"What are you doing here?" J.C. sputtered. "At the crack of dawn on Saturday?"

She stumbled down the outside steps, one hand unsuccessfully shielding her eyes -- why on this of all spring days, did it have to be sunny? -- and the other attempting to hold up the sagging waistband of her flannel bottoms.

Liam rested a hand on the top of a pickax and glanced at his trusty Timex. "Actually, it's more like eleven forty." He looked back at J.C. and raised an eyebrow. "Those bumps must have hit you harder than you thought?"

J.C. rubbed her forehead. Boy, did her molars kill her. "It wasn't so much the bumps as the alcohol afterwards."

"I thought I warned you that it wasn't a good idea to mix alcohol with a possible concussion."

"You should have told my friend, Phoebe. She's a bad influence. Very bad." She shook her head to emphasize her words. What a mistake.

"You know what they say? With friends like that...." Liam let the cliche evaporate as he surveyed J.C. more closely.

From the looks of it, she'd just rolled out of bed. Her drawstring pajama pants hovered below the bump of her belly and provided a clear display of the way her skin indented inside her hipbones. And visible on one of those sexy hollows was a small tattoo of a heart, not some Valentine-y looking thing with Cupid's arrow, but more like something from a box of Bicycle Cards. Hmm-m. And on the other indentation inside the other hip? A single spade, and not the digging kind either.

Speaking of hmm-m, she also wore a skimpy kind of undershirty-top, which highlighted two of her finer points. Yes, the air was cool, so the points were prominent. Call him a totally predictable shallow male, but Liam greatly admired upturned breasts, erect nipples - hell, breasts of any sort. And, in the scheme of things such as breasts, J.C. Schubach's were definitely in the top ten percent.

Of course there was also the black smudges under her eyes and the rather odd hairdo. But frankly, as a total package, Liam had never seen anything or anyone sexier.

"Yes, well...," J.C. responded to what she thought may have been a question. No one would ever mistake her for a morning person. She patted her hair, only to rediscover the Phoebe's cornrow handiwork, and seriously considered plastering one hand to her head. After concluding that she might end up looking even more ridiculous, she dropped her arm to her side.

"So," she said, brazening it out, "where's your friend? The one who destroys unsuspecting floral life?"

Liam sucked in his cheeks and smiled. "I left the Floral Avenger home, deciding he'd done enough damage in the past twenty-four hours. Besides, I can't have him digging the whole thing up again, now can I?"

For the first time, J.C. registered beyond the fact that she looked like a wreck, had a splitting headache, and was trying to banter less-than-successfully with a man who looked just as good the day after, the day which is supposed to expose all those warts and imperfections.

To avoid staring, J.C. cast her eyes in the direction of her front yard. All thousand square feet of it.

Where yesterday laid the remnants of Red Dog's carnage, today raised the beginnings of a massive landscape project. The broken daffodils had been cleared to a tarpaulin on the grass. New holes had been dug into the dirt, with a generous addition of peat moss thrown in for good measure. A bag of the stuff lay open next to the tarp, as well as a collection of shovels and several flats of blooming daffodils.

"The guy at the gardening center warned me that the soil here is nothing but clay and shale, and he was right," Liam informed her, shaking his head in wonder. "I finally had to resort to using a pickax to dig the holes."

"Yeah, I remember my mom complaining about that." Then she stood up straighter. To her horror, but Liam's delight, her pants slipped down further.

"I can't believe you went to all this trouble," she marveled, trying her best to convey her appreciation. "It really wasn't necessary. I mean, I was just going to rake up the worst of it and put it in a garbage bag."

"And lose all that your mother had done? I know these flowers aren't the same ones, but at least the man at the nursery assured me these are meant to be transplanted now, and that they will to come up year after year and re-bloom, just like the memories of your mother."

J.C. could feel tears welling up her in eyes. The man was too much. There had to be something wrong with him. Maybe he was gay? No, on second thought, gay guys did not kiss the way he had kissed her yesterday.

Was it only yesterday?

"Well, I can't thank you enough." J.C. gulped away her emotions. "Listen, maybe I can help you with this project?"

"Absolutely not. It was my dog that made the mess. I'm the one who'll do the clean up."

"Well, at least let me get you some coffee. Or don't you ingest things with caffeine, in line with your whole-wheat, macrobiotic kind of thing?" She waggled her hands and shimmied her hips, as if to fit her square-peg suggestion into the round peg of his lifestyle.

And Liam noticed that her pants slid down a millimeter further, making it only a matter of micro-millimeters before he and the old woman he'd seen peeking out her Venetian blinds in the house across the street, would be able to answer the question as to whether J.C. Schubach believed in Brazilian bikini waxes.

He wet his lips and pretended to take a sudden interest in the calluses on his left hand. "Coffee's fine," he said into his knuckles.

J.C. nodded earnestly. "Well, good. I'll just go take care of that then. In the kitchen." She pointed over her shoulder.

"That's the usual place to make coffee." Liam didn't bother not to smile.

"Yeah." J.C. rapped the side of her fist to her mouth. "My thinking exactly. How do you take it, by the way?"

He looked up. Her pajama bottoms were still in place, which was both a relief and a disappointment. "Milk."

"Coffee with milk coming up." J.C. pivoted on one naked heel. "I'll be back in two shakes of a dog's tail." She hopped gingerly up the steps.

J.C. groaned inwardly. Two shakes of a dog's tail? Oh, my God, he must think I am so lame. "You know..." Her voice trailed off as she tried to think of someway to explain that normally she didn't talk like a refugee from The Lawrence Welk Show.

"Don't worry," Liam said. "I didn't hear that bit about two shakes of a dog's tail." He waved his hand with its dirty, broken fingernails in the air.

J.C. screwed up her mouth. "Good, I didn't think so. Meanwhile, I'll just--" she pointed inside "--you know..."

"Yeah, I know." Liam said politely, swallowing his laughter.

J.C. pulled the front door shut, threw her back against it, and closed her eyes. Talk about making a fool of herself. Could it get any worse? And then she remembered the cornrow.

###

Meanwhile, outside in the garden, Liam forced himself to inhale slowly through his mouth - anything to keep from hyperventilating.

His agitated state wasn't due to J.C.'s butt, which, as he couldn't help noticing as she scampered up the stairs, was a fine specimen. No, what had him trying to regulate the intake of oxygen were the little circular dents on either side of her spine just above her butt. Liam always had a weakness for those little circular dents. He found they practically called out for special attention when it came to exploring a woman's body.

But in J.C.'s case, they had just about laid him low. And high, to be anatomically correct. Because those two little dents on J.C.? They each held a tattoo -- a diamond in one and a club in the other.

Talk about hitting the jackpot.

###

J.C. returned encased in a blue terry cloth bathrobe big enough to cover her whole body and several sides of beef, perhaps an entire herd of cattle. Liam was naturally disappointed, though it was probably a wise decision in terms of his blood pressure.

She'd supplemented the ensemble with red flip-flops festooned with crimson silk chrysanthemums. The lady clearly had a thing for red shoes.

"Coffee?" J.C. joined him. She held out a delicate porcelain cup with a raised gold, beaded trim around the edges.

He gingerly fitted his wide fingers around the dainty handle. "You're sure I won't break it?"

"Don't worry. More of my mother's legacy," she assured him.

Liam peered at her cup. It was an opalescent blue-and-white honeycomb pattern with a handle shaped like sticks of bamboo. The dark liquid it contained looked lethal. "Take it black, do you?"

"I'm strictly a three-sugars with my coffee person. Besides, even though the milk smelled fine when I sniffed it, it made those funny little rivulets when I poured it in."

Liam watched her cradle her cup between her hands and blow on the coffee. She closed her eyes after the first sip, a contented smile crossing her lips. She looked like she'd just enjoyed a satisfying bout of sex. Speaking of sex...

He'd had more than flower planting on his mind when he showed up today. But Liam also liked to think that by this time in life, he possessed a little finesse. That he understood and appreciated the other things a man and a woman could share: conversation, maybe dinner, long, comfortable walks, which afforded more opportunities for talking. Talking was his strong suit, after all. Then he thought about J.C.'s silly-looking, flirty red shoes. Maybe not too long a walk. Maybe not too much conversation.

Patience, finesse, Liam chided himself.

"I probably should get back to work," he said, heeding his own advice. Then he took a quick slurp, and almost immediately sputtered the hot liquid down his shirt.

"Oh, no." Despite her preoccupation with her own hair disaster -- J.C. had never realized how difficult it was to undo a cornrow, though maybe it had something to do with the blueberry yogurt that had mysteriously found its way into her locks -- she could hear the distress in his voice. "Don't tell me the milk was bad after all?"

Liam wiped at the wet spots on the front of his T-shirt. If this was his best attempt at finesse, it was time to pack up his shovel and leave. "No, the milk is fine. It seems that my delicate system isn't quite up to your brewing capabilities." He figured the coffee's octane level would satisfy Formula One requirements. "Maybe if you just hold onto it for me?"

J.C. stepped forward and took his cup. "Delicate system. You're so pure."

"If only you knew," Liam said under his breath, carefully positioning the top of the pickax in front of his crotch.

"What was that?" J.C. leaned forward.

"Nothing," Liam assured her. "You can sit on the front steps and look pretty while I work, if you want?" He swiveled around and vigorously punched a new hole in the dirt, swearing softly when he caught the tip of his work boot.

J.C. watched his hunched shoulders for a moment or two. "Okay." She tucked her chin into the roll collar of her bathrobe and walked back to the stoop, her sandals slapping the bottom of her bare soles. He'd said she should "look pretty," which must mean that he thought she was pretty, right?

She lowered herself to the concrete steps and peered over the rim of her coffee. She watched the way the muscles in his back rippled as he raised the pickax over his head and swung it in an easy arc. And as she took in the rhythmic sway of his arms and shoulders, she felt her headache recede to a dull ache. Her sinuses no longer felt as if they were measuring the rapid rise in barometric pressure. And her thoughts drifted to a Never Never Land of warm coffee and even warmer hands...

"There, that oughtta do it." Liam's words broke through her daydreaming.

J.C. blinked to restore alertness and the realization that he'd stopped planting. "What?" Realization wasn't necessarily accompanied by articulateness.

"If you could just get a watering can, I'll water the flowers after I pack up the tools and all the rest of this garbage. "

J.C. rested her coffee cup on the step and stood. "Let me see what we've got." She crossed the walkway and circled around the garage to the shed where gardening supplies were kept.

She opened the shed door. There wasn't a watering can. But there was a hose.

"Did you find anything?" Liam called from the yard.

"Coming," J.C. replied as she wrestled the coiled hose from the round hanger on the wall and lugged it to the front. She dropped it on the ground by the house foundation, and then screwed it to the outside tap. She turned on the faucet, making sure the trigger nozzle on the end of the hose was closed, and started to drag the hose to the flowerbed. This should have been an easy exercise, and with a brand-new hose it probably would have been. But with this one, dating no doubt from the McKinley administration, J.C. found the rubber was more inclined to kink up and catch on every projectile along the way rather than gracefully extend the distance.

The journey may have been all of thirty feet and absolutely level, but Sir Edmond Hillary didn't have a rougher time reaching the summit of Everest. Nor did it help matters to have Liam standing there, witnessing her ineffective struggles.

"Do you need some help?" he offered.

"No," she said, yanking at the hose and ignoring as best as possible the way he stood there, arms across his chest, biting back a smile.

When at last she was in spraying distance, J.C. pressed down on the trigger nozzle. And nearly washed away the flowers with the force of the bullet-like spray.

"Hey, you're going to ruin all my hard work," Liam cried out. "You need to adjust the nozzle for spraying!"

"Easy for you to say," J.C. muttered, trying to turn the rusted dial on the ancient nozzle. That her parents had never replaced it was so typical. "Why get a new one when this one works so well? It just needs a bit of WD40," he father would have explained. "Besides, they don't make them like this any more," her mother would have added with the all-news radio station blaring in the background.

J.C. broke a nail trying to get the damn thing to shift.

"You sure you don't want me to do that?" Liam offered again.

J.C. shook her head. "No, you did all the planting, the least I can do is water." She swore when she broke a second nail, but when she squeezed the trigger this time the water didn't quite come out like a round from a semi-automatic.

"That's better," Lima sounded encouraging, really he did, even though he winced as the force of the water jackknifed through the soil. One blossom was already pummeled. "Only maybe shift it still a little more."

J.C. continued to struggle with the rusted mechanism. "I suppose you think you could do better?" She hated him thinking she was your stereotypical helpless female. She was not a stereotypical anything, least of all helpless.

"No, I didn't say that. I'm merely suggesting that what we're going for is a gentle rain instead of a tropical rainstorm with gale-force winds." Did that sound too patronizing?

"Patronizing bastard," J.C. muttered under her breath. "So now you're a weatherman?"

Liam held up his hands. "Just making a suggestion." He held up his hands.

J.C. smiled sweetly.

That should have been a tip off, Liam realized too late.

"I'll show you a gentle rain." J.C. directed the full force of the surge of water at Liam.

"Hey. What did I do?" Liam dropped his hands to protect his chest from being pummeled.

"What did you do?" She redirected the spray to the top of his head and sent his hair standing on end. When he switched his hands to covering his face, she went back to blasting his stomach. Up and down went his arms like a wind-up toy.

What could J.C. do but laugh? I mean, it wasn't like she was going to stop or anything, though the more she laughed, the less accurate she got with the hose.

He stormed over, shaking the water from his hair and wiping his mouth and chin with the back of his hand. "I've got half a mind to take that thing away from you."

J.C. clutched the hose to her chest. "You think you can take it away, do you?"

"Be careful. A dare is music to a MacDonald's ears." He grabbed her hands and tugged.

She clamped down on the trigger again. Water shot up, catching both of them in the chin.

"Ow, my God, that's freezing," J.C. shouted, still hanging on.

"You think I don't know?" Liam yanked it from one side to the other. The water flipped back and forth between their shoulders. "Say uncle or I will be forced to hit below the belt."

J.C. hooted with laughter. "Are you kidding? I refuse to give up."

"You asked for it." With his hands still holding hers, he wrestled the hose downward -- not all that difficult considering how hard she was laughing.

And hit below the belt.

"Aach!" She dropped her grip and jumped back, doubled over in laughter and shock.

Liam dragged a hand through his wet hair and looked over. J.C.'s bathrobe was drenched. The belt had come undone. Her breasts were clearly outlined against her soaked tank top. Her nipples poked out brazenly.

"You don't play fair, do you?" he asked between gulps of air.

"I never claimed I did." She glanced around him. "At least the flowers got some of the water."

Liam dropped the hose by his side. And looked down at himself. His jeans were drenched, sticking to his legs like Saran wrap. His T-shirt was in the same shape. He was clammy, chilled and breathing hard.

Then he looked up and saw the way she was taking him in, as well. Saw how her eyes were dilated. Saw how she licked her bottom lip. And made no attempt to pull her robe together to cover her own water-revealed body.

He stepped forward. Ready to--ready to what? Cover her so she wouldn't get a chill? No, health wasn't the issue.

He put his hand on her chin and gently raised it. He was going to kiss her. Again.

Only this time, before he did, he remembered. "I realize I've already hosed you down once and kissed you twice, but would you mind telling me your name? Before I kiss you again?" He swiped a drop of water from her jaw.

J.C. felt the warmth of his finger as it slid close to her mouth. "My name...it's-"

"J.C. What the hell kind of crap is it that you let me sleep until past noon?"