here, I’m probably in the garden. Flowers make everything better.”
Back to breezy, shifting back and forth like the wind. I headed for the shower, stripping my shirt over my head along the way, and thought that a man who was trying to get somewhere with a woman might not ask her to put the sheets on his mum’s bed for him. He’d probably be less sweat-stained when he went to dinner with her, too.
I could fix one of those things, anyway.
Daisy
I made the bed with white sheets and a brown duvet. My least favorite color. I stood back, looked at all of it, and thought that it was awful. Pink, blue, and brown.
It wasn’t like Gray had no taste. He’d done the yurt, and he’d done his house in Wanaka. He had beautiful taste. He just had no time. The girls had told me that they’d heard the ute leaving this morning before seven, and he’d come home at six-thirty, because he hadn’t even had time to shower and change before we’d got there.
I didn’t want to think about what I was doing, so I didn’t. I didn’t think about his thumbs brushing over the skin over my hipbones, or the gentle touch of his lips on mine. The working-man scent of him after a hard day, made up of dust and the kind of clean sweat that came from physical labor, or the way he’d asked me to trust him. Or the sight of him walking down the passage, pulling his T-shirt over his head. Or the look of his jeans when my foot had been on his thigh. It was hard not to think about that, because it had been impressive, but I did my best.
I went downstairs instead and hunted through the orange-and-green kitchen for scissors. I found shears, which were even better. I also checked out his collection of glassware: poor. And the state of his fridge: pathetic.
He’d been in Wanaka, that was why, and then he’d been working too much and fixing my window and chasing off my ex-husband.
I was pretty sure his mum would take care of his fridge. I wasn’t going to have to cook for him anymore, and never mind that more than half of me wanted to do just that. Gratitude, or something more complicated.
Another thing I didn’t want to think about, so I went outside and headed down through the garden, then along the track. After that, it was a wrestling match.
Xena found me first. I heard Gray’s voice, and before I could answer, the Labrador was running up to me, then running off again. Gray turned up thirty seconds later, looked at my efforts, and said, “I’m not saying it. It’s killing me not to say it.”
I said, “I have excellent balance. Also flexibility.”
“Noticed that, didn’t I,” he said. “When you had your foot on my thigh. I could still ask why you need to be two meters up in a kowhai, with one foot on a limb that’s bound to break, and reaching too far for good sense.”
“Because that’s where the flowers are,” I said. “And the limb is bound to break if I go out any farther, since as I told you, I’m heavy for my size. Fifty-one Kg’s, to be exact, which is too heavy for that branch. And because you don’t grow enough flowers, and kowhai is cheerful.” I finished clipping off another branch drooping with trumpet-shaped yellow blooms and said, “I’ll hand them to you and climb down.”
“Barefoot,” he said. “How about not. How about this instead. You trust me, and I’ll lift you down. Since we’re sharing, I’m twice your weight, which is exactly no surprise to me.”
I said, “Fine. I could do it, but let’s avoid having a whole barney about it.”
He said, “Let’s,” then reached up, closed his hands over my waist, and lifted me carefully down. Slowly. From over his head. The man had some strength. I don’t mean weight-lifting muscles. I mean strength. He set me on my feet again, not doing the whole brushing-down-the-body thing that I was half-expecting, took the kowhai branches from me, and said, “It never would have occurred to me to cut these.”
“I like flowers,” I said, slipping my jandals on again and starting up the track. Xena, of course, stayed so close to Gray that her nose was practically pressed to his leg. He was wearing soft, faded jeans again, and another T-shirt, an old Highlanders one. His dark hair was damp, his