Page 23 of Deep Feelings & Shallow Graves

Too late.

He’s already standing there. In my garden crime scene. I need a lock on my damn gate. Or a moat.

“You need help?” he asks, eyes sweeping the absolute carnage. “You putting in a pool?”

Sweet, dumb, heartbreakingly hot Blake.

“My garden got a virus,” I say, straight-faced. “Had to start over.”

The thing about chopping up bodies while your hot neighbor redoes your garden is that it’s a logistical challenge. Timing. Angles. Body position. You gotta stay low, and let the shrubberies do the heavy lifting. And do not get viscera on the petunias.

“I can start turning this bed for you if you want,” Blake says, already grabbing a shovel like I’m not wrist-deep in compost-slash-Hank. “Soil looks like it’s got some sort of fungus.”

“Virus,” I call over my shoulder, sawing a thigh bone like it cut me off in traffic. “Garden plague. Very biblical.” Pretty sure I saw a locust earlier. Or it might’ve been Greg’s eyeball.

Blake whistles low, face scrunching. “No kidding. Smells like roadkill had a threesome with Satan and forgot the safe word.”

“Mm-hmm,” I hum, wiping sweat off my forehead with the clean part of my glove. “So tragic.”

He keeps digging, muscles flexing in that soft blue T-shirt I want to see peeled off with teeth. Meanwhile, I’m hackingthrough my late ex’s spine with the kind of focus usually reserved for bomb disposal.

“You want me to grab you some fresh soil?” Blake offers. “Can’t replant into cursed earth, right?”

“Oh my god, marry me,” I say.

“What?”

“I said that’d be lovely.”

He flashes a grin that has no right being that pretty while he’s ankle-deep in rot-dirt. “You’re lucky I like dirty girls.”

God help me, I nearly propose over a sack of dismembered Steve. I might be in love. Again. While knee-deep in body parts. I have a type and it is “men who help me dig graves without asking follow-up questions.”

Behind the cover of a drooping hydrangea, I dislodge a foot that was never cute in life and is now… haunting. “This one had a bunion,” I say. “Gross.”

“What?”

“Nothing!”

He’s now filling in one of the holes I’d emptied, completely unaware that ten minutes ago it held a man who used to think I was “too emotional to understand politics.”

“You want me to grab those bags for you?” he asks, already stacking them neatly like I haven’t been casually shoveling ex-boyfriends into them. “I’ll help load ‘em.”

I freeze for half a second. “You don’t mind?”

“You kidding? You’re trying to protect the whole neighborhood from virus dirt. That’s hot.”

God help me, I beam like a prom queen at her first exorcism. He hauls one of the heavier bags into the trunk of my SUV like it’s mulch and not Steve’s torso.

“You’re so thoughtful,” I tell him.

Blake leans against the open hatch and smirks. “So are you. Honestly, if you ever do decide to date again, some guy’s gonna be real lucky.”

Oh, sweet summer child. “I’ve got a date tonight,” I say. “Real responsible, emotionally mature type. Works with fire.”

He gives a slow, appreciative nod. “I like that for you.”

So do I, I think, watching him walk back to the garden bed. He bends down and my brain spirals with indecent thoughts. My hands are covered in corpse juice and I’m imagining him bent over a kitchen counter while I whisper filthy things into his neck and moan around the taste of sugar and heat and…

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