Page 9 of A Little Naughty

“Your fingers.” I do a little point, and he rubs them together.

He has long, elegant fingers, which is completely unexpected and entirely thrilling when I imagine them tracing along my skin.

“Maybe.” His eyes slide up to mine again, and my stomach tingles.

“That’s very mysterious. You can tell me about it when we finish our interview.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yes.” I lean closer, and it’s possible I’m being a little flirty. “You were going to tell me all about your million-dollar idea before I left. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to make a really good story.”

His blue eyes travel to my lips and lower before he nods. “It is.”

I’m not sure if we’re still talking about his idea, but I’m okay with that, too. “I’ve got your number. I’ll text you when I’m back at my desk.”

“I’ll answer.”

CHAPTER2

RAIF

On my way to the refrigerator, I kick an empty pizza box across the floor.

“Fucking slobs,” I mutter, bending down to pick it up before continuing through our rusted tin-can of a trailer.

I am so done with this place. Only one thing keeps me here, and it’s the same thing that has me going to the refrigerator on this cold January morning—it’s a memory, or amemoriam… or both.

Opening the door, I take out the bag of bulbs. They’ve had enough time to chill, and I head outside in my bare feet. It’s never really cold enough in South Carolina to worry about things like shoes or sweaters or wool.

A hound dog with one blue and one brown eye hops up and follows me across the sandy grass. He wandered up here about three years ago as a puppy. I expect somebody dropped him off on the side of the road, but I fed him. He’s pretty much my dog now.

“Morning, Porkchop.” I pat his head, and he licks my face when I kneel down beside the flower bed I’ve built up inside a tractor tire.

I nudge him away and take out my hand trowel. I know, it’s pretty redneck, but Mom would’ve appreciated these beds. A smile lifts my cheek as I imagine her expression, and I feel her with me as I dig holes in the rich soil I’ve established above ground.

I remember a year when I was about six or seven years old, she’d seen black and red tulips arranged in a pattern like a checkerboard in one of her women’s magazines, and she’d wanted to recreate it so much.

She worked all day, measuring and planting tulip bulbs in square patterns, doing her best to get it just right. Her fingers were dark brown from the rich soil she’d bought to enhance the sandy loam we have down here by the ocean.

“The dirt here is only good for growing potatoes,” she’d told me as I sat and watched her work, fascinated. “But with the right soil, you can grow anything.”

I’d dug my small fingers into the ground beside her, and she’d grinned watching me. She liked to sing sad songs while she worked, or maybe they sounded sad because her voice was high and lonely. I’d never heard them before, and when I asked her if she made them up, she’d laughed.

“I learned them from your grandmother. She learned them from her grandmother and her grandmother, all the way back to Scotland.”

I liked the sound of them. I liked the way her voice wavered when she sang certain words. I liked spending the day with her in the yard, digging in that black soil.

Winter came and went, and those bulbs never even tried to poke through the earth. Of course, my mom had no idea what she was doing planting tulips in the south. She didn’t have the internet, so she didn’t know the bulbs had to freeze to sprout. They just cooked in the ground like potatoes.

Still, she wasn’t defeated. She loved flowers of all varieties, and she’d try new seeds and cuttings every year. She said it was like a surprise. We never knew what we’d get.

I learned later about planting zones and how to know what would grow and what wouldn’t. Even if we had enriched our yard with the best soil this side of the Mason-Dixon line, not everything will grow here.

Glancing up at the house, I decide the same is true of people.

I learned about annuals and perennials and which flowers attract bugs and which repel them. I learned to grow the flowers she loved, camellias and jasmine, and yep, even tulips.

They just take a little more work. You have to trick them into thinking we live where it snows, which it never does here.

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