With a snarl, I smashed the elevator button so hard my thumb smarted. I shook it out and watched the numbers climb. Why now? After dealing with a shitty experience, licking my wounds in Boston with Rach and Mace, to come here, find a hot guy who is overt in showing his appreciation for me, or at least my body, and everything builds up to this? Had it always been coming to this point? Where I felt as though my emotions and fears were simmering like lava under the Earth’s surface, a volcano that could erupt at any moment?
The elevator dinged and I was catapulted into a very strange world. Plants, trees and the humid air blasted against my skin, making it hard to breathe. The humidity was so thick you could cut it like a pat of butter.
“Jesus...” I swallowed reflexively trying to bite back the fish-out-of-water feeling.
“Lucita! Over here.” I heard Anton call but only saw a man’s form, a blur of white as he moved from plant to plant. On closer inspection, his shirt, linen pants, even his boat shoes were white and smattered with dirt, marking up the toes. A huge, Asian style sunhat peeked up over a large shrub as I made my way closer.
I stopped and stared at Anton as he pulled weeds, twisting the bottom and yanking them out, scraggly, webbed roots and all. “What are you doing?”
“Gardening. There’s gloves over there. Do you have a green thumb?” he asked, with what sounded like hope in his tone.
I shook my head. “ ’Fraid not. I kill most things.”
He stood tall, the linen shirt forming around all his muscles. A stirring of excitement started low in my belly but fizzled out when he stepped closer, within touching distance. Look but no touch. Interesting.
“Guess we’ll have to change that, won’t we?”
Shrugging I pulled on the gloves. “Never gardened before. Back in Vegas we have what’s called zero-scaping. Rocks instead of lawn, cacti instead of bushes and succulents instead of flowers. You don’t have to do much to keep those suckers alive.”
“Ah, but the joy comes from the tending and caring for something other than yourself.”
Lovely way to think of it.
“Here, you see this plant?” I followed his fingers and assessed the wild green sprout that didn’t look like the others. “This weed will end up infiltrating this entire box of Pawpaw.” I crinkled my nose not sure what the heck a Pawpaw was. He grinned. “It’s a shrub, but it flowers. See this?” He held up a stem that had a flower unlike any I’d ever seen. It was a deep, dark eggplant color at the center, with three long petals that were light, greenish yellow in color. Unique for sure. “The weed will infest the entire lot and destroy the beauty growing within. Kind of like negative thoughts.”
Negative thoughts. “How so?”
He smiled softly, his eyes a bright green. “Sit with me, Lucita.” I did as he bade. Planting my bum on the small edge of the flower box. “Negative thoughts are planted like a seed in the brain, and then once they grow, they take over the whole mind. Infecting your ability to see truth and beauty clearly. To see the honesty behind a person or situation. In the end those thoughts take over, and you lose sight of the joy of having that person in your life. Like the weed. It will grow and infest the entire planter box until all the beauty is destroyed and all that remains is the one thing you didn’t want in the first place. The weed or in this case, the negative thought.”
“You surprise me.” I laid my hand on his bicep and squeezed. When he placed his hand over my knee I froze. Fear and ugliness creeped from the center of his touch up my leg, over my body where a tightness stuck in my chest. Without realizing it at first, I held my breath. His green eyes searched mine, and he closed his eyes, blinking slowly before letting my knee go. It was as if I could breathe again. I turned my head, braced my hands on my knees, and breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying to be stealthy about it. Didn’t work. He noticed but had the decency not to comment.
When I got myself back in order, he finally answered my question. He waggled his eyebrows and licked those plump, kissable lips. “I surprise most people.” And there was the sarcastic side.
“So, gardening is your hobby?”
He nodded. “Si. I love to see beautiful things grow. And I love to eat what I’ve grown.” There was pride in his tone. This hobby seemed beloved to the Latin Lov-ah and somehow it made him more real, a bit more earthy.
The word eat jangled around in my mind. Reminded me of the way he’d eaten dinner the other night and how he reacted when I told him I hadn’t eaten. “Are you a food lover?” I asked toying with a leaf of a bush I couldn’t name. Everything was so exotic and new to my untrained eye.
Anton got up and moseyed over to another bush. “Food is a necessity. No one should be without it.”
“Sounds like man who’s lived without it and knows what it’s like.”
His jaw tightened and his lips thinned. Bingo!
“Are you going to tell me why you freeze when I touch you, even in a friendly manner. Though I’d like to touch you in other ways. If you were willing.” His eyes blazed with intensity, proving that he did, in fact, fancy me the same way I fancied him, only it wasn’t meant to be.