Page 23 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
But underneath all that green tangle, if a person looked closely—if a person crouched down and parted the crabgrass and the thistle—the soil held a different color. Darker. Richer. Worked soil. Soil that someone who knew gardens had turned, fed, and tended.
His wife used to plant roses along the front porch railing.
Rafe’s words from that second evening circled back, and with them the gravel in his voice, the way he’d gripped the arm of his chair when he’d said it. He’d told her not to touch the beds. But touching and tending amounted to different things, and, right now, those beds needed nurturing the way a child needed feeding.
The weeds had buried the roses Miriam Foster had planted here, and Grace had a thing or two to say about that.
She set the wash basket on the step and knelt.
The first weed came up with a satisfyingrip, roots and all, trailing clumps of dark earth that crumbled between her fingers. She shook the dirt off, tossed the weed into the basket, which she’d now have to wash, but she’d take that trade, and reached for the next one. Then the next.
Pretty soon, she’d stopped thinking about anything except the rhythm of the work, grip and pull and shake, grip and pulland shake, and the smell of turned soil rising up around her like bread baking.
The baby slept through all of it.
The weeds gave up their secrets as she cleared them. Beneath the crabgrass, a woody stem pushed up from the base of the railing post. Grace brushed the dirt from around its base and traced the stem upward to where new growth had started, pale green shoots reaching for sunlight through the canopy of weeds that had smothered everything around them.
A rose bush. Still alive.
Further down the bed, another survivor. And another. Three bushes total, half-strangled but stubborn, pushing up through two years of neglect with the kind of blind determination that only living things possess.
Grace sat back on her heels.
Sweat ran down the channel of her spine and soaked into her waistband. Dirt packed under every fingernail and worked into the creases of her knuckles, the good kind of dirt—garden dirt—soil that still held the promise of growing something.
She’d cleared half the bed already.
She leaned forward and tugged at a stubborn clump of thistle. The roots ran deep on this one, spreading through the soil in a web that held fast when she pulled. She shifted her grip, braced her knee, and yanked.
Someone cleared their throat behind her.
Chapter Seven
Grace yelped and threw a clump of dirt at him.
Which, alright, fine, Loganhadsnuck up on her. He’d come around the side of the house to check on the downspout bracket that’d been working loose since the last rain. Instead, he’d found Grace on her knees in his mother’s flower beds with dirt up to her elbows and the baby strapped to her chest like some kind of tiny sack of grain.
For a second, he just stood there, even with the dirt sliding down his cheek and Grace looking at him with her mouth open.
Because the beds looked different.
Half of the crabgrass and the thistle that’d swallowed everything over the past two years—all that choking green tangle—sat in a pile on the porch step. While underneath, where he hadn’t looked in longer than he cared to admit, three rose bushes clung to their spots along the railing with new shoots reaching up through the cleared soil.
She blinked and closed her mouth.
“You gonna just stand there gawkin’ or you gonna help?”
So, he helped.
Not because she told him to, mind. But because the alternative meant walking away from his mother’s rose bushes while somebody else tended them, and that sat wrong in a place he couldn’t quite get at. Besides, the downspout bracket could wait. It’d waited this long.
He knelt on the opposite end of the bed and started pulling weeds. Grip, pull, shake the dirt loose, toss. Grip, pull, shake, toss. The soil came apart easily under his fingers, and the smell of it caught somewhere behind his breastbone.
Ma used to smell like this soil after a morning in the garden. Like turned earth and green things and the faint sweetness of rose sap on her hands when she’d come inside to start supper.
“These bushes got some fight left in ’em.” Grace worked a root free and held it up. “Your ma knew what she was doin’. The roots run deep enough to survive just about anything.”
“Yeah.” He pulled at a clump of crabgrass. “She had a way with growin’ things. These roses, she, uh, ordered the cuttings special from a nursery in Denver. Took her three tries to get ’em to take in this altitude.”
