Colin noticed things gradually changing in Jill’s garden. He learned that tomatoes needed eight hours of sun a day and that Humboldt County in the mountains wasn’t exactly known to be sunny and warm, even in spring and summer, but it was known for rich soil. Everyone in town talked about the great success that Hope McCrea had had with her garden and everyone was happy to know that Jill had brought it back to life.

Another change involved Colin—he began painting in the sunroom quite often—he preferred it to the artificial light in his cabin or the outdoors once the weather became hot in the sunny afternoon. He liked being able to look down on Jillian’s work in progress and watch as she tilled, sprayed, planted, moved plants from the greenhouse into the ground, scooting around the property in her garden-mobile. The UPS truck was a daily arrival; Jilly was constantly buying supplies. After painting for a couple of hours Colin would wander down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, then out onto the porch to take a break. If Jill saw him, she stopped work and spent a little time with him. What he liked even better was when she came silently up the stairs and sat on the floor behind him, watching him paint. More and more of his work made the move to the Victorian and it remained there. He still went out with his camera, but a lot of Colin’s time was spent painting in that big room with all the windows, the two skylights and so much natural light. And many of his nights were spent in the bed he’d bought her.

There were paintings he still kept in his cabin, covered and turned toward the wall so that if he and Jillian spent a night there, she wouldn’t peek. He worked on them only when he was alone. One was of a gardener wearing calf-high rubber boots, gardening gloves and a wide-brimmed straw hat—and that was all. She was turned to the side; only the lower half of her face was visible, the strong line of her jaw and her beautiful, plump, pink lips in a secret smile. Also visible was a side view of her nude body—the soft curve of her breast, the round arc of her perfect butt, her long, elegant legs, graceful arms and delicious shoulder. It was Jilly as he pictured her.

That painting’s twin was the nude gardener crouched between rows of plants, small spade in hand, grooming. No one but Colin would know how perfectly each of those curves fit into his big hands, how soft that velvet skin felt against his rougher skin, how much pleasure those exquisite lips brought him.

She had become the answer to prayers he hadn’t known he whispered.

After an afternoon of perfect light, Colin cleaned up his brushes, put away his paints and washed up in the upstairs bathroom. He heard a scraping sound from the room right below him and was still drying his hands on a small towel when he walked into the maid’s quarters. He found Jillian had pushed the bed away from the wall and was measuring the size of the room.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She turned toward him with her eyes glowing. “I’ve had an offer on my town house. I’m accepting it. I asked the Realtor to hire a moving crew to pack up all my things and deliver them to me here. It’s either store them here where I live and have plenty of space, or rent a storage facility. I don’t have that much—my town house is pretty small. So—we’re going to make a change—this bed will go upstairs and I’m going to put my desk, credenza and shelves in here. This will be my office. What do you think?”

Colin tilted his head and frowned slightly. “Don’t you want to go back there to close up your house? Pack up your own stuff? See your friends again? Because I could help manage the garden with Denny if you need to be away.”

“I’m not even going back to close on the sale. Until I got settled in here, I didn’t even realize how little that town house meant to me. It was no more than a crash pad. I spent all my time at work. If I end up going back there, I’m going to find something different.”

“You must have friends from work you miss,” he said.

She drew a deep breath and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think maybe I’m ready to tell you about it. About him. About what happened to me.”

Colin sat down beside her. “Only if you want to.”

“I want to. It’s become kind of blurry and surreal in my mind—I still can’t believe it really happened.

“He was a man on a mission. And he was relentless….” Twenty minutes later Jillian had shared with Colin many of the details about her relationship with Kurt, telling the story with brutal honesty.

“You must have been at least flattered if you were going to break rules,” Colin said, pulling her closer to him.

She laughed. “Truthfully, I had promoted him because we lost a director in my department and Kurt had come with glowing letters of recommendation. I was watching him closely to see how he was holding up with his added responsibilities. He was watching me closely for other reasons. I began to get the attraction message from him and he was…”

“Tempting you…”

“I was very busy with work. I didn’t have a lot of time for socializing. But, I began to see him away from work and I knew these were not just a couple of colleagues talking business over dinner. I knew what his intentions were. I warned him that it was not a good idea, but after a few months, after he continually made the excuse that we both spent so much time at work, neither of us had anyone to date and next thing I knew, I was sleeping with him and worrying about keeping it a secret from the boss.” She laughed bitterly. “The boss, Harry, who was my best friend in the company. Six months after I met Kurt and one month after I first was intimate with him, he accused me of sexual harassment. He had a lawyer, witnesses, a complicated log of events that I couldn’t exactly refute, text messages and emails that could certainly be construed as exploitive if it weren’t for the simple fact that he’d approached me, worked very hard to seduce me and it was completely consensual. In fact, when you get down to it, he put the pressure on me! I was very reluctant! He had set me up from the beginning—he forced me out of my job and part of the settlement he asked for to keep us all out of court was to take over my position and he wanted me terminated.”

“Did you fight?”

She shook her head. “We talked about fighting it, me and Harry. We both knew it was all trumped up. But in the end Harry pulled my fat out of the fire. He told me to resign, but that he was going to replace me with a consultant and would consider my resignation a leave of absence. He gave Kurt vested stock options—probably worth a lot of money, but going to court might have cost more. But Harry got a confidentiality agreement, which both Kurt and I signed, and a waiver—that would be the end of the complaint. No further suit. This was critical—I wouldn’t have my reputation damaged by these phony accusations. I still have a good reputation in the industry.” She fell back on the bed and looked up at him. She shook her head. “I can’t believe I was so naive. So unprepared.”

Colin reclined beside her, his elbow braced on the bed, his head balanced on his hand. “You never suspected?”

“Not for a second,” she said. “He was cute and charming, but so wily. It never would have occurred to me that he was both lazy and predatory. He even walked me into a jewelry store once and got me looking at rings. Not that I was ready to be so serious, just a casual, fun thing. Know how I found out the truth? I walked into the boss’s office for a meeting and Kurt was sitting there wearing a perfect, pathetic hangdog look—the poor victim. I was stunned. I could barely breathe.”

She sat up, cross-legged on the bed, facing him. “I was devastated. Not only was I shattered that this man would betray me like that, I’d lost my real true love—the company I’d helped found and build.”

“And tell me this—how could your mentor, your best friend, let that happen to you?”

“Because he didn’t know. In retrospect, I should have confided in Harry immediately.” She shook her head. “I didn’t want my friend and mentor involved in my love life. In the end, he had to rescue me as best he could.

“When this accusation hit the fan, everything changed. I wanted to fight it out, but Harry saw it otherwise. I can see now that he made sense. When it was all over I left BSS, got in my car and drove. I came up here to get away, to rest and think. I didn’t know I was going to discover the garden. That was an accident.”

“And what did he get?” Colin asked, reaching out and running a finger around her ear, along her jaw.

“Well, not everything he wanted. He got his vested options and will make some money, but he didn’t get my job. But, there wasn’t a going-away party for me. That tells me he wasn’t as confidential as he was supposed to be and leaked the whole thing. And that he’d charmed more people than just me.”

“Bastard,” Colin grumbled.

“So in answer to that first question—are there friends there? There are several I’d work with again and a few I’d consider friends, but to be completely frank I actually didn’t have many close friends in San Jose—probably because I spent most of the past ten years simply working. Believe me, I won’t make that mistake again.”

Colin’s jaw pulsed briefly and she put her palm against it. “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t feel sorry for me.”

He gave a short laugh. “Sorry for you? God, no! Angry for you, yes!”

“But here I am and in truth, Colin, I’ve never felt better about anything. I’m the CEO of the backyard garden and it feels real good. No one’s getting the better of me here. Well, the frost or aphids might—but I’m on top of it!” She smiled at him.

“Jilly, do you feel safe and in control now? With the garden? And with me?”

She leaned toward him for a kiss. “Yes. And you don’t have to be angry for me, either. I’ve got that covered.”

Jillian never even suggested that Colin keep her most personal information secret. She knew she didn’t have to. One thing he did ask her was, “Have you talked to Harry since you left?” When she said there had just been a few emails between them, he said, “He was on your side, Jilly. I know you didn’t think you got what you needed at the time, but it sounds like he did the best he could for a trusted friend—the most important thing was, he believed you.”

She realized she’d been avoiding Harry because she didn’t want to show her weakness by asking how Kurt was doing. There was a tiny part of her that was afraid he was thriving.

She knew how to work her way around office gossip. Too bad she hadn’t thought that so necessary when she was seeing Kurt! But no way was she going to have anyone pass around the news that Jillian Matlock had called the CEO! She didn’t call his office; from the widow’s walk, she dialed up Harry’s cell phone from her cell phone. Her name would come up on his caller ID.

“So—you’re not dead?” he answered gruffly.

She laughed before she said hello. “I am very much alive and sitting on the top of a three-story, ninety-year-old Victorian house, on the widow’s walk, in the middle of a forest, because I have good reception up here. The view over the forest and farms is awesome. How are you, Harry?”

“I’m grumpy. I’m told I need a knee replacement. My wife has me on a diet for my cholesterol. She wants to go on a month-long cruise. I don’t think I could survive something like that. I want to send her on the cruise with her sister and go to Pebble Beach for three days. Think she’ll buy that?”

She laughed at him; he adored his wife. “You’d be better off on a ship with your bad knee. Besides, you could use a vacation,” she said.

“I could use a knee replacement, too, but who has time? Seriously, I don’t think I can be trapped on a boat for a month. I might throw myself overboard. Jillian, how the hell are you?”

“I’m better than I’ve been in a long while, Harry. You’ll never guess what I’m doing. I’ve started a very special garden….”