Excerpt

These Boots Were Made for Strutting

Excerpt, "A Rose by Any Other Name"

Chapter One

Seattle

Kelsey hid behind a goat and spied on her employee. Plump, fifty-six-year old Bridget was being dusted with kisses by her husband. He pressed lips to Bridget’s eyelids as if he was worshipping an idol, both giving and receiving blessings with his touch. He pressed his brow to hers, the two of them joined gazes, and the soft murmurs of their devotion drifted up the weedy slope to Kelsey.

Kelsey sniffled. It was the same routine every morning, corny and excessive and enough to make her sick with yearning for the same thing in her own life.

The goat, Little Bastard, said, “Nay.”

Kelsey wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. “I can too have that,” she whispered. “Someday. If someone as weird as me exists, then there’s got to be an equally weird guy out there for me.”

“Nay.”

“Shut up. Stupid goat.”

Little Bastard narrowed his yellow eyes and abruptly moved away. Kelsey lost her balance and plopped onto her butt amidst the thorns of brambles, her yelp drawing the eyes of Bridget et homme. Bridget’s husband waved uncertainly. Bridget said something to him, and after one more doubting look up the slope to Kelsey he got back into his ancient, bumper-stickered Volvo and putt-putted off to work. Bridget waved until he was out of sight.

“I will find someone,” Kelsey whispered.

Little Bastard, whose tether had stopped him from completing his offended exit, stared at Kelsey over his shoulder.

“I will! He’ll be awkward and geeky, just like me. And shy.”

She painted a mental portrait of her dream mate: pale, unmuscled, a look of concern in his eyes. She saw him in an old T-shirt, camping shorts, and Teva sandals, carrying a canvas grocery bag. They’d go to a farmers’ market, and then cook their squash and chard in the kitchen they’d built together out of recycled materials. And when the meal was over and the wine had been drunk – just one glass each, because they liked it for the taste, not the effect – they would slowly undress each other in the moonlight and he would trace his shaking fingertips over her breasts…

Little Bastard bleated a firm pronouncement of his low opinion of her chances.

“He’s out there, and I’ll find him.”

The goat shook his head, ears flapping, and turned his attention to the consumption of blackberry vines, every line of his goatly body declaring he was done with her.

Kelsey tore her overalls loose from the thorns and trotted down the slope to Bridget, who was donning work gloves and sun hat.

“Hi,” Kelsey said, and found herself unable to say more. Bridget had worked for her for five weeks now, and this was the start of their second project together, but Kelsey was still shy with her, the mere act of speaking to an unfamiliar human scattering the words in her head and filling her with the certainty that even if by happy chance a word did manage to emerge from her lips, it would be the wrong one. It didn’t help that Kelsey was the twenty-seven-year-old boss of a woman who had grown children.

“What a lovely location!” Bridget said. “I didn’t know this little neighborhood even existed, and so close in to the city. You could walk to a dozen restaurants from here, but it feels like you’re on the edge of the wilderness.”

“The property backs onto a park.” Kelsey pointed up the hill. “Just over the ridge.”

Bridget smiled gently, like a mother humoring a child. “I’m sure there is. Well, that does explain the quiet, doesn’t it? But what a strange house to build in the midst of it all!”

Kelsey turned round and looked at the 1930s Art Deco home at the bottom of the slope. It was a long, boxy building in white stucco, with a flat roof. Large windows looked out from the back of the house towards the slope, which had to have been a depressing view for many years, given the wild overgrowth. “The previous owner died here. He was an old man. He lived alone.”

“Oh dear, how very sad.” “He built it for his wife. She died before him. Many years before.”

“Oh…” Bridget pursed her lips in concern, then forced a sunny smile. “But the new owners want a garden! It will be good to bring life to this place. Have the new owners moved in?”

Kelsey nodded. “It’s a man. Jack Lovgren.”

“Single?” Kelsey shrugged.

“Young? Old?” Kelsey shrugged again.

“Didn’t you meet with him, go over your landscape design, all that?”

She shook her head. “Everything was email and fax. He travels a lot, for work.”

Bridget glanced towards the nearest windows, bare of curtains. The dim shape of packing boxes and a couch could be seen. In a lowered voice she asked, “Is he home?”

“I don’t think so.” Kelsey privately wondered why the man was bothering with a house and extravagant landscaping, when he was home so little. Why not buy a condo in a high-rise downtown, where he wouldn’t have to do any maintenance? He must have more money than sense.

“Then I won’t disturb him if I take a peek.” Bridget trotted over to the window and pressed her face to the glass, hands cupped round her eyes. “Yes, definitely a bachelor. Why do single men always buy black leather couches? There’s some sort of gong hanging on a wood stand. A few cardboard boxes. Nothing much else. Hmm.”

“What?”

Bridget came away from the window. “He doesn’t look like a man with roots. He’ll sell this place within the year.”

“You can tell that from looking at his stuff?”

She nodded slowly. “When you get to be my age, you develop a sense about people. It takes only a few clues to know who you’re dealing with.”

Embarrassment fluttered in Kelsey’s chest and she looked away. What must Bridget understand about her? “We should get to work clearing the ground. You go up by Isis and dig out any roots. I’ll clear the beds along the house.” Isis was another of Kelsey’s goats; there were six of them at work on the property, chomping weeds and brush.

“Tell me what we’re going to do to this yard,” Bridget insisted, not moving. “What does our rootless mystery man want? No, let me guess: a big patio with room for a barbeque, a pergola over a hot tub that he’ll use three times, and a bit of lawn on which his future neglected dog can relieve itself.” Bridget giggled.

Kelsey cracked a smile. Bridget shared her loathing for run-of-the-mill suburban backyards, with their bark dust flowerbeds and random bits of badly pruned shrubbery. “He wants a Northwest version of a Japanese garden, with a waterfall and pond.”

“Really?” Hands on hips, Bridget looked again at the house. “Huh! I wouldn’t have thought it. Maybe he saw a photo in a magazine somewhere, next to an ad for barbeques.”

“He said in an email he likes visiting Japanese gardens. In Japan.”

Bridget sniffed, unwilling to accept defeat. “He must be older than I thought.” Her expression brightened. “Or maybe he’s gay!”

“I’ll kill you! Just see if I won’t!” Kelsey grunted under her breath as she wrapped her gloved hands around the ivy. The noonday sun beat down. Sweat trickled between her breasts, smashed flat under her athletic bra. “Suffer, you damned life-sucking, rat-harboring fiend! Die! Die!”

With a muscle-wrenching heave she yanked the ivy from the ground. Dirt flew into her face, and with it beetles, spiders, and glossy white slug eggs. Kelsey spit grit from her lips and wiped her face on the long sleeve of her SPF 45 shirt. At least her big orange-tinted prescription goggles had kept the mess out of her eyes.

She squinted along the length of the flowerbed against the house. Ivy didn’t give up easily. A single fragment of root left in the ground would sprout anew. It was the hydra of gardening. She tightened her kneepads and got down on all fours, swearing and muttering as she dug and yanked, squishing the odd cutworm or beetle larva as she worked her way down the bed. Snails she tossed into a covered bucket she dragged along with her.

There was a strange satisfaction to the destruction she wrought, her gardening wrath acting as a purging fire upon the earth. The beds beneath her hands and trowel became rich, crumbly brown dirt, virgin soil upon which she would later work her creative magic.

It beat an office job. She was no good at working with people. But plants? She and plants understood each other.

Unfortunately, landscaping was not the best career choice for a fair-skinned redhead with a family history of skin cancer. It meant covering every inch of skin, which made for hot work even on a gentle spring day like today.

“Oh, you evil devil,” she said, as a particularly stubborn length of ivy clung to the ground. “You don’t think you’re going to get away from me, do you? Well, you’ve got another think coming…”

Inside the house, behind a window left ajar for air and a blackout curtain pulled tight against the light, Jack Lovgren thrashed in his bed sheets. Half asleep and jet-lagged, he struggled to make sense of the female voice muttering murderous obscenities.

He was in Japan, his dreaming brain told him. The voice was an angry oba-san, one of those fearsome older Japanese women who pushed their way through life. She was mad at him for wearing his shoes on the tatami, the woven mats that made up the floors of traditional Japanese houses, and now she was chasing him down the street, swinging a broom.

“You slimy piece of—“

Was she swearing at him in English?

Jack peeled open a raw eyeball. He wasn’t in the middle of a narrow Tokyo street. He was somewhere dark and unfamiliar, and the cursing voice was coming from behind a backlit curtain.

He stumbled from his bed, angry at the disruption. He’d barely slept for three days, and now that he was finally enjoying some hard-earned rest some witch started ranting in his ear.

“For God’s sake, woman, will you shut up?” he yelled, and grabbing the edge of the curtain yanked it open.

Retina-searing sunlight hit his wincing eyes, and the witch’s cursing was cut off by a shriek that vibrated his eardrums.

“Shut up! For the love of God, shut up!”

The shrieking abruptly stopped.

Jack carefully opened his eyes a slit. On the other side of the window, kneeling in a flowerbed with her dirty face three feet from his hips, was a woman in a French Legionnaire’s hat and enormous orange-tinted goggles. The buggy eyes behind the goggles were fixed firmly to his crotch.

His naked crotch.

“Shit!” He grabbed the curtain and pulled it over his privates. “Who the hell are you? What the hell’s going on?”

“Are you okay?” a distant female voice called, followed by what he could have sworn was bleating. He squinted up the slope. Was that a goat?

“F-fine!” the goggled woman called over her shoulder. “I’m fine!”

“Who. Are. You?” Jack demanded. And why was there a goat? Was he still asleep? He must be asleep. Why was he dreaming about a goat?

“K-kelsey Safire.”

“Who?” he asked, even as the name rang a distant bell. He should know who that was, shouldn’t he?

He looked out at the half-denuded slope, not recognizing it. Where was he? Not Japan, obviously.

He turned and looked at the room. That was his bed frame and sheet set. His clock on the bedside table. His lamp.

The fog of sleep finally cleared. “Shit. This is my house.” The gaping woman in front of him was the landscaper he’d hired based on a coworker’s recommendation. He’d been so busy, he’d approved her plans and fees with barely a thought, and then scratched her existence from his mind.

“Er. Sorry,” he said. “Will you excuse me?” She nodded, and he yanked the curtains shut. Great! Just great. What a fabulous first impression, Jack.