His arms folded, this time making him look like Paul Bunyan, with tree-trunk arms and brawny shoulders as he looked down at me. “That I watch historicals?”
“No, that you disapprove of him cheating on her.”
Oh, how his frown deepened, forming an expression of betrayal. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” I hedged, suddenly unsure of myself, “only that … well, I just didn’t think you were one to attach emotions to sex.”
“That is mighty presumptuous of you, Tess.”
“It’s just that you seem to really enjoy women,” I clarified, avoiding his eyes by keeping myself in motion.
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect them.” He picked up another stack of crates and loaded them a little harder than necessary. “If I’d nearly died in war and come home to find the girl I loved married to someone else—my dickface cousin named Francis, no less—I’d have been broken. But I would have gone on. Because if she’d loved me, she would have waited. And if I’d found someone who loved me like Demelza, I wouldn’t have looked back.”
I watched him stack the last crates with that pout still on his face, unable to reconcile the man who watched BBC with his mom and ranted about the love story and the guy I’d thought had zero regard for anyone’s feelings other than his own. Not that he did it on purpose. His head really was that far up his own ass.
Or so I’d thought.
“Well,” I started, grabbing a couple of buckets of flowers, “I’m with you. And when she punched him in his stupid slack jaw, I jumped off the couch and did a Herkie.”
“A what?” he asked on a laugh.
“A Herkie. You know, the cheerleading jump where your legs go like … like one of them sticks out and the other bends?”
He frowned. “I don’t get it.”
I sighed, setting the flowers down and taking a few steps back to get into a clear space. “Like this.”
I wound up and jumped, kicking my right leg out in front of me, toe pointed, and bending my left leg, putting my foot right by my ass. My hands punched out to the sides like Bruce Lee knocking out two drug lords at once.
He clapped when I hit the ground, and I curtsied, lifting invisible skirts.
“Thank you, thank you,” I said.
“Where’d you learn to do that? I don’t remember you being a cheerleader.”
“I wasn’t. Ivy taught me,” I said, picking up my buckets again as he grabbed the cart handle. “I used to help her, spot her and that sort of thing, and she showed me some stuff. That one was my favorite.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you shoulda made the squad.” Hewinked as he passed, and I followed him.
“Oh, I didn’t really have time. My mom … well, I’d just started taking care of my dad full-time. There wasn’t time for much else.”
He slowed, looking down at me as I caught up. “I imagine you didn’t have much pep either,” he said gently, quietly.
“No, not a lot of pep or cheer. Not to expend on a basketball game anyway. I spent that energy on flowers instead.”
He didn’t say anything for a second as we walked through the double doors and into our workspace, and neither did I. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about, nor was it something I wanted to dwell on.
“Well, you did good on that, Tess. And look at you now—head of design and production at Longbourne Flower Shop.”
I chuckled, thankful he didn’t press. “What a fancy title. I’ll have to put that on my business cards.”
“You have business cards? Do they have your number on them?” he joked, waggling his brows at me.
I rolled my eyes. “No business cards.”
“If you did, would you give me one?”
“Probably not.”
“So there’s hope?”
I laughed, bumping him with my arm. But I didn’t answer.
I was a terrible liar.
The day went by in a blur, that kind of creative time warp that left you shocked when you looked up and it was dark out, the sort that had your stomach grinding on itself because you’d missed a meal. We ordered sandwiches, ate them sitting on tables across from each other in the storefront, feet dangling as we talked.
Luke and I worked around each other in a symphony with no sound. I planted the succulents and leafy plants, and he hung the frames and swing. I built the flower cloud with a wad of chicken wire, using wispy gray pampas grass like feathers, lavender heather, white wheat stalks, baby’s breath. It looked like a thundercloud hanging over that swing. Then we strung the filler flowers, hanging them upside down from frames Luke had whipped up like it was nothing. When I backed up, the flower heads made a pattern that looked like it was raining or sunshiny, depending on which installment we were looking at.
It was late as I put the finishing touches on it all. Luke had disappeared an hour before, but I’d barely noticed, my mind focused wholly on what I was doing. I stepped back to admire our work when I heard him approach.
“What do you think?” I asked without looking, still smiling at the installments, hands on my hips.
“Damn,” he breathed. “It really is impressive when you step back and look at it all together. I can’t wait to see it from the outside. Especially when we hang these.”
My brows quirked as I turned. He’d put his shirt back on when the sun went down and the shop cooled off, much to my disappointment. But he was dusted with sawdust, and little flecks of wood stood out like snowflakes against the dense black of his hair.
In his hands were two signs, and he held them up one at a time, as they were too long to display at once. In a gorgeous handwritten script were the words rain and shine, carved out of the wood, which he’d left raw.
My jaw hit the ground. “Luke, did you … you didn’t make these, did you?”
“Yeah,” he answered, inspecting rain. “Do you like them?”
“Like them?” I took rain from him, my eyes combing over it. “They’re … they’re gorgeous. How the hell?” I asked myself, turning it over like I’d find proof of magic.
He shrugged like it was no big deal, casual and confident, like this was just an everyday, regular thing. “I drew it out, used the scroll saw. Didn’t take long, thirty minutes for each, since they were just fonts, no borders or anything.”
I turned to meet his eyes, blinking at him stupidly. “You drew this?”
“I mean, I used a font as a template, but yeah.”
“And then you just … cut it out?”
“That’s how it usually works,” he said on a laugh. “I would have painted them, but I didn’t know what color you wanted to do.”
“Turquoise,” I said without hesitation. “To match the door.”
“Got it. Be right back.” And with a smirk and a wink, he was walking away again, leaving me in the quiet shop.
Luke Bennet, my hero.
It wasn’t even right.
I swallowed the bitter pill that I’d been wrong about him as I walked to the swing and sat, gripping the rope. But the aftertaste of that wasn’t something I could rid myself of so easily.
I liked him. And I liked him enough to do something about it.