The Millionaire's Makeover

“We could lose some really valuable things,” she finished vaguely.

He nodded, instantly decisive. “No bulldozer. It’s a deal. So you’d use a team to clear the cactus by hand? Machetes and whatnot?”

“I’d be here myself the whole time, to oversee the work so that nothing important was damaged. If this place was mine, I’d let the design of the restored garden evolve over a period of some days as we began to discover what lay beneath. I wouldn’t plan it on paper in advance. It would be a unique, fascinating exercise.”

She ran her gaze over the mazelike expanse and felt a ridiculous itch to get started at once, like a kid in a candy store. Was that the curve of a stone well housing she could glimpse between the forests of cacti? Even if the well didn’t produce water, the old stone would make a dramatic accent with the right surroundings. She could see brilliant yellow flowers, too, but couldn’t make out what they were. It would be wonderful to work on this garden.

“Tell me more, Rowena,” Ben Radford invited her softly. “Make me see it. Paint it for me.”

“Oh, um…” she began awkwardly, and even when she relaxed and grew more fluent, she kept waiting for him to lose interest and signal that she’d said enough.

But he never did. Instead he stayed silent. He followed the gestures she made, nodded when she emphasized a point, smiled and even laughed with her once or twice when she invited him to picture an incident from a previous project. Like the time she’d briefly mistaken a late-twentieth-century lost toy for a Civil War belt buckle because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She’d made an appointment to get contact lenses the next day.

She didn’t mind telling an anecdote against herself if it made a man laugh. Ben Radford’s laugh was deep and a little rusty, as if he didn’t use it often enough.

“I really think that’s about all I can tell you for the moment,” she finished, after several minutes.

Ben nodded slowly, and made up for his disdainful failure to glance in her direction earlier by studying her with a disconcerting intensity now. What was he looking at? The too-dreamy expression in her eyes? The way her smile wobbled when she felt doubtful about something she’d said? Or was he seeing something else? Had she gone way over the top just now? What did he see? How much was he judging her?

“That’s not what I envisaged when I decided to bring you in,” he said.

“You expected to start with a blank canvas, so to speak, and lay the whole thing out according to a plan on paper, right off the bat.”

“I guess I did.”

“I could do it that way,” she conceded slowly.

“But you’d rather not.”

“No, because it’s such a fabulous opportunity!” She clasped her hands together, then quickly separated them again. Her body language would say she was begging. “With what you’ve done to the house so far—that’s wonderful, by the way, such a great blend of modern comfort and warmth, and authentic historical references. I’d love to do the same with this yard. To stay true to the Hispanic and pre-Hispanic heritage, while developing a space that’s beautiful and usable and welcoming at the same time. You’d love it, too. I know you would.”

His smile was crooked and cynical this time. “You know I would? What if I said it doesn’t fit my idea of the place at all?”

She’d let her personal feelings show too clearly, and she’d assumed way too much about her prospective client. Putting on a blank, polite face, she told him, “Then we’ll do whatever you decide. You’re the client, Mr.—Ben. Or you would be,” she corrected herself quickly, “if you decided to contract me for the project.”

She didn’t think that he would. Their initial dealings with each other this morning had been too awkward, and he was the kind of man who made quick, incisive decisions that he didn’t rethink.

Even now, after they’d found some common ground, there was something in the air that she couldn’t put her finger on, a kind of tension that made her uncomfortable and which she wanted to escape from as soon as she could. Her therapist, Jeanette, would probably want her to identify the tension’s exact origin in their next session, but Rowena wasn’t convinced she should risk taking a closer look at it.

“Tell me why I’d love this idea of yours,” Ben said. “How can I know? Convince me. How do you know? You seemed pretty sure just now.”

“Because I saw what you’d done with the house,” she explained simply. “That couldn’t just have been the work of decorators. I could see one person’s unique vision there. I assume that person was you.”

“You’re right. It was me. I said no to half of what the interior designer wanted, not to mention—” But he stopped.

He narrowed his eyes, looked down at the tips of his fingers and rubbed them together almost without seeing them. Was he still thinking of the picture Rowena had painted? Or was this an absentminded interest in the brilliant color of the dye that stained his skin.

“My wife thinks this whole idea is insane,” he said abruptly. Then he swore under his breath and muttered, “I have to start remembering to call her my ex!”

Rowena didn’t know what to say.

Ben picked up on her awkwardness. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t planned to say that out loud.” He gave her a sharp glance, as if wondering what on earth had made him apologize to someone like her for the second time in the space of half an hour.

“It’s fine.” She kept the polite facade in place.

“But you probably didn’t expect to find yourself discussing my divorce,” he persisted.

“No. Your bio that I found on the Internet said you were happily married,” she blurted out, then mentally swore. Oh,shoot!

Ben Radford swore right out loud, and he didn’t say anything so mild as shoot. “We maintained the fiction for quite a while, but I’m afraid the Internet information is out of date. If I sound bitter about it, there are reasons.”

“So what went wrong?” she blurted again. Oh, this was getting worse and worse! Just because he’d let a couple of details that he clearly regretted already slip, that was no reason for her to keep this same conversational ball rolling. It was as if his forthright Irish housekeeper had slipped truth serum into their coffee. “Forget I said that,” she added quickly.

“I’ll answer, if you want.”

“No, no please.”

“Let me answer,” he insisted lightly. “I need the practice.”

She laughed before she could stop herself—oh Lord, what would he think now?—because it was the same thing she’d thought about him, some minutes ago, when they’d reached their first uneasy truce.

In dealing with men like Ben Radford, she definitely needed the practice.

“You have to laugh, don’t you?” he said. He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t even smiling. “Either that or punch walls. Which hurts, I’ve discovered.” He rubbed his knuckles to illustrate the point and made her laugh again.

Like Ben Radford himself, she wasn’t all that accustomed to laughter.

Her twin, Roxanna, laughed a lot.

Rox was bright and bubbly and confident, as well as creative, disorganized and quirky. She lived in Tuscany now, having fallen hard for a wealthy Italian businessman who loved her sizzling personality. She’d been the stronger, healthier twin at birth, while Rowena had been in and out of hospitals for years as a child, with respiratory problems and a heart defect that had required more than one operation to correct.

Formed by these childhood experiences, the differences between them had persisted into adulthood. Where Rox enjoyed parties and music and crowds of interesting people, Rowena liked the meditative silence of the research libraries where she tracked down her garden history and the fresh air and beauty of the gardens themselves. Where Rox turned men’s heads with her dazzling smile, Rowena became flustered and confused at male attention.

A serious clinical anxiety disorder had taken her out of the dating game completely for the past couple of years, and despite the huge progress she’d made under the guidance of her therapist, she knew she had some distance still to travel.

“I’ve never been divorced,” she blurted out. “Or married. Or engaged. Or even very serious.”

“You strike me as very serious.”

“About a man. Was what I meant.”

“I’m teasing you, Rowena.” She felt foolish, until he added unsmilingly, “Because if I don’t undercut your advantage a little, I am about to make myself very, very emotionally naked, telling a virtual stranger what went wrong with my marriage.”

“Oh, please don’t feel you have to do that!” She pressed a hand to her cheek, stricken at the fact that she seemed to have drawn out a vulnerable side to Ben Radford that she wouldn’t have thought could exist.

He wasn’t listening. “After I sold Radford Biotech, our divergent money styles became irreconcilable. I could phrase it that way.”

“Mmm,” she agreed politely.