Wild Man Creek (Virgin River #14)(60)

“You’ll be on a cruise,” she said, feeling a little emotional. “Or off carbs…”

“Seriously, you’re ready for your own company. You always have been. I started my first when I was twenty-eight. Didn’t go that well, but I was ready and the experience was good for me. You should try it. Now’s the time.”

“For right now, it’s time to garden. It’s the strangest thing—it makes me feel…I don’t know…like I’m really part of something that never stops. Year after year, the cycle of life kind of thing. In a perfect world I’d work six months a year and garden from spring to fall. Could you get into that, Harry? Put me to work from October to April?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if you made a business out of it. I always expected you to start your own company. I didn’t think you’d do tomatoes, but what the hell, huh? There’s money all over this world—you just have to have a nose for it. Those tomatoes smell like money, Jillian?”

She laughed through the feeling of tears that had gathered in her throat. “Sometimes they do.”

“Hah! I knew it! When they’re ripe, send me some, will you?”

“Sure.”

“And Jill? There’s one more thing and I am absolutely not supposed to discuss this. A couple of the women from Corporate Communications who stood as witnesses in his case came to me—they realized their mistake, realized they’d been had and tricked into believing you exploited him. They now have guilt. They see the light and know they were used. They’re sorry.”

“Tell them to go to hell,” she said, bitter.

He laughed so loud and hard it triggered a coughing fit. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, I couldn’t say it, but I thought it. Too little too late, huh?”

“How can I be such a hard-ass,” she amended. “He tricked me, after all.”

“Let him go. He’s so over, the body is getting cold. Hey, if you don’t come down here, I might come up there, see what you got.”

“You’ll be on a cruise.”

“We could compromise,” he said. “Three-day cruise, three-day trip to the veggie farm, three days at Pebble Beach. You know what, Matlock? I miss the hell out of you. It was time for you to take on the world, but that doesn’t make it easy.”

“I love you, Harry.”

“Yeah, yeah… Every broad I ever gave a few million to has said that.”

She laughed into the phone.

“Godspeed, kid,” he said.

“God bless, Harry,” she said.

Jillian’s town house had been a small two bedroom—around sixteen hundred square feet. Perfect for one single woman. Therefore it hadn’t held a lot of furniture. Denny helped her move the bed Colin had purchased out of the maid’s quarters to one of the second-floor bedrooms. When her furniture arrived, the office furniture that had been in her second bedroom went into the maid’s quarters. She moved her computer and recliner from the kitchen into that room.

Her living room sectional went into the sunroom along with her big flat screen, bookcases and side tables and there was still more than enough room for Colin to paint. It became the most wonderful room—a den and studio all in one. She had come to love the smell of his paints.

Jillian put both leaves in her dining room table to make it longer and it still didn’t overpower the eating area of the roomy kitchen. Her patio furniture—table, chairs, two chaise lounges—went on the back porch. Her bedroom furniture went into the largest second-floor bedroom.

She bought herself a hanging rack for clothes and filled her bedroom bureau drawers. The rack went into the third empty bedroom on the second floor, which served as one big closet. The problem with these old Victorian’s—no closets. Whoever moved into this place permanently would have to invest in wardrobes.

Certain parts of the Victorian took on a look of peaceful domesticity. Colin and Jill were rarely apart and never spent a night away from each other. Colin still liked to prowl around for wildlife shots and he enjoyed painting on hilltops for a few hours here and there, but daily life saw them mostly together. In evenings, while Jill sat in the office and read the gardening blogs on the computer, Colin sat in the recliner in the same room, reading or surfing art and galleries on his laptop. Jill invited him to use her computer anytime he wished to and before long his laptop and color printer appeared to have found a permanent home in the office.

They seemed to spend most of their nights in the Victorian, which made a trip to the cabin seem like an escape out of town, a completely different environment.

“I’ve never had a relationship like this,” she said. “I’m thirty-two and this is the first time I’ve slept with a man every night. I’m kind of surprised—this is so new to me. And so natural.”

“For me, too,” Colin said. “I like it.”

“But I hardly ever had a man in my life. You’ve had lots of women—I can tell.”

He pulled her close and said, in all honesty, “Not like this, Jilly. Not like you.”

In the bright sunshine of early May, Jillian’s flowers around the house, fruits and vegetables in the open garden and flowering shrubs around the yard were in full swing. There were a few apple trees in the front of the house and the air was filled with the sweet scent of blossoms. Also bees, but for any gardener, bees were the friends who transported pollen. She’d been right about the bulbs—daffodils, tulips, lilies all bloomed in the warm sun. Jill was surprised to discover a long row of blackberry bushes along the tree line in the back meadow. When they were all ripe, there would be too many to even deal with.