by Staci Hart
“Well, never fear,” she said. “I’m here to help shepherd you through it.”
“The queen of flings.”
“I don’t know if you know this, but I’m a little out of practice.”
“I heard getting knocked up will do that to a girl.”
“It’s true,” she said with a sigh and a rub of her belly.
“Well, if I decide to go for it, you’d better teach me all there is to know about casual sex. You can officially pass the torch.”
“Let’s just hope you don’t get burned,” she joked.
But a flash of worry shot through me at the thought.
She wasn’t wrong. Luke Bennet wasn’t any less dangerous than he’d been yesterday. In fact, he was probably more dangerous than ever.
But with every kiss, I found it harder and harder to care. And deep down, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to put up a fight even if I wanted to.
LUKE
I shifted on the blanket again, wondering if I looked casual.
If you have to ask yourself that, you do not look casual.
It was late, the greenhouse bathed in moonlight, music floating out of my little speaker as I waited on Tess to meet me. I’d brought a couple of lanterns and laid out some camping mats under the big woolen plaid. In the cooler was ice, and on top of it was a bottle of whiskey. And all around was the abundance of flowers reaching up to the skylight.
The bounty of this place was astounding. My father’s green thumb had been learned from his father-in-law, who had tended the greenhouse before him, just as my mother’s knack for flowers had been learned from my grandmother, passed down to Laney, Ivy, and Tess. But Laney had never loved it, not the way Mom had and not in the way Tess did. Dad understood. I don’t know that Mom ever would. And as such, Tess had become the vessel to pour her passion into.
And really, it was a boon because Tess needed Mom. Needed a mom.
I scanned the greenery, dotted with zinnias. Even after the heavy harvest today, there was more to be had. And over the next days and weeks, more would bloom.
It was one of the many majesties of flowers—the more you took, the more they gave.
One common misconception of gardening was that pruning would hurt the plants. But so long as you did it with conscientious awareness, the bounty would multiply. When control was exerted, when boundaries were put in place, the subject thrived. When left wild, they would overgrow, choke other plants. The bounty would thin. The plant might even die.
Glancing at the greenery, one might think it was chaos. But that chaos was controlled, contemplated, cared for with consideration.
It was like Tess, I realized. Her desire to prune, to control her life, to insulate herself from change and that inevitable chaos of life. Maybe there was something to that. Where I was wild, my bounty was anemic. Where hers was pruned, her bounty was plentiful.
Maybe it was something I could learn from her. Maybe she’d show me where to trim, where to cut.
And maybe I could show her how to run a little wild.
I shifted again, lying on my side, propped up by my forearm. Brutus popped his head out from a peony plant, judgmentally eyeing me.
“I look like fucking Burt Reynolds, don’t I?” I muttered to him, sitting up.
“You kinda do,” Tess said with a laugh.
I shot to my feet, smiling like I hadn’t just had the shit scared out of me. “Hey. You came.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Did you have to sneak out again?”
She chuckled, moving to sit on the blanket I’d laid out. “Not exactly, but I did have to lie about where I was going.”
I frowned as I sat next to her. “I thought your dad liked me.”
“Oh, I’m sure he does. But I’m not quite ready to explain to him that I do too. Not after years of insisting that I can’t stand the sight of you.”
I ignored the latter in favor of the former. “You like me.”
Tess laughed, her little chin tipping up. “Well, you’ve been a good friend.”
“And a great kisser.”
A flush smudged her cheeks. “Yes, and that. Among other things.”
A flash of hope smudged my heart. “I’ve been working on changing your mind about me.”
“You don’t say?” she deadpanned.
“I know. I’m slick undercover like that.” That earned me a laugh, and I reached for the Maker’s, holding it up in display. “Care for a drink?”
With a nod, she smiled, lips together and corners curled. “It’s that first night all over again.”
“Except this time, I’m not drunk and I brought better whiskey. I want a do-over, Tess. You deserve one,” I added as I scooped ice and poured us drinks. “I told you I’d make it up to you. What better way than the closest thing to a time machine I could come up with?”
I handed her a drink, which she took with that small, sweet smile on her face. “To time machines.”
She held her glass out, and I tapped it with a clink.
“And second chances.”
Something flashed behind her eyes—a touch of worry, a hint of indecision. Appreciation, understanding.
We drank without clarifying what it meant.
I knew what I meant.
This—whatever this was—was different. I liked her. And not in that I was interested in a distant way like I normally was, with that detached admiration I typically felt for women.
I liked Tess. I liked her, not the idea of her, not as one admires art or a bouquet. But in how I craved her company. How I wanted to impress her. How I wanted to prove her wrong about me. It wouldn’t be easy. But I had a feeling it’d be the most satisfying thing I’d ever done, if I could pull it off.
The last time I’d felt this way, I’d ended up married. A shot of fear rushed through my chest at the thought. Because that had been a trainwreck.
But it was the closest thing I could compare it to. Tess had gotten my attention. And now, I couldn’t look away.
“You did good today, Tess,” I started, stretching my legs. “How many bouquets did you make?”
“Feels like a trillion,” she said on a laugh. “Pretty sure I’m going to have anxiety dreams about marigolds tonight.”
“Mom cried through half of dinner. I swear, I think she’s going to erect a statue of you in the middle of the shop as tribute.”
Tess blushed prettily. “I can’t believe that many people were lured in by window installations.”
“People shop with their eyes, right? And you gave them a visual feast. That window display is perfect. It helped that it was gorgeous out.”
“And that there was an event in Washington Square.”
“I was thinking we should always do the new displays on Sunday mornings, get the weekend crowd. Maybe we could even join forces with a couple of local places, like Blanche’s. Have a little coffee bar and pastries for the unveiling.”
She brightened. “I love that. Think we can get Blanche’s to partner up?”
“Oh, old Blanche can’t say no to me,” I said with a sidelong smile. “She’d sneak me donuts when I was little, made me swear I wouldn’t tell Mom. Officially, she’s known at my house by the name Meal Ruiner.”
A chuckle, this time coupled with a sardonic look. “Is anyone immune to your charms?”
“Only you.”
Her eyes flicked to the ceiling, but she was smiling. “Please. Me least of all. It’s why you make me so mad.”
“Make? Or made?”
“Both.”
It was my turn to chuckle. “You know, they say there’s a fine line between love and hate.”
“They also say not to shit where you eat.”
“Sure, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
“And curiosity killed the cat.” She took a sip of her drink, her eyes smiling at me over the rim.
“Well, drastic times call for drastic measures.” I set my drink on the cooler, taking hers once it was free of her lips.
Because I had other plans for those lips, plans I didn’t care to wait to implement.
“I’ll take that with a grain of salt,” she said breathlessly, watching me as I moved closer.
And I slipped my arm around her waist and shifted, laying her down. Her hands gripped my arms from the motion, fingers tightening when I slipped my thigh between hers, opening them up.
“Then I’ll let my actions speak louder than words,” I whispered against her lips before I took them for my own.
This. This was what I’d missed last night. Her body beneath me, soft and sighing, mine for the taking. I’d wanted to lay her down so I could love her down, unobstructed by distractions like physics and furniture.
But she broke the kiss with a pop, her breath noisy and lids heavy as she looked up at me. “Wait,” she whispered. “Are you sure we should—”
“Yes,” I said and kissed her again. I kissed her until she was wound around me, until there was no space, no air.
But she stopped the kiss again, staying me with her hand. “When you do that, I can’t think.”
“Then don’t.”
When I kissed her once more, I felt her give herself over completely, felt her yield, felt the fight in her heart abandon her. And I took the chance to fill that space in her with me. I’d convince her I could be what she wanted, what she didn’t think I was. I could be that man.
I would be that man.
As the kiss deepened, I noted the depth of my desire. It reached beyond the surface, into the hidden spaces in me, places undiscovered, untapped. I didn’t care what it meant, didn’t question the difference. All I knew was this: I wanted to give Tess what she wanted. My body was hers, but that was the easy part.
Because if I knew Tess at all, I knew she didn’t do casual. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t want to.
And the strangest part of all was that it wasn’t strange. Not even a little.
13
ACE
TESS
“I’ve got it,” I lied over my shoulder at Luke, who watched me wrangle the armful of flowers with dubious concern.
“If you’ll just let me—”
“I’ve got it,” I repeated with a laugh as I headed for the door to the shop, not entirely sure how I was going to open it. “I just need to—oof.”
I hit the worktable with a thump and a burst of pain in my hip.
With a chuckle, he took the load off my hands. In his massive arms, they looked inconsequential. In mine, I could barely see over the top.
“Sure you don’t want anything else?”
My face flushed. “Well, since I’ve got more room, I’ll just grab some of these.” I reached for the bucket of pods. “And maybe some of these. Oh! You know what would look great …”
And seconds later, my arms were almost full again.
He shook his head at me, his smile sidelong and sweet.
“Okay, that’s it.”
“You sure?”
I cast a forlorn look at the flowers before promising, “I’m sure. Thank you, Luke.”
He started walking, and I followed the expanse of his back. Which he’d been on half an hour ago. With me in his lap. Naked.
I realized I was smiling and pursed my lips, taking a breath to try to cool the warmth on my cheeks.
So I’d caved that night in the greenhouse. And then I’d caved again the next day. And the day after that.
And then I’d given up fighting, which was when it had become fun.
Luke Bennet singlehandedly made every minute of my days light and carefree, bright and brilliant. His unworried, unhurried attitude kept me more still and calm than I’d been in years, since before my mom died.
We’d closed the shop together every night for a week.
Every morning when I came in, he was already here. I would make arrangements with Ivy all day while Luke ran deliveries between repairing furniture he’d found in the basement. Or building things for me. Or discovering new props for the shop in the depths of the forgotten wealth of storage.
Mrs. Bennet had advised me on plans for window installations, her ideas fresh and clever and sparking my own. Laney and I had coordinated our social media for the next few weeks with the store’s displays, and Luke had helped build a photo spot for a corner of the store. This week, it was a flower wall with ivy and zinnias in hot summer colors. Next week, it would be a wall painted a pale pink, topped with garlands of roses. The week after would be daisies hung vertically in strands. We’d only had it up a week, but our Instagram had exploded with several thousand followers in just a handful of days. Laney had set up newsletter promos for coupons, bouquet giveaways for our followers, and a dozen other promotions that I would never have even considered.
Luke built whatever she needed alongside putting in beams in the ceiling where we hung planters and some old tobacco racks for displays. We built and created every day, and Luke showed up with the sun with nothing but a smile on his face and the motivation to get shit done.
And I matched him smile for smile.
He brought donuts from Blanche’s every morning. I brought us leftovers to share for lunch. We ordered dinner every night and ate sitting on top of the worktables with dangling feet and endless conversation. And then everyone would leave, and it would just be me and Luke.
I looked forward to that part of the day from the second my eyes opened in the morning. The sound of the bolt on the front door sliding home was like Pavlov’s bell, indicating that dinner was served in the form of a Luke Bennet buffet.
Somehow, he had become a fixture in every meaningful part of my day. And I didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate it so much, it scared me.
He is not your boyfriend. He is your fling. He is your friend. Don’t you dare expect anything beyond that.
This, I told myself, was why it was fine that Luke was about to come to my house for the first time in a decade. Friends went to friends’ houses. They chatted with friends’ dads. It was all normal, totally normal and exactly why I shouldn’t be super fucking nervous.
Silently, I followed my friend, who I saw naked every day, out the door to the shop—which, by the way, he opened without incident despite the haul in his arms. Once I was past him, he locked up, pulling the grate down and locking it too, one-handed.
Showoff.
I smiled mischievously at him.
When he stood and caught the expression, he answered it with a matching smile before stealing a kiss.
“Lead the way,” he said.
So I did.
“Can you believe the crowd today?” he asked, his voice touched with wonder and that smile. “We should rename Sundays the Garden Annihilator.”
I laughed. “Thank God we have a week to replenish before we do it again. I thought maybe we should move the new installations to Saturdays, get the whole weekend crowd, but I don’t know if the greenhouse would survive.”
“Never in the history of Longbourne have we had such a wonderful problem. Thanks to you.”
“Psh, you’re the one who built me twelve ladders last week.”
He shrugged one massive shoulder. “Half of them I scavenged.”
“Oh, sorry. You made six ladders with your bare hands. Totally normal, everyday stuff any old joe would know how to do.”
“YouTube is a powerful tool, Tess. Anyway, it was your idea to set them up and display flowers all over them. It looks like something out of a magazine. It’s no wonder we had to close early.”
“It was either that or have nothing to offer but potted succulents.”
“Hey, we had some ivy too. Honestly, you could have made bouquets out of dying roses, and I bet people would have bought them. Marcus said we should raise prices. Supply and demand or something.”
I frowned. “I don’t know if I like that.”
“Oh, don’t worry—Mom almost cranked open his mouth and climbed into his throat. I’d say there’s very little danger of prices changing anytime soon.”
I laughed, imagini
ng Mrs. Bennet going after Marcus, finger wagging and face bent up and red. “I was thinking next week, we can use two of the ladders to suspend from the ceiling for me to hang arrangements off of.”
“Oh, you know—I know a guy who laser-cuts acrylics and welds. I know you like geometrics, right?”
I glanced at him, surprised. “I do. How’d you know?”
He shot me a little smile. “You just ordered all those planters with the gold wire frames. Kyle could totally make you something like that. Or acrylic planters, big ones. We could do a big display, plant succulents, make it look like a minimalist jungle.”
I smiled. “I like it. How fast can he get something to us?”
“Draw something up, and I’ll ask.”
We walked for a second in silence. The cool of the summer evening was welcome after the sweltering heat of the day. Marcus had just spent a small fortune installing air-conditioning in the front, promising we’d sell more if we kept it under eighty degrees, and he’d tasked Mrs. Bennet with keeping a water dispenser on the display table just inside the door to lure people in.
Honestly, it worked. I swear, some people just came in under the promise that frosted, sweating cooler full of sliced fruit water made. But they always left with a bouquet.
At the last kid meeting, Marcus told us we had a long way to go, years to catch up to the debt, but this was an excellent start. We’d put our best foot forward. I only hoped we could keep up the pace.
“How do you know so many people?” I asked, unable to catalog the array of encounters he’d had.
Seriously, he had a guy for just about everything.
“As you so kindly noted, I’ve had a lot of jobs. I collect friends like some people collect matryoksa dolls.”
My brows gathered. “What dolls?”
“Russian nesting dolls. Wendy and I used to live next door to this little old Russian lady who had about a thousand of them. No lie—I really do think she had a thousand. They covered every wall in her living room. She said her grandfather owned a shop in St. Petersburg about the same time my ancestors were opening Longbourne.”
My heart slid into my stomach at the mention of Wendy. “I bet she had stories to tell.”
