Chapter 2 #2
“Oh?” Ryan turned to him, the sudden, frosty politeness replaced by curiosity.
A sharp shard of anxiety shot down Graeme’s spine.
Shit. He hadn’t meant to blurt his life out like that.
He sure as hell wasn’t ready to talk about the carnage that had followed his revelation about Damien.
And he definitely wasn’t ready to talk about Damien yanking the rug out from under him either.
“Last fall,” he said, scrambling to reveal the truth with the bare minimum of details. “It was a mess.”
That didn’t come close to explaining things.
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, his tone more formal, but still friendly. “I’ve never been through a divorce, but I’ve had a break-up or two in my day.”
“And a career change.”
Shit! Why had he brought that up? Ryan had made clear not even an hour ago that it was a sore point for him.
Fortunately, Ryan smirked and huffed a laugh. “And a career change,” he repeated. “Life has a way of kicking us in the balls sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Graeme said. He wanted to find better words than that so Ryan would consider him a good conversationalist. Words weren’t his strong point, though.
“It’s nice to have our careers to fall back on when life gets shitty, I guess,” Ryan went on, managing the conversation well enough for the both of them.
“It is,” Graeme agreed. “Although if I had known I’d lose my entire crew in the divorce, I might not have accepted this job.”
They rounded the corner of the house and slowed their pace a little as they carried the stakes through the kitchen garden and on to the lawn that would be the walking garden.
Ryan frowned curiously at him. “Was your wife co-owner of the business?”
Oh, God. He was going to have to explain things.
“No,” he said slowly, turning away and taking a moment to grab the twine from the pile of things he’d brought back to the gardens earlier.
It was just the hint of a break he needed to gather his thoughts and decide what he was going to say.
“I started a garden care business right out of school,” he said, nodding for Ryan to continue on to the empty lawn.
“A few of my mates who also had no plans for uni decided to go in on it with me. We started small, mowing lawns and pulling weeds and the like.”
“That sounds like an enterprising thing for young people coming out of school to do,” Ryan said.
“I was lucky to get into a trade training program to learn more of the business end of gardening,” Graeme continued as they crossed through the brick archway.
“I started designing just a few years ago. The guys who worked with me out of school became my employees.” He paused before saying, “One of them, Harry, was, is, Mavis’s brother. ”
“Ah,” Ryan said, nodding. “I get it. Your brother-in-law didn’t want to keep working with his sister’s ex.”
More like Harry hadn’t wanted to work for a ‘disgusting pouf who would rather suck cock than have babies and a normal life’ with his sister.
“The others went with Harry when he started up his own business back in November,” Graeme said. “I carried on as best I could on my own.”
They reached the far side of the kitchen garden’s wall and rested their bundles of stakes up against the bricks. Graeme crouched down to untie the cord that held his bundle together.
“November was more than six months ago,” Ryan said. “You haven’t gone looking for replacement workers since then?”
“No,” Graeme answered, keeping his hot face turned away from Ryan. “Haven’t had time.”
More like he’d been too busy being screwed and then screwed over by Damien.
Seducing a man who had always believed he was straight away from his wife had lost its fun once he’d had him.
Two months and Damien was already ghosting him and looking for his next plaything.
He’d left Graeme scrambling to pick up the pieces of his shattered family relationships and lost friendships.
If it hadn’t been for the promise of the Hawthorne House job, he didn’t know what he would have done with himself.
“Right, so what we need to do is start by marking the entire area of this garden into a grid so we can pinpoint where each of the beds I’ve designed for Mr. Hawthorne should be placed,” he said when he stood up with a stake in each hand. “We’ll start by marking out the four corner points.”
That was it. His discussion of the destruction of his life was over. He didn’t want to think about it anymore, he just wanted to work.
“Perfect,” Ryan said, coming over to take one of the stakes Graeme held. “Just tell me where to you want this and I’ll hammer it into the ground.”
Graeme’s gut quivered and his cock, which had already ruined his life, tried to stand up and take notice at the mention of hammering. “I calculated the corner points on this side of the garden already,” he said, fighting to ignore everything. “Let’s start over there.”
Work was definitely the best distraction.
He walked to the edge of the kitchen garden wall and a few steps beyond and found the marker he’d placed a few days before, when he’d started the job.
Ryan seemed delighted to hammer a stake into the ground, like he was a kid building a fort in his backyard.
For all Graeme knew, he might have built forts in that same garden when he actually was a kid.
He was working as hard as Graeme now, but Ryan Hawthorne had the unmistakable style and grace of someone way above him.
Ryan seemed eager to learn how to measure out the boundaries of a garden and how a garden design went from paper to reality.
He fetched the tape measure when Graeme sent him for it and walked beside Graeme as they marked out one side of the garden, then turned ninety degrees to measure out the next border.
It made Graeme smile to see how much delight Ryan got from something that was pedestrian at best to him.
“This garden is going to be huge,” Ryan said once they reached the end of the planned distance for that side of the garden.
“There’s a lot of space back here to fill,” Graeme said, handing him another stake to pound into the ground. “I’m surprised there isn’t already a garden back here.”
“I feel like I’ve seen old drawings of the house where there was something in this part of the garden,” Ryan said, his brow pinched. He took the mallet Graeme handed to him and drove in that stake.
“It’s a great space,” Graeme said once the stake was in, walking on with Ryan striding in step with him.
As they measured out the length of the third garden boundary, Graeme started to feel something different in the soil under his feet.
The whole area was lumpy and overgrown, but it had a whole different consistency in that area.
He’d been doing what he did for years now, and he knew when there were changes in the ground.
It wasn’t until they got to the third corner point of the would-be garden that he had his first hint of what he was feeling. He handed Ryan the third stake and the mallet, but this time, when Ryan tried to drive it in, he was met with something solid.
“There’s a rock under here,” Ryan said with a frown. “How anathema would it be to put the corner point somewhere else?”
“Not anathema at all, whatever that means,” Graeme said.
Ryan chuckled and moved the stake a foot to the right, but when he tried to pound it in, he met something solid again. The same happened when he tried to place it a foot forward from the original point.
“There’s something under here,” he said, giving up on the stake and crouching to feel the ground.
Graeme did the same, suspicion welling up in him. “I could feel it when we were walking this way,” he said. “I shouldn’t have dismissed it in such a hurry.”
He and Ryan felt the ground, tugging at the grass and weeds in a few places and generally working together to solve the mystery of what was in the ground under their feet.
Everywhere they pulled up the grass and a few inches of the dirt under it, they were met with stone.
Not jagged, natural stone, though. Bit by bit, they uncovered smooth stones of the sort that had been used to build things.
Things like houses. Some of it was coated with blackened soot.
“You know, I’m suddenly remembering what I’ve seen in old drawings,” Ryan said at one point, as he dug a bit deeper into the dirt between them.
“What was that?” Graeme asked.
Ryan’s expression contorted for a moment, then he pulled a strangely shaped bit of pottery from the ground. It looked like part of the handle and side of a teacup. “There was a gamekeeper’s cottage out here,” he said. “It burnt down after being struck by lightning in the early nineteenth century.”
“Oh,” Graeme said, twin feelings of interest and disappointment filling him.
It was always interesting to find something unexpected in the ground, but not in the spot where he’d planned to build a garden.
“I can’t just dig through this and plant a garden here if this is a site of archeological interest,” he said, sitting back with a sigh.
“This could throw a spanner in the works of everything.”