Page 10 of Where You're Planted

“I was looking for Irma. She went to find a bathroomwithoutspiders and didn’t come back.”

He slung his toolbelt over his shoulder then stomped through the trees toward her, tucking his shirt back in. And jeez, why was that soriveting? Her lips parted, her mouth suddenly dry. There was nothing sexual about it, and yet, it felt so blatantlyintimate, his hands slipping unselfconsciously down the front of his pants.

“The admin building has bathrooms,” he said as he stalked past, casting a long, skeptical side-eye down at her, like maybe he’d somehow heard her stupid body’s thoughts abouthisstupid body, and then joined the path toward the main gardens. Five steps later, he called back, “Are you coming?”

“Is that a question you regularly have to ask women?”

He stopped mid-step but didn’t turn around, and Tansy held her breath, appalled that those words, in that old flirty-mean tone she hadn’t used in years, had come out of her mouth. Hastily, she added, “You’ve got to be the least patient person I’ve ever met.”

He turned to face her, hands on his hips in a melodramatic disgruntled man pose. “For the record, patience inthatarea is not a problem for me.”

Tansy’s cheeks—and other regions of her body—flooded with heat, and her eyes dropped straight to her mud-caked shoes. Had he really just—

“And you,” he added, “might have the worst common sense of anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Excuse me?” Images fromthat daybroke through her thoughts. She couldn’t change the choices she’d made. She’d done the best she could with the information she’d had at the time. At least, that was what Dr. Sharon had instructed her to remember after Briar’s last session. But the memory of her utter helplessness—how she’d failed to keep Briar safe, how even in that moment when he’d pulled up in his boat, she’dwanted to save face and wait foranyoneelse rather than take more of his judgment—cut right through any of the soothing scripts she repeated to ease her guilt.

He pointed at her feet, gaining steam. “Those shoes? That skirt? There’s poison oak and ivy, snakes, exposed roots, mud—”

“I dressed for myjob. At alibrary. And you’re talking about hazards out here, but what about the mud pit on the way to our little shed of horrors?”

“It’ll get fixed,” he said. And once again, instead of engaging with her and addressing her points, he turned to go.

“When?”

“I don’t know. Maybe let’s get through this meeting first.”

She caught up to him, matching his pace with occasional bursts of a jog. When they reached the main path, she followed the left fork, back toward the greenhouse and the covered courtyard across from it.

Only Jack was no longer speedwalking by her side. “You taking the long way?” he called over his shoulder, striding in the opposite direction.

Damn it. Tansy raced to catch back up, just in time to hear him mutter, “Should’ve let you go. Solve a few of my problems.”

4

Jack

“Where’s the food?” Ian asked when Jack, annoyed and out of breath, marched up just ahead of the librarian. “Didn’t Greta say to get coffee and cookies?”

“If adults can’t get through a ten-minute meeting without a snack, that’s on them.”

Ian raised his palms and backed away from the stairs, where Jack took his position in front of the small group. He’d removed his shirt while repairing the live oak to avoid working in sweaty clothes for the rest of the day, but now he was damp anyway from the juvenile foot race, possessed by God knew what to beat that librarian here just becauseshe’dturned it into a competition, despite having no sense at all which wayhereeven was. She took a seat now with her colleagues, cheeks flushed but a cheery smile in place.

He checked his watch. It was three minutes past their scheduled meeting time, yet only a dozen people slouched inthe twenty folding chairs facing him in the covered courtyard. And he couldn’t blame the sparse turnout on the librarians. Only one of them was missing. Meanwhile, half his interns and two maintenance staff had yet to arrive.

Greta usually ran these meetings, but she’d given him more responsibility ahead of her retirement in a couple weeks. She’d also forced him to start spending an hour every day in the office, answering emails and phone calls, and he was beginning to think taking over as director so he could ensure the park didn’t wind up in the hands of some hack was possibly not worth the time he now spent dealing with so manypeopleinstead of outside with his hands in soil.

Not to mention that, even with Greta still in the job, the commissioner was undermining their work, freezing their budget and requiring case-by-case approval for every little thing while pushing his own agenda of largely cosmetic improvements around the park. The essential but less visually impressive flood-mitigation projects, soil rebalancing, and other true recovery work never made the cut. A county politician with no expertise in horticulture had no business overseeing this place.

“All right,” he said, cutting through the din of voices. “As you can see, we have some new folks on the grounds for a few months. Everyone, these are the librar—”

“Four months.”

Jack’s gaze skipped over the crowd, snagging on golden hair as the crusader librarian stood once more. She waved shyly at the rest of the group. He bristled. She’d proven she wasn’t too shy to disrupt a gatheringoradd her complaints to someone else’s full plate.

“Hi, everyone,” she said, crossing the courtyard to stand beside—no,in front of—Jack, blocking him in on thestaircase. “I’m Tansy Perkins. Children’s services librarian. Also, technically, interim branch manager and assistant manager. I wear many hats.” A laugh. “But only figuratively. Hats never look cute on me.”

The group chuckled softly.

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