now. We’ll see what happens.”
“Then you do see…the irony.”
“Not really,” he said, shaking his head slowly, watching the way her tongue darted out to swipe her lips. His gaze lingered on her lips a touch too long, but he couldn’t help it. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman, and this one was getting under his skin. He met her eyes. “Irony signals a difference between the appearance of things and reality. If anythin’, my name is unironic.”
“I don’t think your definition is right,” she sniffed.
“I know it is.”
“Are you a cop or a gardener or an English professor?”
“Don’t get your panties in a wad,” he drawled, smirking as he picked up his coffee and took a sip.
Why did all this feel like flirting? Or like foreplay? And why was he enjoying it so damn much? Much more than he should. He straightened his expression.
“A wad?” She wrinkled her nose, looking affronted. She shook her head and said under her breath, “A gardener named Gardener.”
“A fact we’ve established,” he said, giving her a bored look, though he didn’t feel bored at all. “Repeatedly.”
“How did that…happen?”
“The name or the job?”
“Both.”
“Don’t you have somewhere you need to be, Duchess?”
“And miss your scintillating explanation of this fascinating sobriquet-slash-profession collision? No way.”
“My full name is Gardener Pierre Thibodeaux.”
“Posh,” she said.
He rolled his eyes at her, which only made her smile widen.
She cocked her head to the side. “Do you have a brother named Trowel? Or Rake?”
He shook his head. “Just two sisters.”
“Named?”
His mother would have laughed and told him he was about to “walk into the poo.” He sighed. “Lily and Iris.”
“Ha!” she said, her eyes bright with delight. “Flowers! You’re messing with me!”
He shook his head, forfeiting a smile to her because she was just that adorable and it was almost impossible not to enjoy her. “Nope. My father was a landscaper. I guess he thought…”
“He’d mix business and pleasure?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, it’s good to meet you, Gardener Thibodeaux.”
He watched her as she said this, taking a ridiculous amount of pleasure in the way she said his name and wanting to hear her say it again and again.
“It’s good to meet you, Duchess.”
They weren’t touching. He was sitting across from her in a chair, a coffee table and two steaming mugs of chicory coffee between them, and yet he felt a zap of electricity shoot through his body as surely as if they’d both been shocked with a live wire. She must have felt it too because her cheeks colored.
She cleared her throat, dropping her eyes to her coffee mug. “We’ve established Gardener the name. Now, how about gardener the job?”
“I was a cop,” he said.
“Here in Philly?”
He nodded.
“Why not in New Orleans?”
“Change of scenery.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I bet there’s a story there.”
There was, but he didn’t feel like sharing it with her.
He didn’t answer, so she plowed forth. “Why aren’t you a cop anymore? Why work here at Haverford Park?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“Is that a problem?”
He took a deep breath and let it go slowly. Maybe it was. How much did he want her in his business? For that matter, why was she still here? She’d said thank-you. It’s not like they were going to be friends or something. So what was her game?
He met her eyes and held them for a long moment before asking, “What do you want, Jacqueline?”
She leaned away from him. “I wanted to say thank-you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, standing up and glancing meaningfully at the door.
It was fucking with his head, sitting here chatting with her over coffee. The more time he spent with her, the more time he wanted with her, but he’d already determined her an unlikely candidate for a friend and a disastrous choice for anything more, no matter how much his dick disagreed. He saw her coming from a mile away with her designer clothes, entitled manners, and pushy questions. He was trying to build a quiet, new life for himself, and he didn’t need the distraction of Jacqueline Rousseau.
He needed her to go.
As though she knew she was about to get the boot, she said, “I wanted to ask a favor.”
“A favor?”
She nodded, looking up at him from where she still sat on his couch. “Weston English said that you used to work in the Special Victims’ Unit.”
Shit. Weston was talking about him? Was he also gossiping about the accident? Fuck. Gard wasn’t interested in his business being discussed by virtual strangers. He didn’t want