are you?”
He wore battered leather gloves, which chafed her palm as he pulled her to her feet and added to her apprehension. Gloves. Why gloves? He clearly wasn’t a wedding guest, so why was he lurking around her neighbor’s estate at ten o’clock at night? Her heart sped up with uneasiness as she regained her balance. She jerked her hand back and took a huge step away from him.
The stranger stood still before her. He was over six feet tall and broad-chested—she wouldn’t have a chance in hell of defending herself against him if he chose to make a move on her. Suddenly, drunk, handsy Tripp, who had a muffin-top spilling over the waistband of his Vineyard Vines khakis, didn’t seem so bad.
She flicked a glance over her shoulder and lifted her chin, forcing bravado, wondering how far her voice would carry if she had to scream. “You don’t look like a wedding guest.”
“That’s ’cause I’m not,” he said, his voice calm, his drawl slightly Southern.
She took another step back. “Then what are you doing here at the Englishes’ estate in the dark?”
She glanced at his hands, looking for the glow of a concealed a camera, but she didn’t see one. That didn’t mean anything, though. He could be recording their exchange. He could have a camera hidden. He could—
“I’m Gardener,” he said, offering her his hand.
“The gardener?”
This information took the edge off of her worry. He was the gardener? Well, gardeners were, more or less, “safe” on Blueberry Lane. They were “the help,” and the help didn’t attack wedding guests or gossip or take pictures to sell to magazines, because they were paid not only to do their jobs but also for their discretion. Jax had lived her life surrounded by friendly gardeners, chauffeurs, maids, housekeepers, and cooks, so there was a certain solid comfort to his claim. Except—
She scowled at him, crossing her arms in a refusal to shake his hand. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood forever, and you are not the gardener at Haverford Park.”
“Is that right?” he drawled, a slight thread of humor warming his voice. Was he laughing at her? It sort of sounded like it, though a cloud had stalled over the moon and it was too dark for her to see his face to confirm it.
“Felix Edwards is the gardener here,” she said with a sniff, “and right now he’s over at Le Chateau with everyone else.”
“Sounds ’bout right.”
God damn it, if some smarmy paparazzo somehow managed to take pictures of me dancing with Tripp or stumbling through Westerly in the dark, or…or…merde! Why can’t they leave me the hell alone?
“Why are you really here?” she asked, her tone of voice rising with a lot of anger, a good dose of frustration, and more than a little growing panic. “Who the hell are you?”
“Gardener,” he said again, his voice soft and even.
Jax clenched her jaw, just about ready to run back to Le Chateau, when the cloud passed and the moonlight illuminated his face and form. Despite her apprehension, she couldn’t resist checking him out for an extra moment, trying to figure out who he was and why he was here.
He was wearing jeans and a dark-colored T-shirt under an open plaid flannel shirt. Cream-colored leather work boots and yellow leather gloves rounded out his outfit. Pausing at his hand, she found he was holding something and stiffened. She craned her neck, but upon further inspection, she realized that it wasn’t a camera or tape recorder as she’d feared. It was a seedling—a young plant cradled in the palm of his glove.
Huh. Was he the gardener as he claimed?
She flicked her eyes back to his face and was surprised to find him staring at her, a very slight grin on his perfect lips, which, for no good reason, annoyed her.
“We’re not getting anywhere,” she said, scowling at him and ignoring the drunken call of “Jaxy” in the distance. “If Felix is the gardener at Haverford Park, then who are you and what are you doing here?”
His grin widened just a touch and he shook his head like she was funny.
“Shhhh,” he said. “You’ll scare the flowers.”
Scare the flowers? She blinked at him.
Was he crazy? Some crazy cousin of the English brothers who gardened at night? Merde. She’d jumped from the frying pan into the flame. What was worse? A drunken admirer who was trying to sleep with her? Or a crazy stranger who thought plants had feelings? Hmm. It was a toss-up.
“Jaaaaaa-xy!”
She took