NRoberts - G1 Blue Dahlia

He had no intention of dating toe-the-line Stella Rothchild. She wasn't his type.

Okay, sure she was. He set to work turning the soil between his lines to prep for leveling and laying the black plastic. He'd never met a woman, really, who wasn't his type.

He just liked the breed, that's all. Young ones and old ones, country girls and city-slicked. Whip smart

or bulb dim, women just appealed to him on most every level.

He'd ended up married to one, hadn't he? And though that had been a mistake, you had to make them along the way.

Maybe he'd never been particularly drawn to the structured, my-way-or-the-highway type before. But there was always a first time. And he liked first times. It was the second times and the third times that could wear on a man.

But he wasn't attracted to Stella.

Okay, shit. Yes, he was. Mildly. She was a good-looking woman, nicely shaped, too. And there was the hair. He was really gone on the hair. Wouldn't mind getting his hands on that hair, just to see if it felt as sexy as it looked.

But it didn't mean he wanted to date her. It was hard enough to deal with her professionally. The

woman had a rule or a form or a damn system for everything.

Probably had them in bed, too. Probably had a typed list of bullet points, dos and don'ts, all with a mission statement overview.

What the woman needed was some spontaneity, a little shake of the order of things. Not that he was interested in being the one to provide it.

It was just that she'd looked so pretty that morning, and her hair had smelled good. Plus she'd had that sexy little smile going for her. Before he knew it, he'd been talking about taking her to Graceland.

Nothing to worry about, he assured himself. She wouldn't go. It wasn't the sort of thing a woman like

her did, just for the hell of it. As far as he could tell, she didn't do anything for the hell of it.

They'd both forget he'd even brought it up.

* * *

Because she felt it was imperative, at least for the first six months of her management, Stella insisted

on a weekly progress meeting with Roz.

She'd have preferred a specific time for these meetings, and a specific location. But Roz was hard to

pin down.

She'd already held them in the propagation house and in the field. This time she cornered Roz in her

own sitting room, where she'd be unlikely to escape.

"I wanted to give you your weekly update."

"Oh. Well, all right." Roz set aside a book on hybridizing that was thick as a railroad tie, and took off

her frameless reading glasses. 'Time's zipping by. Ground's warming up."

"I know. Daffodils are ready to pop. So much earlier than I'm used to. We've been selling a lot of bulbs. Back north, we'd sell most of those late summer or fall."

"Homesick?"

"Now and then, but less and less already. I can't say I'm sorry to be out of Michigan as we slog through February. They got six inches of snow yesterday, and I'm watching daffodils spearing up."

Roz leaned back in the chair, crossed her sock-covered feet at the ankles. "Is there a problem?"

"So much for the illusion that I conceal my emotions under a composed facade. No, no problem. I did

the duty call home to my mother a little while ago. I'm still recovering."

"Ah."

It was a noncommittal sound, and Stella decided she could interpret it as complete non-interest or a tacit invitation to unload. Because she was brimming, she chose to unload.

"I spent the almost fifteen minutes she spared me out of her busy schedule listening to her talk about her current boyfriend. She actually calls these men she sees boyfriends. She's fifty-eight years old, and she just had her fourth divorce two months ago. When she wasn't complaining that Rocky—and he's actually named Rocky— isn't attentive enough and won't take her to the Bahamas for a midwinter getaway, she was talking about her next chemical peel and whining about how her last Botox injection hurt. She never asked about the boys, and the only reference she made to the fact that I was living and working down here was to ask if I was tired of being around the jerk and his bimbo—her usual terms for my father

and Jolene."

When she'd run out of steam, Stella rubbed her hands over her face. "Goddamn it."

"That's a lot of bitching, whining, and venom to pack into a quarter of an hour. She sounds like a very talented woman."

It took Stella a minute—a minute where she let her hands slide into her lap so she could stare into Roz's face. Then she let her own head fall back with a peal of laughter.

"Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, she's loaded with talent. Thanks."

"No problem. My mama spent most of her time—at least the time we were on earth together—sighing wistfully over her health. Not that she meant to complain, so she said. I very nearly put that on her tombstone. 'Not That I Mean to Complain.'"

"I could put 'I Don't Ask for Much' on my mother's."

"There you go. Mine made such an impression on me that I went hell-bent in the opposite direction. I could probably cut off a limb, and you wouldn't hear a whimper out of me."