Red Lily

he could smell the scent she wore—always light with a surprising kick—along with the garden green.
    “How many are you doing?”
    “About a dozen.” He stuck his hands in his pockets as he leaned in to watch her, smell her. And told himself he was suffering for a good cause. “Go ahead, pick another.”

    “I don’t get out in the field much.” She drew down another shoot, looked toward Harper and got his nod. “It’s different out here. Different than selling and displaying, talking to customers.”
    “You’re good at that.”
    “Yeah, I am, but being out here, it’s getting your hands into the thing. Stella knows all this stuff, and Roz, she knows everything. I like to learn. You sell better the more you know.”
    “I’d rather ram that shoot in my eye than have to sell every day.”
    She smiled as she worked. “But you’re a loner at heart, aren’t you? I’d go crazy holed up in the grafting house day after day like you. I like seeing people, and having them talk to me about what they’re looking for and why. I like selling, too. ‘Here, you take this pretty thing, and give me the money.’ ”
    She laughed as she put another shoot in the bucket. “That’s why you and Roz need somebody like me, so you can squirrel away in your caves and work with the plants for hours, and I can sell them.”
    “Seems to be working.”
    “That’s a dozen, even. What next?”
    “Over here, what we’ve got is rooted shoots I got from stool-grown stock plants.”
    “Stooling, I know what that is.” She stared down at the nursery bed and its line of straight, slim shoots. “Um, you hill the ground up to stimulate rooting, and cut them back hard in the winter, then you take the roots from the whatdoyoucallit, parent plant, and plant them out.”
    “You have been reading up.”
    “I like to learn.”
    “Shows.” And was just one more click for him. He’d never found a woman who’d interested him physically,emotionally, who shared his love of gardening. “Okay. We use a sharp, clean knife. We’re going to trim off all the leaves from the budstick—the shoots we just cut. But we’ll leave just a little stub, just about an eighth of an inch of the petiole—the leaf stalk.”
    “I know what a petiole is,” she muttered, and watched Harper demonstrate before she took her turn.
    Good hands, she thought. Quick, skilled, sure. Despite—or maybe because of the nicks and calluses—they were elegantly male.
    She thought they reflected who he was perfectly, that combination of privileged background and working-class.
    “Cut the soft tip from the top, see? Now watch.” He angled around so she could see, and their heads bent close together. “We want the first bud at the base, that’s where we’re going to cut into the stem, just a little below there. See how you have to angle the cut, going down, then another above, behind the bud toward that first cut. And . . .” Gently, holding the chip by the leaf stalk, he held it out.
    “I can do that.”
    “Go ahead.” He slipped the bud chip into a plastic bag, and watched her work.
    She was careful, which was a relief to him, and he heard her whispering his instructions to herself with every move.
    “I did it!”
    “Nice job. Let’s get the rest.”
    He did seven in the time it took her to do three, but she didn’t mind. He showed her how to stand astride the rootstock to remove the sideshoots and leaves from the bottom twelve inches.
    She knew it was a maneuver, and really, she’d probably feel guilty about it later, but she deliberately fumbled her first attempt.

    “No, you need to position it between your legs, more like this.”
    As she’d hoped, he came over to stand behind her, in a nice vertical spoon, his arms coming around, making her belly dance as his hands closed over her wrists.
    “Bend down a little, loosen at the knees. That’s it. Now . . .” He guided her hand for the cut. “Just a sliver of the bark,” he murmured, and his breath breezed along her ear. “See, there’s the cambium. You want to leave a lip at the base where the chip will layer.”
    He smelled like the trees, sort of hot and earthy. His body felt so firm pressed against hers. She wished she could turn around, just turn so they were pressed front to front. She’d only have to rise up on her toes for their mouths to line up.
    It was a maneuver, and shame on her, but she looked over her shoulder, looked dead into his eyes. And smiled. “Is that