Tangled Up with the Firefighter (Copper Peak Sparks #3)

1. Laurelle

LAURELLE

Isee him before he sees me.

He’s crossing the courtyard with a piece of paper in his hand, moving past the coffee shop and the bookstore like he knows exactly where he’s going.

Dean Corbin. I know his name the way I know all of the firehouse crew—from the mornings they cut through the Trading Post for Lea’s coffee.

He’s the quiet one. The one who doesn’t stop to talk, doesn’t linger, doesn’t look around.

He walks through like a man with somewhere to be and no interest in being anywhere else.

But he’s not heading for Lea’s today.

He’s walking straight toward my door.

I’m at the workbench, stripping thorns from a bucket of roses, when I see him through the front window. He reaches the door and stops, and something about the pause holds me still too. He adjusts his collar, rolls his shoulders back, then pushes the door open.

The bell rings, and he fills the doorway for a second before he comes all the way in. His hands are clean but rough, knuckles scraped in places, and he’s holding that piece of paper like it owes him money.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

He glances around the shop, his eyes moving from the flower buckets along the wall to the cooler case to the workbench where I’m standing with a thorn stripper in one hand and a half-finished rose in the other.

Tourists scan for something pretty to grab on their way to the mountain.

He’s reading the space like it has instructions he hasn’t found yet.

His eyes come back to me. “I need to order flowers.”

“You’re in the right place.”

His expression stays level, like smiling is something he’d have to remember to do and he’s too focused for that right now. He looks down at the paper in his hand, unfolds it, and sets it on the counter between us.

“It’s for my mother,” he says. “Her birthday is Friday.”

I set the rose down and wipe my hands on my apron. The paper is a printout of my order form from the website. He’s filled it out in neat, square handwriting, every line completed. Name, date, delivery or pickup, budget range. Under arrangement style, he’s written nice.

“Nice?” I read it back to him without meaning to.

“I don’t know flower names.”

“That’s okay. Most people don’t.” I pull the form closer and scan what he’s given me. Friday pickup. Moderate budget. “What does she like? Colors, scents, anything you’ve noticed when she’s around flowers?”

He stares at me like I’ve asked him to translate something.

“She likes purple,” he says after a second. “And she has a garden at home. Tomatoes, herbs. Zinnias along the fence.”

“So she grows things.”

“Everything she touches grows.”

The sentence sits between us for a second, warm and unguarded, and then he’s already past it, waiting for my answer like he said something ordinary.

“Zinnias are great,” I say, because I need to say something. “They’re bright, they last, and they’re not fussy. If she grows them herself, she’ll appreciate an arrangement that doesn’t try too hard. Something that looks like it could have come from a garden instead of a catalog.”

He nods. “That. Whatever that is.”

“I can do a mixed arrangement. Purple as the anchor, ranunculus and stock for texture, some greenery to ground it. Garden style, not formal. Nothing stiff.”

“Good.” He pauses. “She’d hate stiff.”

I pull a scratch pad from under the register and start sketching the arrangement—just a rough shape so he can see what I’m thinking, the way I do for every order. The tall stems in the back, the round blooms in the center, the trailing greenery softening the edges.

He leans over the counter to look, and I catch the smell of him. Soap, maybe. Something clean underneath something that smells like the station—diesel and metal—faint, but there.

“She’ll like that,” he says.

“Tell me about the card.”

“Card?”

“The message card. What do you want it to say?”

He straightens. The collar adjustment from the doorway makes sense now. He’s not uncomfortable in my shop. He’s uncomfortable with the soft parts of what he’s doing. Buying flowers, writing a card, doing something that requires tenderness.

“Happy birthday, Mom,” he says. “From Dean.”

“That’s it?”

“What else would I say?”

I write it down. I don’t push. But I notice the way his jaw tightens after he says it, like there’s more behind those words than he’s going to give me across a counter.

“Is anyone else sending flowers?” I ask. “Sometimes families coordinate, and I can make sure the arrangements don’t overlap.”

“My sisters will call her. They always call. But nobody thinks to—” He stops. Looks at the order form on the counter between us. “I just want her to have something she can hold.”

The words hang in the air between us. He says them casually, but I hear what’s underneath.

His sisters will call. They’ll say the right things.

But Dean is the one standing in a flower shop with an order form he printed and filled out in neat, square handwriting, because love without action isn’t enough for him.

“Friday pickup,” I say. “I’ll have it ready by noon. You can come in anytime after that.”

“I’ll be here at noon.”

“I believe you.”

It comes out warmer than I planned. He looks at me, and for a second the steady, squared-off composure shifts. Not a lot. A fraction. Like a door opened an inch and the light changed on his face.

Then he nods. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Dean.”

He turns and walks out. The bell rings behind him. Through the window, I watch him cross the courtyard, and his stride is different than it was coming in. Looser. Like something he was holding got set down, even if it was just a flower order.

I pick up the rose I was stripping and get back to work. Thorn, thorn, thorn, clean stem. Drop it in the bucket. Reach for the next one.

My hands know this. My hands have always known this. Soil, stems, water, light. The rhythm of tending things that need me and can’t leave.

I’ve built my whole life around it. The shop, the courtyard, the small bright world inside these stone walls where everything I touch has roots.

Lea has her coffee shop, Kendall has the outfitter, Ellie has her books, Neve has her candles, Millie has her candy.

We all chose Copper Peak, and Copper Peak chose us back, and the Trading Post holds us the way I hold a stem.

Firmly, carefully, in exactly the right spot.

But Dean Corbin just stood at my counter and told me nobody else is sending his mother flowers on her birthday, and he said it the same way he’d tell me the weather. Like being the one who shows up is so ordinary it doesn’t even register.

I strip another thorn. My hands are steady. The rest of me isn’t sure.