Wildest Hearts

something deep inside himself respond to Annie almost on sight. It was not that she was spectacularly beautiful, rather the opposite. She had a subtle, haunting allure about her that fascinated him in a way more obvious beauty would not have done. He had always preferred ferns to roses.

    He acknowledged to himself that he wanted Annie. Oliver rarely confided in others, but he made it a practice to be bluntly honest with himself. He reacted to everything about Annie, from the explosion of golden-brown curls that framed her huge hazel green eyes to the delicate sensuality of her soft, gently rounded breasts and thighs.

    She was an intriguing creature. He knew from a remark Daniel had made that she was twenty-nine. The intelligence in her gaze was unmistakable. So was the clear, unwavering honesty. Oliver found that particular attribute extremely appealing. Perhaps it was because he himself was so skilled at concealing his own thoughts and plans from others.

    She spoke blithely of a marriage of convenience, but Oliver was satisfied that with a little patience he could make her his in every sense of the word. He had, after all, been fully aware of the sensual awareness that had bloomed in Annie's gaze when she had looked at him the night of Daniel's engagement party.

    Oliver had known then that, given time and strategy, he could have her. He had gone home that night and plotted a patient course of action that would eventually win him his goal.

    But events had intervened before he could begin his campaign to seduce Annie. Daniel had disappeared and Annie had found herself besieged by her brother's creditors.

    To Oliver's surprise, Annie had taken matters into her own hands. He found the results interesting if somewhat disconcerting. He wondered if it was a sign of things to come. If so, his serene, well-ordered life was in jeopardy. But he would cope, Oliver assured himself. Annie was obviously the impulsive type, but she could be managed.

    Oliver prowled through his rooftop jungle, sprayer in hand, and wondered how Annie expected the marriage of convenience to work. He gathered she anticipated a sort of roommate relationship.

    Oliver paused amid a cluster of huge, billowing maidenhair ferns. He plunged his fingers into the rich soil to check the moisture level. The black earth was warm and damp and it felt very good.

    The technology in the vast greenhouse was state-of-the-art. Everything from the heating to the irrigation system was monitored by the newest in electronic control systems. The instrument panel that governed temperature, rain, and humidity in this miniature world was housed just outside the glass-walled structure. The technology was sophisticated enough to allow Oliver to create microclimates in different sections of the glass-walled jungle.

    Oliver used instruments to test the acidity of his potting soil, and he carefully calibrated moisture levels. He mixed fertilizers according to precise formulas and gaged light intensity with highly sensitive meters. But in the end he still relied on his senses and his instincts when it came to making most of his decisions.

    There was no point trying to force ferns to accommodate themselves entirely to modern technology. The primitive green plants came from another time and place, remnants of an era that had long since passed.

    Ferns were ancient survivors of a world that had had no flowering plants, a world that had not yet seen the first dinosaurs, let alone the bothersome little creatures that would one day evolve into humans.

    When Oliver walked through the time warp that was his greenhouse, he was filled with a sense of how the earth must have looked and felt hundreds of millions of years in the past. The journey gave him a link with his own past, back to the time when he had still been free to take another path. It was a path that would have led him down an entirely different road than the one he now traveled.

    The door at the far end of the greenhouse opened. Bolt stuck his head inside. “Mrs. Rain is here, sir. Shall I tell her you're out?”

    “There's not much point. She'll only return again later. Show her up here.”

    “She hates the greenhouse, sir,” Bolt reminded him without inflection.

    “I know.”

    “I'll send her up.” Bolt vanished, closing the door behind him.

    Oliver surveyed the young red fronds of a hacksaw fern. The fronds would turn green as they matured, but for now they lent an unexpected note of color to the