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“Who is he, Maddie?” Lynn wasn’t joking around. Period.
“Darin.”
The response sent Lynn backward in her chair with a whoosh. Of course. She should have seen it. Expected it. Known. Maddie and Darin, alike in some ways, pushing themselves through the rigors of therapy together…
They’d been at the park together, with Kara.
But…
“You haven’t ever liked anyone but Alan,” she said out loud.
“I know.”
They all should have seen this coming, but Lynn hadn’t. And as far as she knew, Sara hadn’t, either. Just the opposite, in fact. Maddie was deathly afraid of men. She was the last resident they’d have thought would be in danger of some kind of transference or neediness with the Bishop men on campus.
To the contrary, they’d hoped an association with someone as harmless as Darin would help ease Maddie back into an ability to be more comfortable around men.
“Maybe Darin just seems like a good Alan to you. Someone who will take care of you.”
The man had that air about him. Like he’d right wrongs, fix that which was broken. In spite of his injury.
Maddie shook her head. “He…looks at me. And I get all rubbery inside.”
Oh, boy.
“Has he ever touched you, Maddie?” She kept her voice soft, calm.
“No! Darin, he wouldn’t hurt anything. Except a spider. He stepped on it.”
Apparently, there’d been a spider during therapy….
“Is it wrong for me to like him, Lynn?”
“No! Of course not.” It wasn’t. In theory. But, oh, boy. Lynn’s insides were churning now, too.
And not in a rubbery way.
CHAPTER NINE
GRANT GAVE LUKE and Craig the whole weekend off. He was going to need them to work overtime the following week, just long enough to set the big boulders in the rock fountain and help with the trenching and plumbing. He’d already purchased treated cedar and metal joists for the benches that he and Darin were going to build on Sunday. And Saturday, he was going to get caught up with all of the regular mowing, irrigation checks, trimming and spraying for weeds so that he could devote the beginning of the next week, after his Bishop Landscaping work, completely to the Garden of Renewal.
The women at The Lemonade Stand needed their garden. He didn’t want to keep them waiting any longer.
Lynn, dressed in scrubs, was walking from the main building, where she had her office and saw her patients, toward the cluster of bungalows at the back of the property. He’d mowed her yard. At least twice since he’d been there.
He just didn’t know which one it was.
But he knew she had a cute ass. A distraction on this Saturday morning. He watched until it was out of sight.
“Hey, Mister…” The voice was close.
He’d been alone. Had just mowed around a small pond in one of the landscaped atriums between buildings, and had noticed that the intake line had not been flowing smoothly. He’d taken the metal cover off the grass-covered hole in the ground that housed the pond’s motorized equipment.
“Kara, no!” He shouted the words as he lunged for the little girl, scooping her up just before she ran right into that hole in her eagerness to get to him.
Maddie…and Darin?…who obviously had no idea the cover was off the access hole, were walking not far behind, watching Kara, but Darin’s head was bent toward something Maddie was saying.
Kara’s shriek was cut off as her body slammed into his chest, probably knocking the air half out of her. And then little arms slapped him on both sides of his neck as the tiny body clung to him. Kara shook and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the child was sobbing. The arms that had clutched him were pushing against him.
He’d scared the crap out of her.
“It’s all right,” he said, the words coming from somewhere he didn’t know existed within him, trying not to drop the squirming little body, but not wanting to hurt her, either. “It’s all right. I didn’t want you to fall in the hole in the ground. See?” Turning, he tilted so that her gaze was facing the hole. “It’s supposed to be covered, but it wasn’t because there was a boo-boo on that machine down there and I had to fix it.”
