Page 58 of Where You're Planted

And then on Monday and Tuesday, he’d dropped by her story times, clearly waiting to catch her, so she’d struck up the most important conversations of her life with the kids and their parents and convinced them to walk back withher to check out some books, closing any window for Jack to slide in. She took her lunches in the shed rather than finding a quiet spot in the gardens, just in case.

But now…well, the tansies could not be ignored. If he was sending her a message here, publicly, in front of her staff, she needed to nip this whole thing in the bud.

She walked a brisk double loop of the park, and just when she was about to give up, she finally found Jack in the gated garden, hoisting thick stumps from a sectioned tree trunk and arranging them upright in a semicircle by the rock wall. He grunted as he dropped the current one into place and wiped sweat from his forehead with his forearm. Tansy hesitated at the gate, torn between announcing herself before he could do something dangerous, like take off his shirt, and waiting forexactlythat.

“Was wondering when you’d come find me,” he called, tipping his face up to look at her. That particular angle, his eyes peering from under thick eyebrows and a loose lock of hair, the pushed-up sleeves, that little smirk on his lips, and the physical labor—it was all some kind of rugged fantasy she’d never known she wanted, come to life.

She gripped the gate, caught. “It’s been busy since the festival.”

He sat with a heavy sigh on the smooth surface of the stump. “So you’re not panicking about kissing me?”

Okay, so they were going to talk about it. Great. She pushed open the gate and crunched her way across the sparse grass, stopping in front of him.

He gestured at the stump beside him, and she sat. Before she could settle on the right way to say it obviously couldn’t happen again, he asked, “Briar okay? With the rain? I didn’t get to talk to y’all after…”

Tansy couldn’t help but soften at the question, that he’d thought to ask, that he seemed to genuinely want to know.

When she’d hurried back to Briar from that mind-blowing kiss, she’d found her daughter safe and dry under the canopy, horrifying Marianne with her encyclopedic knowledge of venomous snakes and the ones most likely to live in this very park. Tansy had given in to the nervous fawning she usually restrained, asking repeatedly if Briar was okay until finally her daughter asked, “Areyouokay, Mom?”

And…no, she had not been okay. That kiss had done something irrevocable to her. She was jittery and had a tangible sense of having narrowly escaped danger while still bracing for it to hit. The mere flash of memory—the way Jack had groaned into the kiss, his strong hands squeezing her thighs—sent her heart right back into overdrive. She hadn’t been able to focus on anything, which was a problem because she’d spent the afternoon on Sunday painting the living room and more than once stepped in the paint pan.

“Briar was fine,” she told him. “Thanks for asking.”

“Good.” He scratched his cheek, staring at a spot of dirt on his knee. “And you?”

“If you’re asking if I just bounced right back from the totally unprofessional act of making out with you during a work function,” she said, huffing in frustration, “no. I’m mortified.”

He grinned. “Mortified. Well, that’s a new one for me.”

“Don’t joke. I’m being serious.”

“Don’t bemortifiedthat you liked kissing me, Tansy. That’s a waste of time.”

“My feelings are a waste of time?”

“No, the feelings you think youshouldhave are a waste of time. Avoiding me and pretending it didn’t happen is a waste of our time.”

She shook her head slowly. He’d avoided her after their creek day together for two whole weeks. But rather than point that out, Tansy admitted, “Fine. I liked it.”

His large hand found her knee, and they both watched the tendons in his fingers and wrist flex as the pads of his fingers swept lightly across her skin. “Been thinking about it all week,” he said.

A relieved breath rushed out of her. “Me too.”

“Yeah?” The corner of his mouth tipped up. “And it wasn’t just…misplaced arousalfor you?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think so.”

“Unfortunately,” he echoed wryly, his smile flashing full and wide now. Damn it, she really liked his smile. He squeezed her knee, drawing her attention back to the pleasing, warm weight of his palm and the subtle scrape of his callouses.

“Misplaced arousal would be easier for me,” she explained. “We could chalk it up to the rain, the whole box breathing thing. Which is totally on me. I didn’t know how weirdly erotic that was going to be.”

He chuckled, thumb swiping circles around her kneecap now. “Like I told you before, it wasn’t the breathing, Tansy.”

The brazen, loosely flirtatious, younger version of herself wanted to tell him toprove it. Kiss her now, in the middle of the day, when neither of them was in distress. But that younger version of Tansy had made many mistakes, so instead, she said, “My library looks especially nice this week. Was that you?”

He glanced away but gave an answering nod to some point in the far-off distance.

“Why?”

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