NRoberts - G1 Blue Dahlia

Still, it made a sweet, if brief, fantasy.

She spotted Logan's truck and a second pickup outside a two-story brick house.

She could see immediately it wasn't as well kept as most of its neighbors. The front lawn was patchy.

The foundation plantings desperately needed shaping, and what had been flower beds looked either overgrown or stone dead.

She heard the buzz of chain saws and country music playing too loud as she walked around the side

of the house. Ivy was growing madly here, crawling its way up the brick. Should be stripped off, she thought. That maple needs to come down, before it falls down, and that fence line's covered with brambles, overrun with honeysuckle.

In the back, she spotted Logan, harnessed halfway up a dead oak. Wielding the chain saw, he speared through branches. It was cool, but the sun and the labor had a dew of sweat on his face, and a line of

it darkening the back of his shirt.

Okay, so he was sexy. Any well-built man doing manual labor looked sexy. Add some sort of dangerous tool to the mix, and the image went straight to the lust bars and played a primal tune.

But sexy, she reminded herself, wasn't the point.

His work and their working dynamics were the point. She stood well out of the way while he worked,

and scanned the rest of the backyard.

The space might have been lovely once, but now it was neglected, weedy, overgrown with trash trees

and dying shrubs. A sagging garden shed tilted in the far corner of a fence smothered in vines.

Nearly a quarter of an acre, she estimated as she watched a huge black man drag lopped branches

toward a short, skinny white man working a splitter. Nearby a burly-looking mulcher waited its turn to chew up the rest.

The beauty here wasn't lost, Stella decided. It was just buried.

It needed vision to bring it to life again.

Since the black man caught her eye, Stella wandered over to the ground crew.

"Help you, Miss?"

She extended her hand and a smile. "I'm Stella Rothchild, Ms. Harper's manager."

" 'Meetcha. I'm Sam, this here is Dick."

The little guy had the fresh, freckled face of a twelve-year-old, with a scraggly goatee that looked as if

it might have grown there by mistake. "Heard about you." He sent an eyebrow-wiggling grin toward

her coworker.

"Really?" She kept her tone friendly, though her teeth came together tight in the smile. "I thought it

would be helpful if I dropped by a couple of the jobs, looked at the work." She scanned the yard again, deliberately keeping her gaze below Logan's perch in the tree. "You've certainly got yours cut out for

you with this."

"Got a mess of clearing to do," Sam agreed. Covered with work gloves, his enormous hands settled on

his hips. "Seen worse, though."

"Is there a projection on man-hours?"

"Projection." Dick sniggered and elbowed Sam.

From his great height, Sam sent down a pitying look.

"You want to know about the plans and, uh, projections," he said, "you need to talk to the boss. He's

got all that worked up."

"All right, then. Thanks. I'll let you get back to work."

Walking away, Stella took the little camera out of her bag and began to take what she thought of as "before" pictures.

* * *

He knew she was there. Standing down there all pressed and tidy with her wild hair pulled back and shaded glasses hiding her big blue eyes.

He'd wondered when she would come nag him on a job, as it appeared to him she was a woman born

to nag. At least she had the sense not to interrupt.

Then again, she seemed to be nothing but sense.

Maybe she'd surprise him. He liked surprises, and he'd gotten one when he met her kids. He'd expected to see a couple of polite little robots. The sort that looked to their domineering mother before saying a word. Instead he'd found them normal, interesting, funny kids. Surely it took some imagination to

manage two active boys.

Maybe she was only a pain in the ass when it came to work.

Well, he grinned a little as he cut through a branch. So was he.

He let her wait while he finished. It took him another thirty minutes, during which he largely ignored her. Though he did see her take a camera—Jesus—then a notebook out of her purse.

He also noticed she'd gone over to speak to his men and that Dick sent occasional glances in Stella's direction.

Dick was a social moron, Logan thought, particularly when it came to women. But he was a tireless worker, and he would take on the filthiest job with a blissful and idiotic grin. Sam, who had more common sense in his big toe than Dick had in his entire skinny body, was, thank God, a tolerant and patient man.

They went back to high school, and that was the sort of thing that set well with Logan. The continuity

of it, and the fact that because they'd known each other around twenty years, they didn't have to gab

all the damn time to make themselves understood.

Explaining things half a dozen times just tried his patience. Which he had no problem admitting he had

in short supply to begin with.