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tycoons are not the wilting flowers your American robber barons are.”
    “Those would be fighting words if I weren’t in your service, sir.”
    I cupped his hand in mine, breathing against his fingers. In lieu of a kiss, he brushed his nose against my cheek.
    “But you are, Miss Bloom.”
    “Yes, I am,” I breathily agreed as I walked backward toward the first of the dwellings, tugging him along with me. We settled side-by-side on the dark wooden foundation, dangling our legs over the edge and letting the midday sun heat the curves of our shoulders and our knees. A comfortable silence occupied us for several minutes before I noticed Adrian was smiling.
    “What now?”
    “If you’re not careful, Miss Bloom, you might start to approve of me.”
    My natural inclination was to deny that, but I didn’t have the heart to disturb the glow on his face when he said it. And perhaps, just maybe, he was right.
    “Is this what you always knew you’d end up doing?” I asked. “Because it was your family’s business?”
    “Property development? Yes, I guess it was. For all my defiance, it never occurred to me to do anything else. I grew up around it, constant conversations about it, absorbing information about it despite myself. There’s a saying… Apples falling from trees… Should I assume you always knew you would grow up to be…? What was it, an environmental lawyer?  Partner at Ferris & Hale?”
    I tried not to grin over the fact that he’d remembered this. “Junior partner,” I admitted.
    “Well, I won’t hold it against you.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and I stuck my tongue out at him. “But was it really your childhood dream?”
    Between chortles, I shook my head and blurted, “No!” I paused for a moment, debating my admission. Hesitantly, I added, “I was going to be a farmer.”
    Adrian stopped subtly swinging his legs and turned his head to look at me full on. “A farmer? From an East Coast walkup? Interesting.”
    “Don’t mock me, sir. I was serious. My… My father even got permission from the landlord to put a little potted garden on top of the building for me.” I closed my eyes and sniffed the air. “To this day, when I need to relax, I remember the smell of the fresh lavender just coming into bloom. There’s nothing like the scent of lavender when it’s lush and oily on a hot afternoon.”
    “I don’t think I can argue that,” Adrian admitted softly and leaned near to press against me, shoulder to shoulder. “Still, a farmer?”
    “Or a botanist. Or a businesswoman with my own nursery. Stop teasing me. I had a talent for it, from my father. He might not have graduated high school, but he had a way with live, growing things.” I couldn’t resist muttering under my breath, “And not just women.” If Adrian caught the stray remark, he didn’t comment on it. Whatever he might have said about his lineage, there’d been some value in his breeding. “Every spring and summer…” Well, every spring and summer my father had been around… “We’d spend all evening watering and grooming plants, picking worms off leaves, sniffing at the vegetables to see if they were ripe.”
    Before I knew it, I’d spent twenty minutes waxing nostalgic about those precious few hours with my father, no drama between my mother and him, no turmoil over other women, no wondering when he’d leave us again. I wanted to say it had been ages since I’d thought about this, but I couldn’t think of any time I’d let myself recall my father with anything but bitterness. And now here I was, a childish smile on my face as I related all my stories of that simple rooftop garden to a man who owned a twenty-thousand-acre tropical island. But Adrian was smiling along with me, not even the barest hint of a patronizing edge to his voice as he asked me about this detail or that and laughed with me over the ridiculous botanical experiments I’d concocted instead of joining my friends jumping