Lisa...she died in childbirth,’ he choked out.
No matter how many times he said the words, they never got easier. Died in childbirth. No one expected that to happen in the twenty-first century. Not in a country with an advanced health-care system. Not to a healthy young couple who could afford the very best medical treatment.
‘And...and the baby?’ Shelley asked in a voice so low it was nearly a whisper.
‘My...my daughter, Alice, died too.’
‘I’m so, so sorry. I... I don’t know what to say...’
‘Say nothing,’ he said, his jaw clenched so tightly it hurt. ‘Now you know what happened. I won’t discuss it further.’
‘But...how can you live here after...after that?’
‘It was our home. I stay to keep her memory alive.’
And to punish himself.
SHELLEY DIDN’T KNOW where to look, what to say. How could she have got him so wrong? Declan was a heartbroken widower who had hidden himself away to mourn behind the high walls of his house and the wild growth of his garden. And she had called him Mr Tall, Dark and Grumpy to her sister. She and Lynne had had a good old laugh over that. Now she cringed at the memory of their laughter. Not grumpy but grieving.
She couldn’t begin to imagine the agony of loss the man had endured. Not just his wife but his baby too. No wonder he carried such an aura of darkness when he bore such pain in his soul. And she had told him he was forbidding. Why hadn’t she recognised the shadow behind his eyes as grief and not bad temper? There’d been a hint of it the night of her interview with him but she’d chosen to ignore it.
Truth was, although she was very good at understanding plants—could diagnose in seconds what was wrong with ailing leaves or flowers—she didn’t read people very well. Somehow she didn’t seem to pick up cues, both verbal and non-verbal, that other more intuitive folk noticed. No wonder she had believed in and fallen in love with a man as dishonest and deceptive as Steve had been. She just hadn’t seen the signs.
‘Shelley excels at rushing in where angels fear to tread.’ Her grandmother used to say that quite often.
She was going to have to tread very lightly here.
‘So it...it was your wife who realised this garden needed to be set free?’
He didn’t meet her eyes but looked into the distance and nodded.
‘Only she...she wasn’t given the time to do it,’ she said.
Mentally, Shelley slammed her fist against her forehead. How much more foot in mouth could she get?
Declan went very still and a shadow seemed to pass across his lean, handsome face and dull the deep blue of his eyes. After a moment too long of silence he replied. ‘The reason I hired you was because you said much the same as she did about the garden.’
Think before you speak.
‘I... I’m glad.’ She shifted from foot to foot. ‘I’ll do my best to...to do what she would have wanted done to the...to her garden.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘She would have hated to have it all dug up and replaced with something stark and modern.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘No need to talk about it again.’
Shelley nodded, not daring to say anything in case it came out wrongly. If she stuck to talk of gardening she surely couldn’t go wrong.
He started to walk again and she followed in his wake. She wouldn’t let herself admire his broad-shouldered back view. He was a heartbroken widower.
Even if he weren’t—even if he were the most eligible bachelor in Australia—he was her employer and therefore off-limits.
Then there was the fact she had no desire for a man in her life. Not now, not yet. Maybe never.
After the disastrous relationship with Steve that had made her turn tail and run back to Sydney from Melbourne, she’d decided she didn’t want the inevitable painful disruption a man brought with him.
She’d learned hard lessons—starting with the father who had abandoned her when she was aged thirteen—that men weren’t to be trusted. And that she fell to pieces when it all went wrong. She’d taken it so badly when it had ended with Steve—beaten herself up with recrimination and pain—she’d had to resign from her job, unable to function properly. No way would she be such a trusting fool again.
As she followed her new boss around the side of the house, she kept her eyes down to the cracked pathway where tiny flowers known as erigeron or seaside daisies grew in the gaps. She liked the effect, although some would dismiss them as weeds. Nature sometimes had its own planting schemes that she had learned to accommodate. If there was such a thing as a soft-hearted horticulturalist that was her—others were more ruthless.
She was so busy concentrating on not looking at Declan, that when he paused for her to catch up she almost collided with his broad chest. ‘S-sorry,’ she spluttered, taking a step back.
How many times had she apologised already today? She had to be more collected, not let his presence fluster her so much—difficult when he was so tall, so self-contained, so darn handsome.
‘Here it is,’ he said with an expansive wave of his hand. Even his hands were attractive: large, well-shaped, with long fingers. ‘The garden that is causing my neighbours so much consternation.’ He gave the scowl that was already becoming familiar. ‘The garden I like because it completely blocks them from my sight.’
‘That...that it does.’
There must be neighbours’ houses on either side and maybe at the back but even the tops of their roofs were barely visible through the rampant growth. But, overgrown as it was, the garden was still a splendid sight. The front gave only a hint of the extent of the size of land that lay behind the house.
She stared around her for a long moment before she was able to speak again. ‘It’s magnificent. Or was magnificent. It could be magnificent again. And...and so much bigger than I thought.’
Declan’s dark brows drew together. ‘Does that daunt you?’
He must be more competent than she at reading people—because she thought she had hidden that immediate tremor of trepidation.
‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘But I’m more exhilarated by the challenge than worried I might have bitten off more than I can chew.’
‘Good. I’m confident you can do it. I wouldn’t have hired you if I wasn’t,’ he said.
Shelley appreciated the unexpected reassurance. She took a deep breath. ‘Truly, this is a grand old garden, the kind that rarely gets planted today. A treasure in its own way.’
‘And the first thing you see is the fountain,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s very grand.’
‘And very dry,’ he said.
The fountain she’d so hoped to see was classical in style, three tiers set in a large, completely dried-out rectangular pond edged by a low sandstone wall. It took quite a stretch of the imagination but she could see water glinting with sunlight flowing into a pond planted with lotus and water iris interspersed by the occasional flash of a surfacing goldfish. She could hardly wait to start work on it.
And, beyond her professional pride in her job, she wanted Declan’s approval.
Behind the fountain, paved pathways wound their way through a series of planted ‘rooms’ delineated by old-fashioned stonework walls and littered with piles of leaves that had