“Not exactly light on them, is he? You’re working from home?”
“Just finished, actually, and the timing’s rather exquisite.” He strolled over, opened the wall panel, chose wine, two glasses.
“I’m not finished working,” she began, but he handed her a glass, took her free hand.
“No doubt, but, again, timing. We need to take advantage of it.”
“Where are we going?” she asked as he drew her out of the room.
“For a bit of a walk before the sun goes down and takes the warmth of the day with it. And how was your day, Lieutenant?”
She could spare time for a walk, she decided, especially since he seemed seriously pleased about something. It was probably part of the Marriage Rules not to stomp on your spouse’s seriously pleased before you even found out what it was.
“Productive,” she told him. “I was going to tap you, if you have room for it, to make the rest of my day even more productive.”
“Sounds interesting.” He went out a door on the second floor, crossed over a terrace where somebody had placed pots of sassy-looking flowers, down stone steps.
To another terrace with tables, chairs, benches, big urns with exotic-looking viny things spilling out.
Who thought of all that? she wondered. The viny things, the sassy things, the happy pink and white and yellow and purple things poking up out of the ground as if they’d just decided to bloom there?
She supposed Roarke had final say on all of it.
And it felt good to be outside, she had to admit it. The air definitely felt like spring—a stroke instead of a bite. Smelled like it, too, sort of green and fresh and promising.
Trees and shrubs had begun to bud or unfurl. She heard birdsong instead of traffic. It didn’t take her long to relax, or to figure out where he was headed.
“Did they finish the pond?”
He smiled. “You’ll soon see. We’ll supply the finishing touch ourselves.”
They wandered through a grove of fruit trees—she remembered the peaches from the previous summer, how they’d smelled, tasted. How they’d looked out and discussed adding a pond, a bench for them to sit on.
And there it was, tranquil and lovely through the greening trees. Naturally, being Roarke’s, the reality leaped well over her initial mental image.
“Jeez, you got a waterfall.”
“A small one. It adds to it, doesn’t it?” He drew her along to that music of water striking water as it spilled over stone rises into a pool where water lilies floated serenely.
Around the stone walls of the pool da
nced budding shrubs and little trees, lush grasses. She could smell them, and the water, the rich, thick mulch that gave way to pavers in that same natural stone gray. Pavers, she noted, that had been etched with the same Celtic design as their wedding rings.
Jesus, the man knew how to get to her.
The bench stood on the pavers, the perfect spot to look over the pond, its magical little falls of water, the castle of a house in the distance, the grove of budding trees.
“I thought it was going to be a hole in the ground filled with water.”
“We wanted to do a bit better than that.”
“It’s…” She could only shake her head. “It’s great. It’s like it was always here.”
“We wanted organic as well.”
“Well, it works. I can’t say I ever pictured myself sitting beside a pond drinking wine, but this works.” She frowned, pointed. “What’s all that?”
“The finishing touch.”