Page 59 of Where You're Planted

“It needed doing.”

She laughed. “Oh, like, ‘Because I had a boat.’ Sure. So whatexactly are you working on out here?” She looked down at the stump she was sitting on and felt the rough bark down its side.

He pulled his hand from her knee and looked at the work he’d been in the middle of. “Thought the kids could sit in the grass once we get it back in shape, but you’ve got a lot of older folks who have a hard time getting up and down. They could sit at the back here on the stumps.”

Tansy gaped at him. “Wait. What?”

“For your story times.” He shrugged. “This makes the most sense.”

“But you said—” She shoved his shoulder, fizzy energy bubbling up inside her with nowhere to go. “This is your special garden.”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t say ‘my special garden.’ ”

“All this from one kiss?” she teased, but her heart felt like it might genuinely burst.

“You need a better space, and I don’t know when I’m gonna be able to restore this how I want. Rather it be useful in the meantime.”

“You’regivingme your special garden?”

“Don’t make me change my mind.”

She beamed at him. “Thank you, Jack. This is going to be so much better.”

“Yeah. Good.”

“Yeah. Good,” she mocked.

“I actually thought…” He scratched his eyebrow, glanced at her cautiously.

“What?”

“All right, listen. Kai told Ian about your food bank problem. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that the two of them are…”

Tansy laughed. “Crushing on each other? Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

“Well, he asked me to help figure out a solution.”

Tansy perked up, but he raised a tempering hand.

“We looked at the staff cottage, the visitor’s center, even considered an empty office they’ve been using for storage in the admin building. Thing is, the cottage isn’t structurally sound, and FEMA’s got us under all this red tape on the visitor’s center.”

Tansy deflated.

“Long story short, I called the food bank.”

“Youcalledthem?”

“Asked if they’d go for hanging tarps around the courtyard instead of actual walls.”

“Did they?”

“Didn’t want to. But Greta’s always saying you’ve gotta scratch people’s backs to get them to scratch yours, so…” He blew out a sigh. “I suggested that once our budget’s restored, we’d grow some produce for them, as long as they keep their agreement with y’all.”

“You—” Tansy shook her head. “Youbribedthe food bank for us?”

Jack panned his hand along the open area behind them. “With kids in and out of here, bringing back the endangered and rare species doesn’t make sense, but there’s native stuff that’s not hard to get that they’d be into, like the pitcher plants. I’ve been thinking about interactive species, too—lamb’s ear, cool stuff that responds to stimuli…And if we’re gonna grow food, might as well do that here, where the kids could get involved, at least until we can move it into the expansion. It could be a…I don’t know, a learning garden, if that’s a thing. Hell, some of those kids couldn’t tell you where a strawberry comes fr— Where are you going?”

Tansy had jumped to her feet and was now beelining toward the waist-high rock wall to put some space betweenthem. Without it, she was about two seconds from climbing into his lap and embarrassing herself again. “You want to teach my library kids how to garden?”

---