Lean on Me by Helenkay Dimon Page A

sweater she’d worn to dinner. Interesting choice since the temperature hovered around thirty degrees. Mitch regretted not wearing a hat because of the wind and this woman stripped down to her lounging-on-the-couch outfit.
    It was another reminder of the life she led before she returned home. Extreme temperatures—extreme anything—didn’t faze her. He’d remember that on their next date. And despite all this nonsense tonight, there would be a next one.
    Pushing up her sleeves, she grabbed a pair of gardening gloves and pulled them on. Between the pile of fertilizer to her left and the pots to her right, her plans weren’t exactly a mystery. Spence had left a note with projects he wanted done in the morning. Mitch remembered seeing it on the work-assignment board before he locked up and left for dinner. Made him wonder when she’d seen it.
    Regardless of the timing, it looked like Cassidy had decided to do some transplanting. Because that was a rational way to spend the evening.
    Shame shoveling shit wasn’t on his agenda.
    Terrifying her wasn’t either. He pitched his voice low, almost at a whisper. “Cassidy?”
    He reached out to touch her shoulder just as she shifted her weight to the side. He grabbed empty air as momentum pushed him forward. His fingers just missed the potting workbench. Before he regained his balance her hip connected with his. The bump tangled their legs together. He outweighed her by a good eighty pounds and didn’t want to crash into her and hurt her, so he twisted his body and groaned as something wrenched and tightened in the small of his back. The move ended with a hiss of unexpected pain and the loss of most of his balance. Plus, she had surprise on her side and knowledge of a game he didn’t even know they were playing.
    He never saw her face but he saw her body turn with her head down and hands out. Like a charging bull she came at him. Her palms simultaneously hit his arm and side. He felt the hard shove as her body knocked into his shoulder and the last of his balance vanished.
    A flash of blond. The thumping of feet. He saw and heard it all as he kicked the pots at his feet and heard a crash as one broke. Before he could get his legs under him, his ankle rolled over a bag of something. He knocked his hands against the workbench, trying to grab on and steady his weight. But it was too late. He went down swearing and shouting her name, the back twinge forgotten.
    He braced for a hard smack against the pavement. Instead, dirt kicked up on a soft landing. Fertilizer squished around him. He lifted his head, but it was too late; the smell of crap wound through his senses as his butt sank deeper into the pile. Scrambling and throwing his weight forward, he jumped out and up a second after he fell. Not that quickness bought him anything. What he decided to think of as dirt stuck to his jeans and blackened his hands.
    He brushed off as much as possible but the stink remained. So did the red-hot anger clouding his vision. Looked like the time for being nice had ended. It was time to make plans. If Cassidy wanted to play dirty, oh yeah, he could play filthy.
    Throw him in a pile of shit and run? Game on.
    * * *
    Cassidy glanced at her watch for the fifth time in twenty minutes. Allan was supposed to meet her at six for breakfast. No way would she have picked this ungodly time of the morning to get up even though she never went to bed. After last night’s activities she should be running out of town or at the very least hiding. She didn’t have the energy for either.
    Mitch lying in a pile of fertilizer. It would take her months to shake that visual image from her mind. From all the yelling and profanity, she doubted he’d forget it any time soon either. She couldn’t imagine many men handled being dumped in crap all that well. Mitch was no exception.
    She tried to put the memory pieces together and figure out how they went from dinner to what she viewed as the real The Fall of Holloway.