And that, he decided, was worth more than a thousand stolen kisses under the wisteria.
She knelt—slowly, painfully, like a woman who hadn’t knelt in years—and picked up the photograph. “Elena was my best friend. She asked me to hide the letters until Mara turned eighteen. She wanted to tell her herself, face to face, after she was released.” Searching for- Stepmom s Gardener Surprise in-A...
The surprise wasn’t what he expected.
That was the first crack.
Celeste handed her a slip of paper from her robe pocket. An address. A phone number. “Bakersfield. She runs a nursery. She’s been waiting for you to find those letters for five years.” And that, he decided, was worth more than
The search had begun as a whispered obsession. For three summers, Leo had watched from the shaded porch of his father’s estate as the gardener worked. But the gardener was no elderly man in overalls. She was Mara—his stepmother’s twenty-three-year-old assistant landscape architect—with sun-streaked hair tied in a loose knot, dirt smudged like war paint on her cheekbone, and arms that could lift a fifty-pound bag of topsoil without strain. She asked me to hide the letters until Mara turned eighteen
His stepmother, Celeste, was a formidable woman who collected antique porcelain and second husbands. She’d married Leo’s father for his money, and Leo was certain she tolerated him only as a footnote in the will. If Celeste caught him so much as looking at her gardener, she’d have Mara transferred to the Arizona property within the week.