Chapter 2
TWO
Shit. It was happening all over again.
Graeme tried his best to keep his eyes off Ryan Hawthorne as they worked clearing the old garden beds in Hawthorne House’s kitchen garden.
Once upon a time, the garden would have looked amazing and provided fresh vegetables and herbs for the Hawthorne family and its servants.
Graeme would definitely have been one of the servants.
He’d been born with whatever the opposite of a silver spoon was in his mouth.
A dirt fork. He came from a long line of people who worked the earth and considered themselves simple country folk.
He was definitely the black sheep of his family. No, he wasn’t even a sheep in their eyes. He’d turned full goat when the truth came out during the divorce.
And now here he was, trying desperately not to sneak peeks at the way Ryan Hawthorne’s jeans hugged his tight backside when he bent over.
He threw himself into his work at a backbreaking pace so he wouldn’t look at the fit and lean lines of Ryan’s long torso once he took off his fancy shirt to avoid sweating all over it.
“This should be the last of it, right?” Ryan asked as they made it to the far corner of the garden and the last bed that needed clearing.
“Hmm?” Graeme heard Ryan’s voice on a split-second delay as his brain occupied itself with trying to figure out what flowers matched the dusky pink shade of Ryan’s nipples. “Oh. Yeah. This is the last of it,” he said, glad that his face was already scarlet from work.
He forced himself to look back over the cleared kitchen garden and was actually excited by what he saw.
When Mr. Robert Hawthorne had called him to confirm that he wanted Dallen Garden Designs to take on the massive project that was Hawthorne House, Graeme had been ecstatic.
The whole thing had been decided in the fall, while Graeme and his crew had been busy putting their other clients’ gardens to bed for the winter.
He figured he’d have the whole winter to finalize the design and line up growers and greenhouses to supply the plants he wanted to install in the numerous different gardens on the Hawthorne House grounds.
He’d assumed he’d have a whole team of guys to work with him to make his designs a reality.
Then Damien had happened.
And the divorce.
And the complete meltdown of his life.
“What do we do next?” Ryan asked as Graeme grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow to take the last of the rubbish from the kitchen garden out to the compost pile he’d started between that garden and the much larger and grander walking garden he had planned for the back section of Hawthorne House’s grounds.
“It’s not too early to start marking out the beds and paths for the walking garden,” he said, very conscious of Ryan following behind him, shirtless.
“Is that the thing I saw with the winding paths, the little hills, and the curved garden beds from your design illustrations?” Ryan asked.
“Yep. That one,” Graeme said as he reached the compost pile and dumped the contents of the wheelbarrow. The compost needed sorting, but that would be a job for another time.
Another time when he had more people working with him, hopefully.
Just nine months ago, he’d had an entire crew of six mates from school days, half of whom volunteered their time and labor just because they were friends.
Everyone knew he was working hard to get his garden design business off the ground and that he didn’t quite have the finances to hire full-time workers yet.
Everyone had ditched him when he’d filed for divorce from Mavis and when Mavis had told them all why.
“You alright?” Ryan asked.
The question shook Graeme into the realization that he’d just been standing there with a tipped wheelbarrow, staring at the thick pile of brambles and brush they’d cleared from the kitchen garden.
“Yeah,” he lied, forcing himself to look at Ryan and not let his thoughts run away from him.
“Just wondering if this really is the best place for the compost piles. And thinking about how I should have done a better job of separating the things that can break down into mulch from the things that should be burned.”
Ryan looked impressed. “I didn’t realize there was so much to gardening.”
“There’s a lot to gardening,” Graeme said, happy to snap back into the one thing he was confident about.
The only thing he was confident about. “Part of the plan I pitched to Mr. Hawthorne was to make this garden as sustainable as possible. That means using the garden waste to make fertilizer. And wild-harvesting seeds for plants instead of buying everything at a nursery.”
Ryan smiled. He had such a fabulous, winning smile. It was filled with confidence and courage, all the things Graeme knew he lacked. “I remember you pitching those ideas,” he said. “Dad and I both loved them all.”
“They take a long time,” Graeme said apologetically, as if the speed of nature was his fault.
Ryan shrugged. “Everything good takes a long time to grow.”
Graeme liked that. But he also knew what the other side of that coin looked like. Things that took ages to grow sometimes fell apart in the blink of an eye.
“Let’s get the stakes and twine so we can mark out the path here,” he said, heading back into the kitchen garden.
He didn’t want to think about how fast things could fall apart.
Things like a life. Everyone always said that it was important to be honest with yourself and stay true to who you were.
Graeme had tried his best to do just that, to be honest and truthful.
He hadn’t cheated or dragged things out.
He’d let Mavis go as soon as he realized that nothing was ever going to make him straight and that he was a thousand times more turned on by Damien’s whispered suggestions than he’d ever been in bed with his wife.
He'd done the right thing by every measure he’d been raised with, and he’d lost everything because of it.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” Ryan asked after a good three minutes of Graeme being lost in his thoughts as he searched through the tools and things he’d brought with him.
Heat flooded Graeme all over again. “I can’t find the stakes,” he said, avoiding looking at Ryan in case one look would reveal everything Graeme was trying to hide. “Maybe they’re in the trailer.”
“Let’s go look, then,” Ryan said with a smile.
“Are you sure you don’t have something else you’d rather be doing?” Graeme asked as they walked around the side of the house to the parking lot where Graeme had left his truck and the trailer attached to it that contained everything important for his business.
Ryan shrugged and looked suddenly uncomfortable. “I should be designing a fall collection for February’s fashion week, but I’m fresh out of inspiration.”
“A fall collection in February? Wouldn’t you do a spring collection then?” Graeme perked up, despite what Ryan had just told him being negative.
Ryan shook his head. “Fall collections in February, spring collections in September. It gives retailers a chance to buy the designs they like and have them manufactured in time for the appropriate season.”
“Right. That makes sense,” Graeme said, “I bet you’ll come up with something.”
“Yeah,” Ryan sighed, pushing a hand through his damp hair. “Losing your job because you refused to let the boss fuck you kind of saps all your creative energy.”
Graeme’s insides flipped. It was way too easy for him to imagine Ryan Hawthorne in some sort of porn situation with what he assumed was an older man.
He’d watched a bit of gay porn in the early days of trying to understand himself and why he was so different from the salt of the earth, Christian family he’d been born into and raised by.
It had definitely answered those very important questions about himself.
And now it provided an intrusive highlights reel to the things Ryan had confessed earlier.
It was a good thing they reached the truck then and he could use the excuse of searching through the contents of the trailer to hide his face and thoughts from Ryan.
“I’ve gone through spells where the inspiration well dries up, too,” he said over his shoulder as he pushed a lawnmower aside to reach the bundled set of stakes in the back corner of the trailer. “It sucks.”
“I guess you do know what it’s like to live off of your creativity,” Ryan said as he waited at the open back of the trailer. He sounded happy about his discovery. “It can be a challenge to work in a field that relies on keeping the creative juices flowing.”
Graeme grabbed the first bundle of stakes and walked them back to hand off to Ryan. “We live in a world that values hard work and the sweat of our brows, but never really understands the creative process that has to come before all that,” he said.
Ryan looked like he’d handed him a golden rose. “You’re so right,” he said. His smile grew. “I had no idea fashion design and gardening had so much in common.”
Graeme shrugged with self-deprecation and headed back to the far end of the trailer to get the rest of the stakes. “It doesn’t, really,” he said once he came out with that bundle in his arms.
“Of course it does,” Ryan said as they walked side by side back toward the kitchen garden. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. We’re both in the business of designing beautiful things to decorate the world with. I decorate people and you decorate the spaces they’re in.”
“Maybe,” Graeme said, tipping his face up to the sun and allowing himself to enjoy being compared to someone so much more sophisticated than him.
“Although, to be honest, my wife always said that I just like digging in the dirt and making more laundry for her. Not that I didn’t always offer to do my own laundry, mind you. But she insisted—”
Graeme stopped when he saw the light go out of Ryan’s smile. The smile was still there, but it had gone from being warm and hopeful to…polite.
“I’m divorced,” he blurted quickly.