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Barrett’s amber eyes held mine. “Our work.”

A smile spread across my face. “Careful. You said our work.”

“Did I? Doesn’t sound like me.”

I laughed so hard that I dropped my forehead onto his chest. His arms came around me automatically.

When I finally caught my breath, I lifted my head.

Barrett smiled as he studied my face. “Feels normal.”

“What does?”

“This.” His hand resumed its slow path through my hair. “You here.”

My chest tightened. “Yeah. It does.”

I lowered myself against him again. For once, I didn’t need to analyze the feeling. I simply let myself have it.

The warm room, his arm around me, our work scattered through the cabin. The impossible little plant thriving on his windowsill because Barrett had known, without knowing how, exactly where it belonged.

I understood that plant better now.

Sometimes the right conditions weren’t the ones you could explain.

Sometimes something simply took root.

And grew.

Chapter 9

Barrett

I spaced the comfrey eighteen inches from the yarrow, knowing their mature spread would bring them together in three years—close enough to share root traffic, far enough that neither would choke the other.

I’d known that spacing since I was old enough to hold a spade. I had never, before this morning, planted anything I wasn’t going to be there to watch mature.

My hands were buried to the wrist in the south bed. The first gray light barely touched the cedars. She was still asleep inside—I could hear her breathing through the open bedroom window—and I could still taste the salt on her collarbone from the night before. I wasn’t in any hurry to stop remembering.

After shifting the comfrey hole six inches east, I tamped soil around the root ball with my heel and reached for the next specimen. All of them were hers—every cutting and division she’d collected that couldn’t survive in a press or a sample bag.

I was giving them a place.

I didn’t let myself consider that I was spacing them for a three-year spread. I didn’t let myself think about the five days left on her permit either.

The next specimen was a wintergreen she’d been keeping alive in a recycled yogurt tub. The soil in the tub was too rich, too wet—but she’d been so pleased with herself for finding it that I hadn’t said. I settled it into the south bed with its own drainage of grit and pine needles, and gave it enough room on the shaded side to spread the way it wanted to.

She’d have found the perfect soil for it, given a season. She wasn’t going to have a season.

The back door opened.

The porch boards creaked under her bare feet. She smelled of coffee and sleep, wearing my red flannel shirt, hanging past mid-thigh. Seeing her in it made my chest ache. That, and remembering how she’d looked last night—rumpled, sated, her hair tangled.

I put my attention back into the soil.

“You planted the feverfew in the corner,” she said.

“It needs full sun.”