His voice had changed since their flirty conversation a minute or two ago. It was harder, tighter, with his English origins prominent in the clipped vowels. His face had changed, too. In the space of an hour, Rowena had seen him as the arrogant, impatient businessman, the intelligent connoisseur and the charmingly cynical flirt. Now she was shocked to see him as a human being through and through, with a beating, vulnerable heart.
He minded about the divorce, she realized.
Minded horribly, in a whole lot of ways that went bone deep and that he hadn’t even begun to come to terms with, yet.
For a moment there, she’d thought his light approach to the subject meant the opposite—that he didn’t care a bit. But now she could see she’d been wrong. He made those drawling jokes about it to mask the anger and failure and pain—mask them from others and from himself. He talked about it because he was still too raw to keep it to himself. He shrouded himself in a successful businessman’s arrogance because this was probably the first, and certainly the worst, failure he’d ever had to deal with in his life.
And at some level, he had no idea that this was what he was doing.
“Dr. Madison?” Heather echoed sharply. “You’re a doctor and you have to take a second job as a gardener to make ends meet?” She was a tiny, gorgeous blonde with bright-blue eyes, flawless porcelain skin and a pert nose, and she wore a cream silk trouser suit that would have taken out Rowena’s monthly dry-cleaning bill in a single hit. “Boy, did you pick the wrong specialty!”
It would have been a funny line, if the sarcasm level hadn’t been so high. Rowena had the impression that Heather could be a very funny woman when she wanted to be—funny and clever and captivating and even more ruthlessly cynical than Ben.
“I’m not a medical doctor,” Rowena said, her awkwardness rising back to where it had been just before she’d let fly at Ben Radford half an hour ago. “I have a Ph. D.”
“Ah, now it makes sense. There’s no money at all in academia. Wait a minute, though. You have a Ph. D. in actual gardening? You can do that?”
“I design and restore historic gardens, yes. My Ph. D. dissertation involved—”
Heather wasn’t interested in the subject of Rowie’s dissertation. She trained an accusing look on her not-quite-ex-husband. “How much work are you having done in the yard? You’re bringing in someone like this. I bet you’re landscaping the whole damn thing!”
“Not quite the whole damn thing, Heather. I’ve decided to leave the cattle runs alone,” Ben drawled. “The beasts seem happy enough with grass. I’m just doing the section behind the house.”
“Just? That’s an acre! More! And, let me guess, we’re not just talking about a few deliveries of dirt and flowers. This is going to be hugely expensive, isn’t it? You’re pouring yet more money into this impossible place, and it’s going to mess up the valuation and slow down the divorce. You’re doing it deliberately. I’m not fooled, Ben! Not for a second!”
“And I’m not doing it to be difficult,” he said tightly. “For heaven’s sake, Heather! You knew I wanted to restore the whole place when we bought it.”
“When you bought it, against my wishes. When you sold a brilliant, high-profit company for half or even a third of what you could have gotten if you’d waited another few years, just so you could mess around with money pits like your precious gallery and your precious casting agency and your restaurant and this wretched historic ranch that’s already soaked up a gazillion dollars. It makes zero sense! And don’t tell me again that you were bored.”
“I was, though,” he said curtly. “Horribly bored. I’d done everything I wanted to do with Radford Biotech. I’d made plenty of money and I didn’t want to hang on to it just so I could wear myself out making even more money doing more of the same thing. Heather, we’ve been through this a hundred times.”
“Yes,” she said bitterly. “And nothing changes. Which is why we’re getting divorced.”
“Is it?”
“Yes! So please, if you have any vestige of feeling left for the time we spent together, don’t mess up my lawyer’s incredibly careful and conscientious and fair valuation with this insane landscaping plan.”
She snatched the binder back from him, turned on a heel that was way too high for such a maneuver and stalked back to the car with her shoes cracking like gunshots on the paving.
Wa-a-ay better gunshots than Rowena’s own shoes had made when she’d attempted a similar exit, she noted with a twinge of self-mocking envy. It was the Ferrari versus the two-door compact, all over again.
Ben followed his not-quite-ex-wife, with that familiar, vinegary feeling flooding into his stomach.
They used to be happy, the two of them. Heather could bewitch a man, when she wanted to. Twelve years ago, as a very focused and overserious biotechnology student, he hadn’t had a clue why she’d chosen to bewitch him.
“I just fell for you,” she’d said later, but had added something that was possibly more honest. “I saw the potential.”
Fell for him, saw the potential, then made improvements.
He’d already spent most of his adolescence building up his body as an antidote to the crippling loneliness and brutality of his expensive British boarding school, but he’d never taken any interest in clothes. Heather supervised his grooming and his wardrobe, boosted him out of his solitude and seriousness in a hundred energetic and very determined ways. And since he didn’t like failure, he had recognized that everything she wanted for him was necessary and important.
On the business front, she supported him in applying for commercial patents on his ideas instead of his original plan of going into academic research, and helped him start his company while he was still completing his master’s degree.
He’d respected her for all of it and had kept the respect for years. He’d loved her, and considered their marriage to be as close to ideal as marriage could get. Practical. Workable. Companionable. A success. In fact, he still didn’t want to deny the years they’d been happy together. Why backdate their failure that far?
Heather was no airhead herself. She’d come to England on a college scholarship, and she had ambition as well as brains. When she’d shelved her own plan to become a research chemist in order to put her energy into helping him build Radford Biotech, he’d seen it as a sacrifice on her part.
Now he wasn’t so sure. Had she viewed him as nothing more than a diamond-encrusted meal ticket all along? The prospect galled him, and made him question his own judgment.
He’d first put forward the idea of selling the company around two and a half years ago, at a time when he’d also begun to think seriously about starting a family. Heather had been against the sale from the beginning. “As far as I’m concerned, the company’s still in its infancy. Its potential is barely tapped.”
“Look at me, though, Heather,” he’d argued from the heart, in a way he rarely did. “I’m in a business suit sixteen hours a day. My frequent-flyer miles could get me to the moon and back on a free first-class ticket. I never even get into the labs to play around with ideas anymore, let alone have a chance to do anything else that interests me. You used to tell me I was too serious when we first met, now you want to push me right back into that box. I’m not interested in that box anymore. There are other challenges out there, other frontiers. What’s it all for?”
“Oh, around five hundred million in pocket change, maybe?”
“Don’t we already have more money than we can spend? I never get time to spend any of it. And I’ve never cared about cold cash for its own sake, you know that.”
He’d talked about wanting to enjoy his business interests, wanting to apply his mind and his energy to something new, wanting to give