"What's this level'?"
"Evening sex and kitchen dinners."
"You seemed to handle the sex better than the meal."
"You're exactly right. Because I don't know what you expect from me now, and I'm not entirely sure what I expect from you."
"And this is your equivalent of tossing ingredients in a pot."
She huffed out a breath. "Apparently you understand me better than I do you."
"I'm not that complicated."
"Oh, please. You're a maze, Logan." She leaned forward until she could see the gold flecks on the green of his eyes. "A goddamn maze without any geometric pattern. Professionally, you're one of the most creative, versatile, and knowledgeable landscape designers I've ever worked with, but you do half of your designing and scheduling on the fly, with little scraps of papers stuffed into your truck or your pockets."
He scooped up more rice. "It works for me."
"Apparently, but it shouldn't work for anyone. You thrive in chaos, which this house clearly illustrates. Nobody should thrive in chaos."
"Now wait a minute." This time he gestured with his fork. "Where's the chaos? There's barely a frigging thing in the place."
"Exactly!" She jabbed a finger at him. "You've got a wonderful kitchen, a comfortable and stylish bedroom—"
"Stylish?" Mortification, clear as glass, covered his face. "Jesus."
"And empty rooms. You should be tearing your hair out wondering what you're going to do with them, but you're not. You just—just—" She waved her hand in circles. "Mosey along."
"I've never moseyed in my life. Amble sometimes," he decided. "But I never mosey."
"Whatever. You know wine and you read comic books. What kind of sense does that make?"
"Makes plenty if you consider I like wine and comic books."
"You were married, and apparently committed enough to move away from your home."
"What's the-damn point in getting married if you're not ready and willing to do what makes the other person happy? Or at least try."
"You loved her," Stella said with a nod. "Yet you walked away from a divorce unscarred. It was broken, too bad, so you ended it. You're rude and abrupt one minute, and accommodating the next. You knew why I'd come here tonight, yet you went to the trouble to fix a meal—which was considerate and, and civilized—there, put that in the C column."
"Christ, Red, you kill me. I'd move on to D, and say you're delicious, but right now it's more like demented."
Despite the fact he was laughing, she was wound up and couldn't stop. "And we have incredible, blow-the-damn-roof-off sex, then you bounce out of bed as if we'd been doing this every night for
years. I can't keep up."
Once he decided she'd finished, he picked up his wine, drank thoughtfully. "Let's see if I can work my way back through that. Though I've got to tell you, I didn't detect any geometric pattern."
"Oh, shut up."
His hand clamped over hers before she could shove back from the table. "No, you just sit still. It's my turn. If I didn't work the way I do? I wouldn't be able to do what I do, and I sure as hell wouldn't love it. I found that out up north. My marriage was a failure. Nobody likes to fail, but nobody gets through life without screwing up. We screwed it up, didn't hurt anybody but ourselves. We took our lumps and moved on."
"But—"
"Hush. If I'm rude and abrupt it's because I feel rude and abrupt. If I'm accommodating, it's because
I want to be, or figure I have to be at some point."
He thought, What the hell, and topped off his wine. She'd barely touched hers. "What was next? Oh, yeah, you being here tonight. Yeah, I knew why. We're not teenagers, and you're a pretty straightforward woman, in your way. I wanted you, and made that clear. You wouldn't come knocking on my door unless you were ready. As for the meal, there are a couple of reasons for that. One, I like to eat. And two, I wanted you here. I wanted to be with you here, like this. Before, after, in between. However it worked out."
Somewhere, somehow, during his discourse, her temper had ebbed. "How do you make it all sound sane?"
"I'm not done. While I'm going to agree with your take on the sex, I object to the word 'bounce.' I don't bounce anymore than I mosey. I got out of bed because if I'd breathed you in much longer, I'd have asked you to stay. You can't, you won't. And the fact is, I don't know that I'm ready for you to stay anyway. If you're the sort who needs a lot of postcoital chat, like 'Baby, that was amazing'—"
"I'm not." There was something in his aggravated tone that made her lips twitch. "I can judge for myself, and I destroyed you up there."
His hand slid up to her wrist, back down to her fingers. "Any destruction was mutual."
"All right. Mutual destruction. The first time with a man, and I think this holds true for most women, is
as nerve-racking as it is exciting. It's more so afterward if what happened between them touched something in her. You touched something in me, and it scares me."
"Straightforward," he commented.
"Straightforward, to your maze. It's a difficult combination. Gives us a lot to think about. I'm sorry
I made an issue out of all of this."
"Red, you were born to make issues out of every damn thing. It's kind of interesting now that I'm getting used to it."
"That may be true, and I could say that the fact your drummer certainly bangs a different tune's fairly interesting, too. But right now, I'm going to help you clean up your kitchen. Then I have to get home."
He rose when she did, then simply took her shoulders and backed her into the refrigerator. He kissed her blind and deaf—pent-up temper, needs, frustration, longings all boiled together.
"Something else to think about," he said.
"I'll say."
* * *
Roz didn't pry into other people's business. She didn't mind hearing about it when gossip came her way, but she didn't pry. She didn't like—more she didn't permit—others to meddle in her life, and afforded them the same courtesy.
So she didn't ask Stella any questions. She thought of plenty, but she didn't ask them.
She observed.
Her manager conducted business with her usual calm efficiency. Roz imagined Stella could be standing
in the whirling funnel of a tornado and would still be able to conduct business efficiently.
An admirable and somewhat terrifying trait.
She'd grown very fond of Stella, and she'd come— unquestionably—to depend on her to handle the details of the business so she herself could focus on the duties, and pleasures, of being the grower. She adored the children. It was impossible for her not to. They were charming and bright, sly and noisy, entertaining and exhausting.
Already, she was so used to them, and Stella and Hayley, being in her house she could hardly imagine them not being there.
But she didn't pry, even when Stella came home from her evening at Logan's with the unmistakable
look of a woman who'd been well pleasured.
But she didn't hush Hayley, or brush her aside when the girl chattered about it.
"She won't get specific," Hayley complained while she and Roz weeded a bed at Harper House. "I really like it when people get specific. But she said he cooked for her. I always figure when a man cooks, he's either trying to get you between the sheets, or he's stuck on you."
"Maybe he's just hungry."
"A man's hungry, he sends out for pizza. At least the guys I've known. I think he's stuck on her." She waited, the pause obviously designed for Roz to comment. When there was none, Hayley blew out a breath. "Well? You've known him a long time."
"A few years. I can't tell you what's in his mind. But I can tell you he's never cooked for me."
"Was his wife a real bitch?"
"I couldn't say. I didn't know her."
"I'd like it if she was. A real stone bitch who tore him apart and left him all wounded and resentful of women. Then Stella comes along and gets him all messed up in the head even as she heals him."
Roz sat back on her heels and smiled. "You're awfully young, honey."