The Light of Paris(23)

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He rose, holding his hands out in surrender. He was wearing gardening gloves and holding a rubber mallet in one hand. Now that he was standing instead of crouching in the bushes like a serial killer, he looked much less threatening, even considering the mallet. His T-shirt was stretched out, with holes at the bottom, and his loose khakis had smudges of dirt all over them. His eyes were fringed with lashes I would have traded him for in a second, and his eyebrows were a little too thick, and he had shaggy brown hair and an equally shaggy beard. He looked like a large, friendly family dog. “I thought you were Mrs. Bowers.”

“You were hiding from my mother in the bushes?”

He gave a sheepish shrug. A pair of headphones hung around his neck, the cord trailing down into his pocket, where a Discman pushed the line of his pants out of shape.

“Mrs. Bowers is your mother? She doesn’t like me much,” he said, and he sounded disappointed about it.

“Buck up. She doesn’t like anybody, really. Not even me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.” He had a comforting drawl that marked him as a local. Tilting his head, he looked at me curiously. “You don’t favor her at all.” His Discman was still playing; I could hear the tinny squeal of guitars issuing from the headphones into the still air, already heavy and wet, preparing itself for the hard work of humidity ahead.

Self-consciously, I reached for my hair with one hand, patting it down. I generally woke with a spectacular case of bedhead, and I hadn’t even bothered to look in the mirror before stumbling downstairs. No, at that moment I probably looked even less like my mother than usual.

“Oh, we’re not related,” I said. “I was hatched from a walnut shell.”

To my surprise, he threw back his head and laughed, a rich, low sound that rang through the morning. “You’re funny.”

I blinked at him. “Nobody thinks I’m funny.”

“I do,” he said, looking surprised.

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste, as my mother would say. Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m so sorry.” He pulled his gloves off and politely extended a hand to me. I took it, and instantly regretted it—my fingers were strawberry-sticky. “I’m Henry Hamilton. And you’re The Heiress Bowers.”

“You can call me Madeleine. No honorific necessary. And my last name is Spencer. I’m married.” I don’t know why I clarified my marital status, as though he might be interested in my pajama-clad, strawberry-stained self. Not that Henry was anyone to impress, really. He was perfectly nice-looking, but in general I wanted to take a pair of clippers to him, trim back the wildness of his curls, the scruffiness of his beard. He wasn’t especially tall, but he was broad-shouldered and big of hand, and at the moment, covered in dirt. My mother would have been horrified by the first impressions we were making.

“Madeleine Spencer. It’s a pleasure. So now you know my hiding place. May I ask why you’re creeping around in the garden?”

“My mother doesn’t keep any food in the house. She survives on Melba toast and the blood of her enemies.”

He barked out another laugh, his curls bouncing. “You’re lucky. Those strawberries shouldn’t be ripe for another two weeks.”

“Yet another one of the myriad ways fortune smiles upon me. What about you? Do you work at the restaurant?”

“I own it, actually.”

“Congratulations. My mother thinks you’re Satan for opening it next to her house, by the way.”

Henry winced. “I know. I feel awful. She’s an incredible gardener. I’d hoped we might have something to talk about.”

I looked over his shoulder at his garden, which was all function, long, straight rows of turned earth, tomato cages and strawberry planters standing sentry, stakes at regular intervals to separate out the crops. “Do you grow all this food for the restaurant?”

“As much as I can.”

“That’s amazing.”

“I’d like to grow more. I wish your mother would talk to me. I have so many questions about how she gets such incredible produce, but she refuses to talk to me.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about it for much longer. She’s selling the house, apparently.”

Henry lifted a broad fist to his chest. “Mon Dieu!” he said. Okay, no, he didn’t, but he looked so surprised, his eyes opening wide, his hand clutching his itty-bitty sledgehammer to his heart as though he were a well-armed heroine in a Regency romance. “Oh no! Was it something I said?”

“Hmm. She does hate you a little bit.”

“Yes, she’s made that fairly clear. I invited everyone in the neighborhood for a private dinner before we opened. Everyone came except her. And this one other couple, but I gave them a bye because the wife was giving birth.”

“Generous of you.”

“I like to think of myself as a magnanimous neighborhood overlord,” he said, giving a little bow and then returning the mallet to his side. “In any case, your mother marched the invitation back over to me and told me exactly what I could do with it.”

“My mother? I don’t think so.”

“Well, there were no specific body parts suggested, but the phrase ‘ruining the neighborhood’ might have been involved.”