THE MILLIONAIRE’S MAKEOVER
Silhouette Special Edition
May 2008 US

Heather Radford caught sight of Rowena and Ben standing by the courtyard gate just as she stepped out of the low-slung yellow sports car, so she came along the side of the old adobe toward them, instead of going to the front door.

“My lawyer’s valuation of joint assets,”  she announced by way of a greeting, and dumped an impressively thick binder of papers into Ben Radford’s hands.

Rowena felt almost comically inadequate when she considered the thin quantity of papers on her own clipboard.  It was like a two-door compact car owner coming bumper to bumper with someone driving a brand-new Ferrari. 

This woman had serious paperwork! 

And if it wasn’t an actual Ferrari she was driving, it was something with the same flair.

“I’ll take a look at it later,”  Ben said.  “Heather, this is Dr Rowena Madison, who’s doing some work on the garden.” 

His voice had changed since their flirty conversation a minute or two ago.  It was harder, tighter, with his English origins prominent in the clipped vowels.  His face had changed, too.  In the space of an hour, Rowena had seen him as the arrogant impatient businessman, the intelligent connoisseur, and the charmingly cynical flirt.  Now, she was shocked to see him as a human being through and through, with a beating, vulnerable heart.

He minded about the divorce, she realized. 

Minded horribly, in a whole lot of ways that went bone deep and that he hadn’t even begun to come to terms with, yet.

For a moment there, she’d thought his light approach to the subject meant the opposite – that he didn’t care a bit.  But now she could see she’d been wrong.  He made those drawling jokes about it to mask the anger and failure and pain – mask them from others, and from himself.  He talked about it because he was still too raw to keep it to himself.  He shrouded himself in a successful businessman’s arrogance because this was probably the first, and certainly the worst, failure he’d ever had to deal with in his life.

And at some level, he had no idea that this was what he was doing.

“Dr Madison?”  Heather echoed sharply.  “You’re a doctor and you have to take a second job as a gardener to make ends meet?”  She was a tiny, gorgeous blonde with bright blue eyes, flawless porcelain skin, and a pert nose, and she wore a cream silk trouser suit that would have taken out Rowena’s monthly dry-cleaning bill in a single hit.  “Boy, did you pick the wrong specialty!” 

It would have been a funny line, if the sarcasm level hadn’t been so high.  Rowena had the impression that Heather could be a very funny woman when she wanted to be – funny and clever and captivating and even more ruthlessly cynical than Ben.

“I’m not a medical doctor,”  Rowena said, her awkwardness rising back to where it had been just before she’d let fly at Ben Radford half an hour ago.  “I have a Ph.D.”

“Ah, now it makes sense.  There’s no money at all in academia.  Wait a minute, though.  You have a Ph.D. in actual gardening?  You can do that?”

“I design and restore historic gardens, yes.  My Ph.D. dissertation involved - ”

Heather wasn’t interested in the subject of Rowie’s dissertation.  She trained an accusing look on her not-quite-ex-husband.  “How much work are you having done in the yard?  You’re bringing in someone like this.  I bet you’re landscaping the whole damn thing!”

“Not quite the whole damn thing, Heather.  I’ve decided to leave the cattle runs alone,”  Ben drawled.  “The beasts seem happy enough with grass.  I’m just doing the section behind the house.”

“Just?  That’s an acre!   More!  And, let me guess, we’re not just talking about a few deliveries of dirt and flowers.  This is going to be hugely expensive, isn’t it?  You’re pouring yet more money into this impossible place, and it’s going to mess up the valuation and slow down the divorce.  You’re doing it deliberately.  I’m not fooled, Ben!  Not for a second!”

“And I’m not doing it to be difficult,”  he said tightly.  “For heaven’s sake, Heather!  You knew I wanted to restore the whole place when we bought it.”

“When you bought it, against my wishes.  When you sold a brilliant, high-profit company for half or even a third of what you could have gotten if you’d waited another few years, just so you could mess around with money pits like your precious gallery, and your precious casting agency, and your restaurant, and this wretched historic ranch that’s already soaked up a gazillion dollars.  It makes zero sense!  And don’t tell me again that you were bored.”

“I was, though,”  he said curtly.  “Horribly bored.  I’d done everything I wanted to do with Radford Biotech.  I’d made plenty of money and I didn’t want to hang onto it just so I could wear myself out making even more money doing more of the same thing.  Heather, we’ve been through this a hundred times.”

“Yes,”  she said bitterly.  “And nothing changes.  Which is why we’re getting divorced.”

“Is it?”

“Yes!  So please, if you have any vestige of feeling left for the time we spent together, don’t mess up my lawyer’s incredibly careful and conscientious and fair valuation with this insane landscaping plan.”

She snatched the binder back from him, turned on a heel that was way too high for such a maneuver, and stalked back to the car with her shoes cracking like gunshots on the paving.  Wa-a-ay better gunshots than Rowena’s own shoes had made when she’d attempted a similar exit, she noted with a twinge of self-mocking envy.  It was the Ferrari versus the two-door compact, all over again.