He eyes the flowers again, then me. “I should have called.”
“You think?” I wave him inside, catching a slight wrinkling of his nostrils. “That’s Fred,” I say. “Don’t mind him.”
“Someone’s here?” he asks, stiffening, and peeks at the flowers again and then looking around the corner as if he might find a naked and very smelly man. Ew.
There’s a touch of jealousy in his voice, and something primal in me likes it. I want to shake him and tell him he’s an idiot. I want to push him against the wall and kiss him until we can’t breathe. I want…
I take a deep breath, then let it out.
“You forgot about Fred?” I ask. “And here I thought you were my self-proclaimed baking teacher.”
Understanding dawns on his face as he steps around the flowers and into the apartment. “You forgot to throw out the trash after you poured out the starter.”
“And you forgot to say goodbye to me,” I say, letting a little snappiness into my voice. “I assume that’s why you’re here.”
He catches sight of the suitcases, lined up by the kitchen island, and his eyes widen before reverting to the flowers. He’s really interested in those.
I pluck the card out of the top and scan it—Congratulations, Molly! We look forward to a long working relationship. –K—before handing it to him. Our fingers overlap for a moment, and I’m gifted with a rush of heat.
“You took the job,” he says softly. “Harry told me they’d made you an offer.”
“Did you fly all the way here to congratulate me?” I ask, baiting him a little. Because why else would he have come? My rapidly beating heart thinks it knows the answer, but I’m not going to do any more assuming when it comes to the mind and heart of this man.
“Sort of,” he says. He rubs the bridge of his nose, and a rush of fondness goes through me. He pulls off his backpack, which I hadn’t even noticed, and unzips it. Pulls out a wooden pen. “This is for you.”
It’s a beautiful pen, made of different layers of colored wood, attached seamlessly, as if they had grown together that way, but it’s a strange gesture given that I haven’t seen him in weeks. Then it dawns on me.
“You made this,” I say with a slight tremble in my voice. Because I know he hasn’t made anything that’s not one hundred percent practical since Alice died.
His Adam’s apple bobs, and his hand sways closer as if he wants to reach for me. I feel myself leaning in toward him, but I hold back.
“A few days ago. I didn’t realize it was for you until just before I bought my ticket.” He sucks in air, then says in a rush, “Molly, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say I’m a stubborn man.”
I do laugh then, because he’s right.
A small smile flits across his face. “But even a stubborn man can admit he’s wrong. My friends—our friends—ambushed me last night at a Mexican restaurant.”
“They like to do that,” I say.
“I shouldn’t have needed them to point it out, but I was wrong to turn away from you. So wrong. You had every right to ask me about what Augusta said. It’s just…” He runs a hand through his hair, those lovely unruly strands, and when his hand falls by his side, I can’t help it, I reach for it. He runs his thumb over the back of my hand, looking at me with eyes full of wonder and wanting and…
“It’s just that I was falling in love with you, and I thought she’d taken you from me too, after she took the club and my story and…everything.”
My heart swells like the Grinch’s.
“She didn’t take everything from you,” I say, looking up at him. Needing him to understand this. “She could never take away who you are inside. Only someone with a heart as generous as yours would feel so guilty about what happened to Alice, Cal. You’ve spent these past years doing so much for other people, trying to make their lives better, but what about you? When are you going to be kind to yourself?”
He swallows again. “I wasn’t kind to you.”
“No,” I say, lifting my free hand to the side of his face, feeling the slight prickle of his whiskers…seeing the shadows under his eyes. He didn’t sleep. He took a red-eye flight to see me. “Because you couldn’t control yourself around me, any more than I can control myself around you. You couldn’t keep me at a distance like you did with everyone else.”
“You’re right about that.” He grimaces. “But if I had a generous heart like you think, I wouldn’t be here. I’d let you follow your dream without saying anything. That’s what I should have done. But when it comes to you, I find I’m a selfish man, Molly,” he says, his voice cracking slightly, “because even though you deserve to have every last thing you want out of life, I don’t want you to go to Los Angeles. I want you to come home.”
The way he says home lifts my heart, because Asheville is home, because of my sisters, because of Dottie and her whackadoodle tea shop, because of Tina and Harry and the rest of the original Bad Luck Club crew.
Because of this man.
And that’s when I decide to stop tormenting him.
“Why do you think I have my bags packed, dummy?”
His eyes light up like he’s a kid at his first Fourth of July fireworks, and suddenly his hands are on me, and he’s lifting me up. I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he swings me through the air like I’m a princess. And the way he’s looking at me…
When he lowers me, I’m the one who kisses him. His lips are soft and familiar, and they were so deeply missed. He kisses me back sweetly, as if I’m something precious, but I weave my hands into his hair and pull him closer, deepening our connection, and he catches on quickly. Soon his tongue is warring with mine and his hands are on my butt, pulling me against him, and he’s so hard for me I gasp.
Need pounds through me, but he pulls back, his hands sliding up to my waist. “You’re really coming back?”
“I’d pretty much decided before I boarded the flight to Seattle,” I say, my hands still on his sides as if to reassure me of his presence. “You made me love Asheville again. Then I came back to my apartment, and the Fred smell sealed the deal.”
“Really?” he marvels, although the hot, hard press of him tells me his attention is definitely divided. Then his lips turn up. “It is pretty bad.”
“The worst part is that you get used to it.”
He takes a dramatic sniff. “Nope. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. Your nose must be defective at smelling. It only works for sniffing out other people’s secrets.”
“You’re right,” I say, rubbing against him and getting a very satisfying groan in response. “I do excel at that.”
“But you’re not taking the Rogue Word job.”
“Nope, and believe it or not, I’ve already told Kate.” I wave a hand at the ridiculous flower arrangement on the floor and laugh at the realization there’s an honest-to-God crystal bumblebee studded in the middle of it. “She still thinks I’m angling for a higher salary, but she agreed to let me do some freelance work for them from Asheville. I have some other plans I’ll tell you about later. Suffice it to say that Mrs. Dahl is my muse, and I have big plans for her. Plans that she and Agnes greenlit last weekend, I’ll have you know. Besides you and Kate, only my sisters know that I’m coming back.” I pause. “I told Maisie about our dad.”