Page 44 of Where You're Planted

She should have moved. She should have taken the sandals and put a normal distance between them. And for that matter, he should have released his arm from her waist. But neither of them did those things.

For a fleeting moment, she let herself go loose in his hold, lean into it just a little. She kept finding herself accidentally pressed against this man. It worried her how much she liked it.Anyman, she supposed, would have this effect on her. It had been so long since she’d been touched in any way that didn’t position her as a friend or a mother.

Pathetic.

“You all right?” Jack asked, his knee-jerk sharpness softened and his warm breath tickling her neck.

She knew he was only asking because she’d fallen, but the question felt bigger. Like he’d felt that loose shift in her, how she would let him shape her like putty if he wanted to. She shivered at the thought. “Probably going to end up with an infection from some flesh-eating creek bacteria,” she said, checking the thin scrape on her wrist.

“Here.” He pressed the sandals into her stomach, removing his arm, and then he stepped back and unbuttoned his shirt. He had a threadbare white T-shirt on underneath, which Tansy at once appreciated and despised because she was now quite interested in the exact topography of his chest. He shook out the sleeves he’d rolled up and draped the shirt over her shoulders. Because he thought she’d shivered from cold. Well, that was a much less embarrassing explanation than the fact that his warm torso pressed to her back and his strong arm banded around her waist had made her viscerally aware of every cell in her body.

His shirt smelled like him: sunscreen, herbs, dirt, and sweat.Summer. There was absolutely no logical reason she should want to tuck her nose into the collar to breathe it in more deeply, which meant maybe this attraction she feltwasa chemical thing. It wasscience. Inevitable.

Andimpossible. Her life was already too messy to invitea guy like Jack into it, even if he’d dialed down his hostility since their truce, even if his generous reframing of her hurricane decisions had been the first thing to actually ease her mind.

Jack had told her himself that he preferreduncomplicated. He didn’t do relationships. Between Briar, the library, and the house, a casual arrangement was all she had room for in her life anyway. But Tansy knew herself. And she could tell from how stirred up she felt merely brushing against him, merelysmellinghim, if she acted on this attraction, she’d be utterly lost in him. Responsible people didn’t throw themselves to the wolves.

After threading her arms through his long sleeves, she wrung out her skirt and twisted it into a knot above her knees.

Jack abruptly marched several paces upstream, muttering something that sounded a lot like, “Your fucking skirts.”

It was time to head back. She was supposed to be working right now, and so was Jack. But Briar was hunting for another smooth rock to skip, and the excited spark in her eyes, the looseness in her shoulders, made Tansy hold off.

Together, the three of them waded downstream. They watched a heron lurch along a bluff on the opposite bank and dive gracelessly into the water. Again and again it did this, climbing up, diving down, and coming up empty. Every time, Briar giggled the infectious, full-bellied laugh Tansy so rarely heard from her anymore. The sound pushed laughter up her own throat, but with it came sudden emotion that she had to fight to swallow back down. She was afraid to breathe, afraid to spoil this unexpected stretch of Briar so unrestrained and carefree.

“Never seen that guy catch anything,” Jack remarked.

“How do you know it’s the same one?” Briar asked.

“You spend enough time in one place, you start to recognize the regulars.”

“Does he have a name?” Briar asked.

Jack shrugged. “Never thought to name him. What do you think it should be?”

“Harry,” Briar said immediately. “Because he’s shaggy like he has hair, andHarrysounds likeheron.”

“Harry it is.”

They went on like this, with Jack identifying animal tracks (deer, coyote, no bobcats) and trees (American sycamore, loblolly pine, magnolia). He answered Briar’s questions like he was speaking to an adult. Tansy supposed it was a lack of experience with kids rather than a particular skill with them, but it was exactly the right approach with Briar, who knew when she was being talked down to. Jack didn’t overexplain, giving her just enough information to ask another question or make her own observations. For long stretches, the two of them were lost in their own little world, Tansy an unnecessary, trailing chaperone, able to simply enjoy the gentle shush of water and the sun on her skin.

After a while, their quiet murmuring receded into the background, and Tansy really looked at the deep scar in the earth and the harmless, shallow water meandering lazily through it that had once overflowed and destroyed so much. She watched the pine trees sway up along the ridge, still standing, although so many others had toppled over in the sodden ground. Every time a crow or egret soared overhead—birds she didn’t even know lived here—she felt the same electric spark of wonder. To be surprised in this way felt hopeful and expansive. Even something as simple as a half dozen turtles sunning themselves on a log felt like a gift.

She turned her face to the sunshine. This place that had made her palms sweat and her heart race less than an hour ago now felt almostholy.

And as Jack guided her and Briar through it, naming all the species, acquainting them as one might introduce old and new friends…well, maybe she was starting to see him differently, too.

14

Jack

With each step up the staircase back out of the ravine, the muscles in Jack’s back clenched more tightly. The urgent drumbeat of his to-do list had faded under Briar’s infectious, free laughter, and the vague, nagging sense that he was always running out of time was smothered by the reverent calm emanating from Tansy. For this past hour and a half, he felt like they’d stepped outside time, or more fully into one suspended moment of it.

They were a third of the way up the staircase when Briar tugged Tansy to a stop and complained, “My legs are tired.”

For the briefest moment, weariness slipped through Tansy’s smile, but she came down the few steps to piggyback her.

Briar turned to him. “I want Jack.”

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