Blue Dahlia

“I’m buying the CD. And make mine a Diet Coke.”
    She ate the hot dog, drank the Coke. She bought the CD. But unlike every other female he knew, she didn’t have some religious obligation to look at and paw over everything in the store. She did her business and was done—neat, tidy, and precise.
    And as they walked back to his truck, he noticed she glanced at the readout display of her cell phone. Again.
    “Problem?”
    “No.” She slipped the phone back into her bag. “Just checking to see if I had any messages.” But it seemed everyone had managed without her for an afternoon.
    Unless something was wrong with the phones. Or they’d lost her number. Or—
    “The nursery could’ve been attacked by psychopaths with a petunia fetish.” Logan opened the passenger-side door. “The entire staff could be bound and gagged in the propagation house even as we speak.”
    Deliberately, Stella zipped her bag closed. “You won’t think that’s so funny if we get there and that’s just what happened.”
    “Yes, I will.”
    He walked around the truck, got behind the wheel.
    “I have an obsessive, linear, goal-oriented personality with strong organizational tendencies.”
    He sat for a moment. “I’m glad you told me. I was under the impression you were a scatterbrain.”
    “Well, enough about me. Why—”
    “Why do you keep doing that?”
    She paused, her hands up in her hair. “Doing what?”
    “Why do you keep jamming those pins in your hair?”
    “Because they keep coming out.”
    To her speechless shock, he reached over, tugged the loosened bobby pins free, then tossed them on the floor of his truck. “So why put them in there in the first place?”
    “Well, for God’s sake.” She scowled down at the pins. “How many times a week does someone tell you you’re pushy and overbearing?”
    “I don’t count.” He drove out of the lot and into traffic. “You’ve got sexy hair. You ought to leave it alone.”
    “Thanks very much for the style advice.”
    “Women don’t usually sulk when a man tells them they’re sexy.”
    “I’m not sulking, and you didn’t say I was sexy. You said my hair was.”
    He took his eyes off the road long enough to give her an up-and-down glance. “Rest of you works, too.”
    Okay, something was wrong when that sort of half-assed compliment had heat balling in her belly. Best to return to safe topics. “To return to my question before I was so oddly interrupted, why did you go into landscape design?”
    “Summer job that stuck.”
    She waited a beat, two. Three. “Really, Logan, must you go on and on, boring me with details?”
    “Sorry. I never know when to shut up. I grew up on a farm.”
    “Really? Did you love it or hate it?”
    “Was used to it, mostly. I like working outside, and don’t mind heavy, sweaty work.”
    “Blabbermouth,” she said when he fell silent again.
    “Not that much more to it. I didn’t want to farm, and my daddy sold the farm some years back, anyway. But I like working the land. It’s what I like, it’s what I’m good at. No point in doing something you don’t like or you’re not good at.”
    “Let’s try this. How did you know you were good at it?”
    “Not getting fired was an indication.” He didn’t see how she could possibly be interested, but since she was pressing, he’d pass the time. “You know how you’re in school, say in history, and they’re all Battle of Hastings or crossing the Rubicon or Christ knows? In and out,” he said, tapping one side of his head, then the other. “I’d jam it in there long enough to skin through the test, then poof. But on the job, the boss would say we’re going to put cotoneasters in here, line these barberries over there, and I’d remember. What they were, what they needed. I liked putting them in. It’s satisfying, digging the hole, prepping the soil, changing the look of things. Making it more pleasing to the eye.”
    “It is,” she agreed. “Believe it or not, that’s the same sort of deal I have with my files.”
    He slanted her a look that made her lips twitch. “You say. Anyway, sometimes I’d get this idea that, you know, those cotoneasters would look better over there, and instead of barberries, golden mops would set this section off. So I angled off into design.”
    “I thought about design for a while. Not that good at it,” she said. “I realized I had a hard time adjusting my vision to blend with the team’s—or the client’s. And