“You’ll think it’s dumb.”
“Try me.”
“I want to set up a gardening charity for people who haven’t got room for a garden of their own. Buy up some land somewhere so people can come and plant things or just sit on the grass and relax. A big public space like a park but where everyone can help with the planting.”
“I’ll help you get there,” he says without looking at me. “Once this job’s done, I’ll buy you the land you need.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I never kid.” He lapses into silence.
“What do you want out of life?” I ask a couple of minutes later just as we reach the gas station and pull out onto the road beyond it.
“To retire,” he says without pausing to think.
“From what job? You still haven’t told me what it is you do.”
“I guess you could say I’m a type of private investigator.”
“So you look at bushes all day long?”
A smile flickers on his lips as he glances my way. “That’s a privet investigator.”
I can’t help beaming back at him. “You got the joke.”
“I’m not an idiot. Of course, I got the joke.”
“No one I know would have got that joke.” I look out at the window at the passing trees, wondering what the bubbling feeling is in my stomach. Gas? Motion sickness? Nerves? Something else? “I thought you never kid.”
I turn and look at him and the sensation grows. It’s that kiss he gave me. I can still feel it. “The kiss,” I say to him in a quiet voice. “Why did you kiss me?”
“Because I like you.
“Why can you only give me twenty-fours if you like me that much?”
“Because you’re good and pure and wholesome. You’re everything I’m not. I warned you this was a bad idea. Anything good that I get hold of, I ruin. Trust me. Any longer than a day and you’d regret it, big time.”
“That simple, is it?”
“Does everything need to be complicated?”
“Most things in life are.”
“Not this. We have one day together. You have a safe word you can use at any time. You know what a safe word is, right?”
“I’ve read enough steamy romances to know about safe words. How about I use, ‘garden,’ as mine.”
“Whatever works for you. You say that to me and everything stops. I leave. I don’t hear that word, I keep going. Got it?”
“Keep going with what?”
The smile comes back to his lips and he looks across at me with ravenous hunger evident on his face. “You’ll see.”
“Is it the things you talked to me about before?”
“And what might that have been?” he asks in a mock innocent voice. “I forget.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”