Page 11 of Just My Luck

Joe yelped and let go of the gardener’s shirt, then backed away.

“Hey!” yelled Zara. “Was that really necess⁠—”

Jim turned, the hose moving along with him, and suddenly a rush of water hit her face. She shrieked in surprise and stepped backwards into a patch of mud. No matter how much she windmilled her arms, she couldn’t keep her balance.

She landed, without any shred of grace, in the middle of a wet bush. It broke her fall but also poked her with its sharp leaves. “Ow!” she yelped.

Jim tossed aside the hose and reached out to help her. “Sorry about that,” he muttered, as he pulled her off the bush. “You surprised me. Are you all right?”

“No.” Water dripped from her face. Worse, her hair had come out of its knot and gotten snagged on those sharp-edged leaves. Every time she tried to move, she just got more tangled up. “What is this horrible bush I’m trapped in?”

“That would be a Kona cheesewood. Pittosporum hosmeri. It’s a native plant⁠—”

“Spare me the botany lecture. Can you just get me out?”

“I got you!” called Big Joe from inside the hale. She heard thumping and bumping in there, and imagined him scrambling to come to her rescue.

Jim the gardener braced himself for action. His straw hat had gotten knocked entirely off his head now and hung by its leather string around his neck. His dark hair was a sweaty mess. Somehow, despite all that, she experienced that same zing of attraction.

She squashed it and focused on the crisis at hand. She needed to get rid of Big Joe so she could ask the gardener where the kids had gone.

As soon as she heard the security guard emerge from the front door, she called, “I’m good, Joe. Why don’t you go find out how that car got in here? Talk to the gate guards. That shouldn’t have happened.”

“You sure, Zara? I don’t like leaving you alone with that⁠—”

“It turns out he’s one of our gardeners. He was just watering the shrubs, right, Jim?”

“That’s right,” Jim called, a muscle ticking in his jaw. She got the impression that being manhandled by a security guard had been a shock to his system. “But thanks for being extra cautious, man.”

She could practically hear the reluctance in Big Joe’s heavy footfalls as he headed away from the hale.

“Where’s Mia and Eddie?” she asked in a fierce whisper as soon as he was gone.

Jim set to work disentangling her hair from the foliage. She was still dripping wet, but the Kona sun would dry her in no time.

“Behind the bromeliad out back. Hold still.” The note of command in his voice took her by surprise.

“You’re awfully bossy for a gardener. Is that how you make the plants grow? Just order them around?”

“I’m trying to get you free, and you want to give me a hard time?” The irritation in his voice made her smile. Despite the awkward situations in which she’d seen him so far, he was such a composed person, almost too in control of himself. It felt good to rattle him.

“What were you doing out here, anyway?”

“My job.”

“Try again. It rained last night, there was no need to water this cheese plant. Which, I assume, doesn’t actually produce cheese no matter how much you water it.”

His lips quirked. “It’s a cheesewood, and no, it doesn’t. I was hanging around to make sure your kids got out of sight okay. In case they didn’t, I had a plan.”

“What plan?”

“I was going to pretend they were my kids and that they were playing hide and seek, for which they were going to be grounded.” He freed a strand of her hair and showed it to her in triumph. “One down.”

“Ugh, do you have some garden shears? Just cut it all off.”

“Never!” He sounded appalled at the very thought. “You have…nice hair.”

The compliment hung between them like an undetonated grenade.