face was pinched with emotion. He was clearly struggling with something. Ryan was good enough at reading people to know there was a story behind the tense, wary look on Graeme’s face as he threw himself into his work. The man had as much of a story as Ryan did about what had led him to digging out old, dead roots in someone else’s garden.
A hint of a smile touched Ryan’s lips, but he forced himself to flatten it. Maybe if he kept digging, he would find out what had put such a dark expression on an otherwise gentle man’s face? Maybe it would all lead to the inspiration he so desperately needed after all.
TWO
Shit.It was happening all over again.
Graeme tried his best to keep his eyes off Ryan Hawthorne as they worked clearing the old garden beds in Hawthorne House’s kitchen garden. Once upon a time, the garden would have looked amazing and provided fresh vegetables and herbs for the Hawthorne family and its servants. Graeme would definitely have been one of the servants. He’d been born with whatever the opposite of a silver spoon was in his mouth. A dirt fork. He came from a long line of people who worked the earth and considered themselves simple country folk.
He was definitely the black sheep of his family. No, he wasn’t even a sheep in their eyes. He’d turned full goat when the truth came out during the divorce.
And now here he was, trying desperately not to sneak peeks at the way Ryan Hawthorne’s jeans hugged his tight backside when he bent over. He threw himself into his work at a backbreaking pace so he wouldn’t look at the fit and lean lines of Ryan’s long torso once he took off his fancy shirt to avoid sweating all over it.
“This should be the last of it, right?” Ryan asked as they made it to the far corner of the garden and the last bed that needed clearing.
“Hmm?” Graeme heard Ryan’s voice on a split-second delay as his brain occupied itself with trying to figure out what flowers matched the dusky pink shade of Ryan’s nipples. “Oh. Yeah. This is the last of it,” he said, glad that his face was already scarlet from work.
He forced himself to look back over the cleared kitchen garden and was actually excited by what he saw. When Mr. Robert Hawthorne had called him to confirm that he wanted Dallen Garden Designs to take on the massive project that was Hawthorne House, Graeme had been ecstatic. The whole thing had been decided in the fall, while Graeme and his crew had been busy putting their other clients’ gardens to bed for the winter. He figured he’d have the whole winter to finalize the design and line up growers and greenhouses to supply the plants he wanted to install in the numerous different gardens on the Hawthorne House grounds. He’d assumed he’d have a whole team of guys to work with him to make his designs a reality.
Then Damien had happened.
And the divorce.
And the complete meltdown of his life.
“What do we do next?” Ryan asked as Graeme grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow to take the last of the rubbish from the kitchen garden out to the compost pile he’d started between that garden and the much larger and grander walking garden he had planned for the back section of Hawthorne House’s grounds.
“It’s not too early to start marking out the beds and paths for the walking garden,” he said, very conscious of Ryan following behind him, shirtless.
“Is that the thing I saw with the winding paths, the little hills, and the curved garden beds from your design illustrations?” Ryan asked.
“Yep. That one,” Graeme said as he reached the compost pile and dumped the contents of the wheelbarrow. The compost needed sorting, but that would be a job for another time.
Another time when he had more people working with him, hopefully. Just nine months ago, he’d had an entire crew of six mates from school days, half of whom volunteered their time and labor just because they were friends. Everyone knew he was working hard to get his garden design business off the ground and that he didn’t quite have the finances to hire full-time workers yet.
Everyone had ditched him when he’d filed for divorce from Mavis and when Mavis had told them all why.
“You alright?” Ryan asked.
The question shook Graeme into the realization that he’d just been standing there with a tipped wheelbarrow, staring at the thick pile of brambles and brush they’d cleared from the kitchen garden.
“Yeah,” he lied, forcing himself to look at Ryan and not let his thoughts run away from him. “Just wondering if this really is the best place for the compost piles. And thinking about how I should have done a better job of separating the things that can break down into mulch from the things that should be burned.”
Ryan looked impressed. “I didn’t realize there was so much to gardening.”
“There’s a lot to gardening,” Graeme said, happy to snap back into the one thing he was confident about. Theonlything he was confident about. “Part of the plan I pitched to Mr. Hawthorne was to make this garden as sustainable as possible. That means using the garden waste to make fertilizer. And wild-harvesting seeds for plants instead of buying everything at a nursery.”
Ryan smiled. He had such a fabulous, winning smile. It was filled with confidence and courage, all the things Graeme knew he lacked. “I remember you pitching those ideas,” he said. “Dad and I both loved them all.”
“They take a long time,” Graeme said apologetically, as if the speed of nature was his fault.
Ryan shrugged. “Everything good takes a long time to grow.”
Graeme liked that. But he also knew what the other side of that coin looked like. Things that took ages to grow sometimes fell apart in the blink of an eye.
“Let’s get the stakes and twine so we can mark out the path here,” he said, heading back into the kitchen garden.
He didn’t want to think about how fast things could fall apart. Things like a life. Everyone always said that it was important to be honest with yourself and stay true to who you were. Graeme had tried his best to do just that, to be honest and truthful. He hadn’t cheated or dragged things out. He’d let Mavis go as soon as he realized that nothing was ever going to make him straight and that he was a thousand times more turned on by Damien’s whispered suggestions than he’d ever been in bed with his wife.
