Page 9 of Where You're Planted

“Thanks!” Tansy called to Jack sarcastically, adding under her breath, “for absolutely nothing.” Then, she put on a bright smile and turned back to her team.

The librarians spent the next four hours shoveling sludge from the floor, startling themselves at every snakeskin, dead roach, anthill, and—finally—the opossum carcass that was responsible for the awful smell. At one point, Marianne ran, gagging, to wash her hands in the attached bathroom because she’d touched animal droppings, only to tear right back out screaming, “Spider nest!”

So they were going to need that pressure washeranda flamethrower.

The spiders were also the reason Irma had left to find a different bathroom. More than twenty minutes ago.

“I’m going to haul off this trash and see if I can find Irma,” Tansy said, wiping sweat from her forehead despite the January chill and then grabbing two full garbage bags. “If we don’t come straight back here, we’ll meet y’all in fifteen minutes in that covered courtyard for the meeting.” She hoped the director would be there instead of just Jack.

After she tossed the bags into the dumpster behind the visitor’s center, which had been dressed like a shiny new package for the ribbon-cutting ceremony two weeks ago, she tried the door, surprised to find it locked. She peeked in through the window. Like her library, it was gutted and dark.

Well, that was odd.

She tried the admin offices next. No Irma. Sure they’dsomehow missed each other by taking different paths, Tansy headed back. But the trail she thought was a shortcut around the greenhouse veered unexpectedly to the outer perimeter of the gardens. The path turned from pavers to gravel and then to a mix of clay and sand. Soon, towering pine trees and tangly undergrowth pushed in from both sides.

She cut through the trees, a slight incline taking her, she hoped, to a better vantage point. Her shoes sank in the muddy ground, and the incline grew steeper, forcing her to bear-crawl up the last bit of the hill. As she stood at the top, she saw that she was at the edge of a sudden drop-off into a ravine.

The creek.

She’d known it was here, but she hadn’t ever seen it like this, up close. Her stomach swooped at the steep drop. The creek snaked in and out of wide bends far below—so far that the amount of water it must have taken to fill this ravine and spill over into the rest of the gardens, through the library, and a few blocks away to her neighborhood, was unfathomable and more than a little menacing. She inched back, heart racing, and then scurried down the hill, feeling as though she’d escaped a predator.

She clung to the likelihood that Irma hadn’t wandered out this far and tried to find her way back to the path, but a sound like a grunt halted her. And then movement several yards through the trees, obscured by foliage. She froze. A bobcat? There were bobcats in Texas, weren’t there? Or—God, some stranger lurking in the woods? Her mouth went dry, and unease skittered up her spine.

Static crackled through the silence, followed by a woman’s scratchy voice over a radio. “Yoo-hoo. Are you coming to this meeting?”

Another low grunt and then a thud—something heavydropping to the ground—and the figure, a man, ducked under a thick tree branch and walked a few steps away from her. She moved sideways both to see him better and to obscure herself. He had his back to her—hisbareback—and between the branch at eye level and the dense overgrowth, she could see only the middle half of him.

He’d been doing something to the branch, she realized. It had a split down its length, not fully broken off at its trunk, and thick screws and wooden braces were holding it together. A toolbelt hung over a different branch alongside a sage-green gardens shirt. Which meant he worked here. She caught glimpses of the guy’s bare, tanned skin and his broad, muscular back emerging from low-slung khaki pants.

He exhaled a long sigh into the woods and then yanked a walkie-talkie off his belt.

“Don’t tell me you’ve ‘forgotten’ your radio again,” the tinny voice added before he could reply. Tansy recognized the delicate lilt, the slight German accent of Greta, the gardens director, whom she’d met at the reopening.

The guy grumbled something too low to make out and re-clipped the radio to his belt.

Curious, Tansy ventured into the tree line, wincing as leaves crunched under her feet. Now that she knew he worked here and wasn’t some creep in the woods, she could ask for directions back. She wasn’t confident she’d make that meeting on time otherwise.

The man reached up for his shirt, and her fingers flinched with an unexpected tactile curiosity about the smooth skin over his taut lower-back muscles and the way his pockets hugged his ass. It was muscular, just like his thighs. Tansy flushed. She hadn’t felt such lightning-quick interest—attraction—like this in years. A purely physical, magneticpull to an anonymous body. It was unnerving, like standing at the top of the ravine moments ago.

She pressed the cool back of her hand to her forehead, interrupting the spell. She was a single mother. She didn’t wander down unmarked paths and drool over half-naked men in the forest. Except…

It wouldn’t hurt to establish some allies around here. And if this guy happened to be one of the hot ones Kai had memorized on the gardens’ staff page, well…she didn’t judge books by their covers, but she did appreciate objective beauty.

He moved around behind the trees, further obscured as he pulled off his cap to slip his polo over his head, and Tansy’s little fantasy died on arrival. Jack Reid shook out his shaggy, dark hair, raked it back, and secured his hat back on his head. And then, at the sound of her disappointed huff, he turned and looked right at her.

“What are you doing out here?” he demanded. “This is a restricted area.”

She didn’t know what was worse, losing the fantasy of an attractive stranger or of a helpful ally. Jack was neither, even if the little swoop in her stomach begged to differ on the first point. “Our bathroom is full of spiders.”

“Did you come out here to—” He gestured vaguely at a bush.

“To what?”

“To pee.”

“In the woods? No. Gross. I’d drive back home before I peed outside.”

“Then, what—” He heaved a sigh. “Never mind. Don’t care what you’re doing. You can’t be back here.”

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