“Sounds wonderful. Can you put some in this garden?”
“It depends on how much of it you want to eat.”
“I don’t know…,” she said hesitantly.
“Do you want to graze lambs on it to make the meat taste good, or do you want to make a few dozen cookies?” he asked without patience.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I want to make a voodoo doll of you and stick lavender pins in it.”
He laughed. “Come on, I’ll show you where we can plant some lavender.” He put the shovel down, took a towel off the bed of his truck, and wiped his sweaty face with it.
“I haven’t seen much of the garden at all,” she said, looking out through the big trees.
“You’ve been too busy—”
“Don’t say it!” Joce ordered.
“What?” Luke asked with exaggerated innocence.
“That I’ve been too busy with Ramsey.”
“I was going to say that you’ve been too busy getting to know people to spend much time in the garden, but if your mind goes to Ramsey and stays there, who am I to contradict you?”
“You can be a real pest, you know that?”
“I’ve never before had a woman tell me that. My mother, yes, my cousins often, and some of my uncles, but women never say I’m a pest.”
“Spare me,” Jocelyn said, but she was smiling. “You have dirt on your face.”
“Yeah, so get it off.”
He leaned down so his face was close to hers. She lightly brushed her hand across his cheek, but the dirt didn’t move. She brushed harder. “Is this stuff glued on?”
“Take your shirt off and wipe hard,” he said without a hint of a smile.
Joce shook her head at him and stepped back. “Get it off yourself.”
He wiped his forearm across his face and the dirt came off. “Better?”
For a moment Jocelyn just looked at him. He was a very good-looking man, with his dark hair and his green eyes. “When’s the last time you shaved?”
“When House did.”
It took her a moment to realize he meant Dr. House on TV. It was one of her favorite shows. Smiling, she followed him as he made his way through the trees.
As she looked at the land around her, she couldn’t help thinking, All mine. Everything she saw belonged to her. “Could you show me the property lines?”
“Glad to,” he said.
He took her around the eighteen acres she now owned, all that was left of the thousand acres the young man from Scotland had bought for his kidnapped bride. Luke knew the grounds well and pointed out where the old cabins used to be, the well house, the dovecote. He stopped at a treeless spot and said the blacksmith shop used to be there.
“When we were kids, we’d come over here and dig in this area and find pieces of hand-wrought iron. Charlie found three horseshoes.”
“What about Sara? Did she find anything?”
“She was good at finding arrowheads. She said that the nineteenth century was too new for her to care about, so she didn’t bother with horseshoes.”
“Interesting that you know that about her, but she says she hardly knows anything about you.”