The Stone Flower Garden by Deborah Smith

Author:Deborah Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

I opened a pair of efficient gray suitcases and stared at only business clothes. When I’d packed for Florida the week before I’d been convinced I’d win Frog a last-minute reprieve and return to Washington quickly. My choice of casual wear came down to a wrinkled sleeveless white-linen shift, a pair of cargo shorts, and another white nightshirt. I showered, then donned the loose shift, wound my hair back in a damp braid, and put on narrow black sunglasses.

A hard tapping sound suddenly sounded above me. I shaded my eyes from hot sunshine pouring through the bedroom’s sliding doors, which went to a private balcony. I tugged the doors open. The rumbling song of the surf poured in, along with a gust of briny air. I padded barefoot onto my balcony, and gazed upwards. Solo sat atop a folding ladder on the deck above me. He was nailing a section of windblown siding back into place.

The deepest blue sky I’d ever seen silhouetted him. He wore baggy, knee-length shorts, his bare feet were smeared with sand, and he’d slung his shirt over the ladder’s utility shelf. As I had seen at the beach, his bare back was muscled, his chest was broad, and his skin was deeply tanned. A fine vee of dark hair trailed down his stomach. He clamped a row of small nails between his lips with intense concentration. Yet he sat with his long legs and knobby, handsomely ugly feet curled around the ladder’s metal stanchions in an almost boyish posture that was very appealing. As I watched, he raised a hammer. Sinews flexed in his forearm, and he drove a nail into the siding with a single, expert stroke.

We like our men rough and hard, Clara had hissed at me that day by the pool. There was a part of me that always worried—irrationally, but still—that some genetic weakness really did doom Hardigree women to be either promiscuous or emasculating, or both. I held myself back from men, and intimacy, for me, required a long, thoughtful, restrained path. Yet there I stood, gazing up at Solo. My skin began to tingle against the fabric of the linen shift. I drew back from the sensations with a rush of discipline as sharp as a steel trap.

“Could you use some help?” I asked.

He pivoted and looked down so quickly I was afraid he’d lose his balance. As it was, he smiled and lost all the nails. They clattered to the floor of the upper deck and several fell between the cracks, landing at my bare feet like hard raindrops. I knelt and began picking them up. “Let ’em go. I’ve got more,” he called.

“Waste not, want not.” I gathered the nails as he climbed down from the ladder.

“I bet you keep a little jar in your kitchen, full of leftover nails and paper clips and safety pins.”

“Spoken like a man who keeps his own little jar.”

“Hmmm. You nailed me on that one.” He sat down on the deck, then stretched out near the edge, looking down at me.

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