Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
FRIDAY
RYDER
“Ziggy! Breakfast!” I walked to the edge of the deck, bracing for impact, but the backyard remained quiet.
No excited yips signalling an incoming over-excited miniature dachshund ready to launch himself into my arms. No rustling of bushes.
No irritated commotion in the henhouse as he barrelled past them.
Nothing stirred the peace of the garden bar the call of a tui feasting on nectar in harakeke flaxes growing next to the kitchen window.
“Mmm.” I walked down the steps and onto the lawn to survey the rambling garden, my pride and joy, and the fruit of a decade’s worth of hard graft, penny pinching, and sweat.
When I’d moved into the cottage ten years before, a couple of tired old flower beds were the only nod to a garden that existed.
Everything had needed work, and a lot of it.
Stripping and polishing the floors was high on the list, along with a new roof, new bathroom, and a new kitchen.
The to-do list had grown significantly shorter over the years but it had been an excruciatingly sluggish process to get there.
With no money to rely on tradesmen for anything but the truly expert work, doing most of it myself meant a steep and clumsy learning curve.
Without my best friend Tap and his mostly enthusiastic but sometimes grumbling help, I wouldn’t have achieved half of it.
The cottage was by no means finished, but all projects were currently on hold while I was caught up in legal issues with the damn council.
The garden was a different story. Working in the soil soothed my soul, and the garden received plenty of love and attention regardless of any council fuckery.
The lush lawn and sprawling flower beds were drenched in sunshine for the first time in two days, and I took a second to appreciate their cheerful spring colour and take stock of any storm damage.
Some plants had taken a battering, their spring flowerings bruised, the cherry blossoms looking particularly despondent.
I made a mental note to get to work with my pruning shears and loppers on the weekend, but the overall effect still cheered my heart.
Besides, that was spring for you. A tempting glimpse of summer with the occasional tail-whip of winter just to keep you on your toes.
Gardening was somewhat like playing golf.
Pockets of self-congratulatory bliss followed by torturous periods of disappointment and even occasional devastation when a weather bomb obliterated all your hard work in a few hours.
If the weather and soil gods aligned, you may as well be wearing golden gardening gloves.
If not, you could be wasting hundreds or even thousands of dollars on plants that refuse to thrive in the face of theoretically perfect growing conditions.
A little like love, I supposed. Whoever came up with the pithy saying, ‘Bloom where you’re planted,’ clearly hadn’t met my ex, who, after professing his undying love, had then upped sticks and left me for a job running a celebrity assistant service somewhere in Sweden.
Nor had they considered the fact that even strong, healthy plants needed nourishment and attention. Just like falling in love, you can’t simply plant something and then piss off and expect it to flourish.
Unless it’s a weed, of course. Refer back to my ex.
“Ziggy! Come here, boy. Come on.” I scanned the underbrush for any tell-tale shaking of foliage that would indicate Ziggy barrelling along one of his many shortcuts back to the cottage.
I’d given up hope trying to ‘re-educate’ him out of my garden, and taken the simpler route of transplanting hardier shrubs along his well-worn paths.
No points for guessing who won that battle.
“Ziggy?” My heart rate picked up as I scanned the wider garden.
Being late for breakfast wasn’t in my tiny terror’s DNA, and a niggle of fear ran through my belly.
Ziggy hated thunder, and he’d slept, burrowed under the covers next to me, the entire night.
As per our usual routine, I’d let him out when I took a shower so that he and Myrtle could argue with each other through the chicken wire, but he was always back for breakfast. The fact that he wasn’t didn’t sit well with me one little bit.
I returned to the kitchen and moved the bacon off the heat. I donned an open shirt over my boxers, slid my feet into a pair of well-worn jandals, and headed into my garden, coffee in hand, to look for Ziggy.
The flower beds surrounding the house were an indulgence requiring a ton of work, but they were only the appetiser to a much larger horticultural feast I’d been working on for years.
When I’d bought the property, it still had ten years left on a sixty-year lease, with the option of outright purchase at the end.
This would bring the property in line with the others on the road that were now all privately owned.
But when the lease came up at the beginning of the year, the council started backpedalling on the option for me to buy, and I found myself caught in a battle for survival, not to mention drowning in legal fees.
At a little over a hectare, half the land was planted in gardens, a quarter left in native forest, and the remaining quarter filled with machinery and storage sheds, plus two large glasshouses that had been there for at least half a century.
I ran a reasonably successful landscaping business from the site, while at the same time figuring out how to add another income stream from the glasshouses.
Pretty much a pipedream, since the cost of running two massive greenhouses, including repairs, upgrades, and the maintenance needed to make them commercially competitive, was daunting, to say the least.
If it wasn’t the heating system breaking down, it was the irrigation, or the power network, or the automated window venting that controlled the temperature.
Most days, the latter didn’t work at all, and I’d come home from work to find my plants quietly cooking in their pots.
I’d lost more money than I’d earned from the antiquated glass monstrosities, but a man could dream.
I walked the narrow path leading through the individually themed garden rooms, my gaze roaming back and forth, searching for Ziggy.
The native garden. The sensory one. The French formal.
The walled garden with its raised vegetable beds.
The orchard. And finally, the water garden, which drew both inspiration and content from the Korimako River that ran through the property.
A piping system filled the ponds and provided most of my greenhouses’ power needs . . . when it worked.
I called repeatedly as I walked, but to no avail.
Ziggy was nowhere to be seen, and the unease I felt in my chest was growing into a full-blown panic.
Ziggy never ignored me. Never. He could be lazy or distracted, or he might take his good time responding if he was in a mood, but he always came.
Always. Especially when food was on offer.
When I reached the water garden and found it empty as well, I kept going, passing through a gate hidden behind a stand of bamboo next to the waterlily pond and into the property’s service area.
This space was home to a couple of tool sheds, the chicken shed, the two glasshouses, my tree nursery, a large machinery shed, and a compost system at the back.
The second the latch on the gate snicked shut, the chickens started a ruckus, expecting to be fed.
“Give it up,” I grumbled, making my way around the shed that housed them to the huge, enclosed outdoor run at the back, complete with various resting perches, scratching options, enrichment equipment, such as hanging balls and swings, mirrors, ladders and logs, and a shaded resort-style relaxation area.
All of which made me the laughingstock of my entire group of family and friends the moment they saw the finished coop.
“So, what have you done with your nemesis, huh?” I peered through the chicken wire, and a half dozen sets of beady eyes peered back.
“You finally ate him, didn’t you?” I fired an accusatory look at the indisputable queen of the coop, Fertile Myrtle, a sassy brown shaver who took no prisoners when it came to laying down the law in her little fiefdom.
That included nosey little dachshunds who should know better.
Ziggy had more than one scar on the end of his nose for daring to poke it under the wire when he hadn’t been invited.
Me too, as it happened, although that was a story for another day and involved far too much alcohol.
Fertile Myrtle stomped her long-toed feet and glared back at me.
The rest of the troop gathered behind her in a spear-like formation as if readying for an All Black haka.
“All right, all right.” I raised both hands in surrender and eyed Fertile Myrtle in pointed fashion.
“Breakfast first. I get it. But just so you know, the scrambled eggs are going to be as cold as your tiny, wicked heart by the time I get back to them. Your eggs, as it happens. Thank you for your service.”
Myrtle’s creepy stare narrowed indignantly, and I figured I’d just climbed above Ziggy on her shitlist, which was no mean feat.
“Hold on to your tail feathers, Mama,” I soothed the pissed-off shaver.
“I’ll be back in a minute.” I retraced my steps to the storeroom side of the shed, opened the door, and .
. . stopped in my tracks, blinking at the sight of a pale, handsome, wide-eyed, and partly dressed man staring back at me.
“Who the hell are you?” My hands fisted at my sides, ready for anything.
“And what the fuck are you doing in my shed?”