Chapter 2 #2
Of course it’s the name of the rose. I laugh, then it falls short. “You wrote it down,” I say. Realization dawns. “You can’t speak.”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t look regretful about it. It’s just a fact.
“Can you hear?”
He shakes his head. But points to his mouth.
He’s deaf. But he can read lips.
I nod. “I understand.”
I adjust to this and realize I love this silence.
I hesitate, then look around the house; the roses; the meadow. “Is this all yours?”
He writes in his notebook.
I don’t own it. But I live here. I’m the island caretaker.
“Are you alone?”
He examines me a moment.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to murder you or anything. I may be a jilted bride, but there’s only one person I want to murder right now.”
To my surprise, his lips curl up slightly on one side, before dropping, his face expressing something like anger mixed with disbelief.
I’m alone, he writes. Then he puts the pencil to the book again. I’m sorry about the guy in the closet. That fuck.
I can’t help it. I burst out laughing at how he uses my words.
Then I sigh, nodding. “I’m sorry too.” I walk over to the rose again, trailing my finger along the stem, skipping over a sharp thorn before dusting my fingertip over a leaf. “I think I am, anyway. I’m still kind of shocked. He’s supposed to be a family man, you know?”
I smell one of the roses—a more traditionally pink one in a cluster of blooms.
Then I remember I have to face him so he can read my lips. I repeat what I said before. Then I laugh kind of ruefully and say, “You know what’s funny? It’s the flowers I’m going to miss the most. From the wedding. It was going to be a beautiful bouquet. Jeff said he’d get the hotel to make it…”
I trail off. “It would have been you, wouldn’t it? Who made the bouquets?”
The gardener looks down, his ears pink. But he nods.
“I’ve heard about them, you know. People in town talk about the wedding bouquets you make. I didn’t know there was a single man behind them all.”
When he looks up again, it’s as if he’s lit from within.
And suddenly, I can’t breathe. That amalgamation of features before? It vanishes now. He’s just handsome. Beautifully handsome. Like an angel, with that hair curling at his neck and eyes that look like the ocean.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
He picks up his pad, stepping closer so I can read. Clint.
I swallow. “I’m Maggie.”
Something flashes behind his eyes. He nods, as if expecting a plain name like that.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” I say, reaching up to draw my finger gently along the petals of A Rare Beauty. “Nothing can compete with this.”
He’s still a few feet away and hesitates only a moment before coming over to me.
I come up only to his shoulder, even in my heels.
I find, out of nowhere, my heart beating rapidly in my chest. A patter that seems to vibrate through my body. I can smell him, he’s so close. He smells like the earth. Like fresh air.
Like roses.
He puts his book in his pocket and pulls something else out. A pair of clippers. Before I know what’s happening, he’s reached forward, expertly grasping the base of the giant bloom.
He clips it, and the bloom falls.
I gasp, reaching my hands out to catch it, cupped like I’m trying to catch falling water.
I hold it, shocked. “That was your best one!”
Clint just smiles. Then he reaches his hand into mine. His fingers are huge, and when he slips them under the stem of the rose, I feel something warm open up in my lower half. It’s like he’s slipped his hand somewhere much more intimate.
I’m shocked at the thought, but even more so at the sensation. My cheeks feel like they’re on fire.
I don’t realize what he’s doing until he’s got the rose upright. He shears off the thorns, one by one, letting them fall to the boards at our feet.
His hands are talented. Expert. He does it all in a matter of seconds, then hands the rose back to me.
This time, when his eyes meet mine, it feels as if he’s stripped me of my thorns. Like he’s holding on to me in those big, dirt-lined hands, with nothing between us.
What the hell, Maggie? I don’t think like this. I don’t fantasize about big, random strangers, even one who rescued me so perfectly he might have been riding a horse, hair fluttering in the wind as he swept me off my feet…
I take the rose, careful not to touch those rough-looking fingers. At this rate, if I do, I might moan.
But I can’t help looking up at him again. Those stunning blue eyes are pinned on me.
But there’s something about him, I realize. When I first looked at his face, I thought there was some generic, warm feeling there, a sensation of safety and kindness. But now I think it’s more than that. There’s something familiar about him. Something I can’t quite place.
“Do I…know you from somewhere?” I ask.
Clint looks down. Then lifts his notepad again, hesitating, before writing Maybe in town.
I shake my head. “I don’t think that’s it. I’d remember seeing you in town. You’re kind of hard to miss.”
His throat bobs, his jaw ticking slightly as he locks eyes with mine. I have seen him before. I’m sure now. Just…something’s not lining up. It’s like it wasn’t as he is now.
He writes something in his book, and when I read what it says, I frown.
“I helped you once?” Inanely, I think of the library. But that’s impossible. He looks to be my age.
He writes again. When we were kids.
I frown. “Really? When was that? What happened?”
It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago. It’s slow to explain on paper.
“I like slow,” I say. I bite my lip, and I can’t help but notice the way his eyes follow the movement, his pupils flashing just slightly as my lip slides from my teeth.
Maybe I’m not such an intruder here. Maybe this feels good for him too, at least a little.
Bolstered, I go over and sit in the chair at the table, pulling out the one next to me for him to sit in too.
Jeff used to tell me I was bossy when I got an idea in my head.
I like to call it determined.
The man hesitates, then sits down.
Then, he writes.