The Millionaire's Makeover

Now they shook hands. The sober gray cuffs of her jacket were too long. They hid her wrists completely, but couldn’t hide the way she’d had to work at her hands to get rid of the garden stains. Manicured in clear polish and softly moisturized, they nonetheless had a slight roughness to the palms that told him she had every intention of getting dirty, too.

“Thank you for meeting me in person, Ben,” she said, visibly struggling with the informality of his first name. “You really didn’t have to. In fact I expected—” She frowned.

“You thought I’d send a car for you?”

“No, I assumed I’d drive a rental. When I return for the next two phases I’ll bring my own car, but this time it was in the shop for some work. I’ve made a rental reservation. We arranged that I’d come out to Santa Margarita for a meeting at three, didn’t we?”

“We’ll cancel the car rental reservation. And as for our meeting, that’s still on, but meeting you at the airport beforehand seemed like a better idea, since I was in the city already.”

“About the car,” she persisted stubbornly, setting that mouth in a straight line. “I will need my own transportation.”

“You can drive my SUV if you need to. That would be easier for you, in any case, with equipment and samples and so forth, wouldn’t it?”

“It would be, yes,” she agreed carefully.

Her caution seemed habitual. Ben compared it with her sharply accurate and quite passionate outburst about his self-importance six months ago and was intrigued.

What would she be like when the polite and bland veneer slipped? It was a veneer, he felt convinced, and in fact it had already slipped a couple of times, when they’d talked about his divorce. She had brains, heart, humor and perception. He wondered why, too often, those things just didn’t show.

“Any bags to wait for?” he asked.

“Um, a couple. As it happens.” She winced slightly, and a few minutes later he understood why.

Three large matching suitcases.

Gray, of course.

Ben wanted to tell her that black, gray and navy weren’t the only colors a professional woman could be seen with in public while still keeping her reputation intact. Some high-flying female executives were daring enough to try cream or burgundy, or even florals. Some of them showed a bit of skin. Instead, heaving her baggage from the carousel, he exclaimed, “What on earth do you have in these? Sample paving stones?”

“Research material.”

“Books?”

“Mainly.”

“They feel like encyclopedias.”

“Well, most of them are about that big, I guess. For some reason, publishers don’t put out small reference books.” The smile was almost flirty for a moment, but then Ben could actually, visibly, see her pulling back, like a scared cat skittering across a slippery floor. The smile turned into a frown, like the sun disappearing behind a cloud. The body language tightened. She stepped farther away.

“We’ll get a cart,” he said, while fighting an out-of-leftfield curiosity to know which of her conflicting personality traits she expressed in what she wore when she was alone.

There must be some occasions when she let her vibrant side free. What did she wear to bed, for example? Flannel pajamas? High-necked cotton nightgown? Strappy satin slip?

Or maybe—a long shot, here—she wore nothing at all.…

“Will I be able to keep some of them at Santa Margarita?” she asked.

Nope. Had to be the cotton nightgown. With full-length sleeves.

“Some of them?” he echoed, having to force his concentration. “Where will you keep the rest?”

“At my motel.”

Oh, hell, they should have worked all this out in advance!

“I thought you’d prefer to stay at the ranch,” he told her. “There’s a separate guest wing, and I’ve had my housekeeper prepare it for you. We won’t be in each other’s pockets.”

“No,” she agreed awkwardly. “I mean, it’s a big house.”

“It’s up to you, of course, but I thought you’d be more comfortable staying on-site, with meals on hand and no driving back and forth. The nearest motel I’d recommend is some miles away from Santa Margarita.”

“That’s…that’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

“You can come and go as you want, of course,” he reassured her again. “There’s a separate entrance. Your private life is your own.”

She still seemed uneasy about it, however, and her ongoing discomfort got under his skin. Why did the damn woman have this effect on him?

Rowena adjusted her thinking.

She ditched the idea of lining the trunk of a zippy little rental compact with a layer of heavy-duty plastic so she could ferry plant or paving samples from garden centers back to Santa Margarita. Ditched the anonymous safety of a budget-priced room at a blandly elegant chain motel. Ditched the prospect of several hours in which to gather her breath and her cool before heading out to Ben Radford’s land-grant ranch at the respectable and prearranged hour of three o’clock this afternoon.

She’d be driving his SUV, staying in his guest wing and, before she got to any of that, it seemed that they were having lunch. He announced the fact in an offhand way as he maneuvered out of the airport parking lot in his midnight-blue European car. Rowena hadn’t taken in the make or model; she was too busy sinking into the luxury of its butter-soft leather seating.

And then he hit her with the lunch thing.

“At La Jolla,” he explained. “Not quite on the way, but almost. There’s a great seafood place that overlooks the ocean. It’s on the market, and I think it might be an interesting addition to the Radford Lateral Enterprises portfolio so I’m scoping it out. We can celebrate the start of the project with some champagne.”

She wanted to ask him if a long, expensive lunch was really necessary, but when she rehearsed the words in her head they sounded prim and disapproving and, really, did she need to be that way? She should remember why she was here.

To work on a really fascinating, historic, possibility-laden Spanish-land-grant ranch’s mission-style garden.

Ben Radford’s garden.

“Great,” she said firmly. “And while we eat, we can talk about some ideas.”

Five minutes before reaching the restaurant, they passed the corporate headquarters of Radford Biotech. The low white building was set in a manicured sea of green turf, mown in a crisscross pattern that made it look like a plaid blanket spread on the ground.

The reflective glass of the windows shone in the sun. The massed plantings of exotic grasses and desert shrubs had a majestic, almost architectural quality, and the asphalt driveway that led into the parking lot was as fresh and smooth as the frosting on a wedding cake.

“That’s my original outfit,” was Ben’s four-word commentary, and Rowena didn’t like to crane her neck to take a backward glance at the building because he seemed so offhanded about it.

And after all, the corporation was no longer his.

It said something about him, though—about his eye for detail and beauty in the building and its surrounds, and the hard work he must have put in to create something so successful.

She didn’t totally buy the offhandedness, either. “You sold it all? You didn’t keep a partial share?”

“I sold it all,” he said, then added almost ruefully, “And then three months ago a big parcel of shares came back onto the market and I bought them for twenty percent more per share than I’d gotten for them last year. Just as my ex-wife predicted, the value’s still going up. So I do have a stake in the old place again, now—around ten percent.”