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, imagining 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.”
“That she did. She would call me synochik, make me tea in a pot older than God, and tell me about her village. Her husband and kids. Her parents and grandparents. Surviving the winter by sleeping on a massive stove made of clay. Foraging and storing food in spring and summer. The war. It’s crazy, what she’s been through. I used to go down every Saturday morning and eat biscuits with her and just listen.”