Chapter 33
Sage
Taking my cake, I studiously ignored them and returned to my craft corner to work on more flower pressings for new pieces.
They sold well once I mounted and framed them.
My shop was eclectic, but it had a cool vibe.
During the busy summer months, I had repeat customers who came in specifically for my art.
When I first started selling crafts, it was because Chloe urged me to try it. She thought they were beautiful, but I had considered them a little too homey. When they all sold for twenty bucks each on the very first day, I was stunned.
The shop did well, but business wasn’t always steady.
Our town was small, and I relied heavily on the tourist season.
The problem was that tourists didn’t buy flowers or plants the way locals did.
Budgeting was necessary, of course, but we also hosted a ton of events in town, and word of mouth helped too.
I stocked mini-plants and tiny fairy gardens with moss and small gnomes that people loved.
They featured on my social media, and they were always popular.
Making flower pressings was inexpensive for me, and they sold quickly.
They traveled well for tourists. Way better than plants did, and ultimately, my crafts covered my expenses, and everything else was profit.
Unscrewing the press, I checked on my flowers that were currently drying. The bright orange cosmos in my first press still felt too pliable, so I tightened them back down. The petals were already looking gorgeous, and once I added some feathery sattice or something, they’d look even better.
Taking a bite of cake, I moaned around it. It was delicious, just as I expected. Rich, dark chocolate with coffee frosting.
“You like it? I figured you deserved cake for breakfast this morning.” Phiny quietly slipped up behind me, offering a gentle smile as she leaned against the counter.
Usually, Phiny had a pretty good resting bitch face unless she was looking at a Holt or at food.
Many people thought she was standoffish, but we all knew that wasn’t true. “It’s good, right?”
“It’s amazing. Coffee in the frosting?”
“Good guess. Espresso. Lila made it for book club night. It’s going to be called Stoker’s Chocolate Stout Cake. I’m guessing it’ll be a big hit. What’s not to like?”
I noticed her eyes slide over to Ellis. Since she’d been home, she hadn’t gone on a single date, and even when we were at the Public House for a ladies’ night of dancing, she only came out on the floor with us.
This was the first time her eyes had wandered with any interest. He was good-looking with muscles for days.
I could see the appeal, but I’d be surprised if she took the bait.
“So, you have a bodyguard. That’s good. We’re all worried after yesterday and with the flowers.” She swallowed hard. “I shouldn’t have teased you about it before. We should have done something right away. Told Wade.”
“It isn’t your fault. You know that, right?
” Phiny’s eyes were glassy and so dark that they almost looked black.
She was beautiful—more beautiful than any of the rest of us combined—with her high cheekbones and the caramel notes in her skin.
She could have been a model if she wanted, but Delphina Holt had never been interested in any of that.
“You and I didn’t know who they were from or anything.
Heck, we don’t even know if the flowers are connected to the gas station thing,” I reminded her. “They could not be.”
“Maybe.” She bit her lip, looking uncertain.
Delphina was always the one who blew hot or cold.
Sometimes she’d be a total hard ass, but underneath every once in a while, you’d find that gooey center.
She leaned in close and wrapped me tight in her arms, squeezing me close for a minute up against her taller frame. “I love you, sister.”
“I love you back.”
“Alright. Enough of this. See you.” She dropped a kiss on the top of my head. “Tonight is book club, so you can have more cake. You’re coming right?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it.”
She gave a sharp nod and two-fingered salute to Ellis as he let her out and locked the door behind her. He looked at me and then back out the door as if he could still see her. “Your sister.” A pause. “She’s a good cook.”
“Yep.” I rolled my eyes, wondering when he’d get to the next question that I assumed he wanted to ask. Everyone always wanted to ask it.
“She single?”
That wasn’t the question I thought he was going to go with. “Yeah.” Looking at him with new consideration, I thought of him dating my sister. “You were in the service then?”
He shuffled his feet a little. “Yeah. Served with Rhodes.”
Wow. A conversationalist, but he hadn’t asked how we could be sisters because we didn’t look alike.
I hated when people did that. Every time it happened, it felt like my skin was two sizes too small, or I was wearing an Edgar suit that was too loose.
It wasn’t that I was embarrassed by our circumstances.
It was the opposite. I was proud to be in a family like the Holts, but most of the time, the question was driven by only one thing…
how we looked on the outside. And I hated that.
We were a family by choice, and not by blood, but it shouldn’t matter if we looked different.
“Well, good luck.” Smiling at the thought of him asking her out, I only wished he’d done it while she was here so I could watch. He frowned slightly at me. “You can try asking her out tonight at book club since I’ll be going then.”
“Maybe.” He gave me a chin nod. “I’m going to get back to installing that system.”
As the morning progressed, I opened up the shop, and a few early customers trickled in.
Mrs. Helmgard, the elderly widow from down the street, stopped by for her weekly flowers.
"Sage, dear, these always brighten my kitchen," she said, her voice quavering with age.
We chatted about the unseasonably warm weather we were having for late March.
I winced a little as she questioned, “You helping with the greenhouses there? "
"Just volunteering," I said, wrapping her flowers in brown paper.
"Rhodes is going to start restoring them.
" She paid with exact change, as always, and left with a wave. Next was a young couple picking up a bouquet for his parents’ anniversary, giggling over the card options.
The variety of people who might come into the shop was part of what kept my days interesting, and I was immediately immersed in helping them decide on their flowers.
My phone buzzed again mid-morning.
Rhodes
Still at the shop? I'm coming by. We need to finish this conversation face-to-face.
Fine.
I wasn’t quite sure how to reconcile my feelings about him.
He was larger than life, and I was already half in love with his daughter, but…
the ex? That was a hard no. That rule was set for a reason.
I’d had a relationship a few years earlier that ended with a guy having an ex-girlfriend who turned out to be more of a not-so-ex.
It all ended amicably, but the drama and stress involved made me so physically ill and caused so much anxiety that I had to start therapy again because of it.
If there was a hint that they were still involved with their ex, then it was a red flag for me.
Of course, I’d never dated anyone before who had been previously married or had children, so the problem was that there was no escaping the history. Catherine would be forever tied to Rhodes and Opal. I needed to really think about whether I could handle that.
Rhodes
Catherine doesn't matter. You do.
Grinding my teeth together, I didn’t bother replying.
This wasn’t really about Rhodes or his ex-wife.
It was about me more than anything else.
The whole thing was that I believed him, and what we shared was special.
But I knew better than to fall into bed with someone like that without having “the talk” about their past. My knowledge of his background and the relationship he’d had with his ex-wife could fill a thimble, and that wasn’t right.
Around 10 a.m., the door chimed again. Ellis was instantly alert, prowling from the back of the shop. My heart sank when I saw it was another delivery.
“Hmmm,” he looked uneasily at Ellis as he tried to shuffle the plain white box in his arms, his eyes flicking from me to the other man. "Special delivery for Sage Holt.”
“You can put it right there.” Ellis pointed at the table in the center. “Don’t move,” he ordered the courier. Surely he wasn’t going to just shoot the guy in the middle of my flower shop? “I’ll open it,” he said, voice low.
"It's probably nothing." The words tumbled out of my mouth, but I didn’t mean them in the traditional sense. Already, the box felt like it was carrying a bomb that could explode at any second.
Ellis examined it as if he believed those things were true, leaning down to carefully inspect the lid’s seams before sliding his fingers along the edges. “Tell me everything you know about this order,” he demanded of the delivery person.
“Umm,” the poor kid tapped his phone desperately, eyeballs pinging from Ellis to me as if somehow I was going to save him from whatever was happening. “Nothing. We’re a courier service. I pick stuff up and bring it. That’s it.”
Inside was a bouquet of forget-me-nots tied with a simple white ribbon.
This was a departure from the other flowers that were sent.
They were the typical sky-blue variety you could find anywhere, with delicate petals that looked beautiful against a plain sheet of tissue paper placed in the box and tied with a plain ribbon.
They looked almost stark and sterile, wrapped the way they were.
Ellis lifted the flowers for a minute, bruising them as he moved the tissue paper around until he retrieved the card and set it on the wood table.
You may have forgotten, but I never will.
It felt personal and intimate, as if the sender knew something about my life that I didn’t.
There were very few people who would even come to mind who wouldn’t come right up to me on the street to chat or invite me for a coffee.
All of the people in my life, even my exes, were amicable.
I was even friendly with the asshole who had made me the other woman.
Ellis snapped a photo of the note and flowers, already texting Rhodes. "Boss will want to see it."
I nodded, my hands trembling as I slipped them into my apron pockets. “It’s creepy. Like there’s something I don’t know.”
The shop suddenly felt smaller, and the cheerful crafts I had made on the walls no longer seemed so bright. My throat thickened as I tried to swallow past the knot that had formed. I felt a little sick.
“Hey, we’ll figure it out. That’s what we do.” Ellis looked like he might step forward and pat me on the shoulder to comfort me, but changed his mind when a customer walked in.
“Can I go?” The delivery driver hitched a thumb toward the door, shuffling a bit as if he was about to bolt.
“No, you can’t. Stay here until I can talk to you. We want details on the location you pick up from. What you know about who ordered it, all of that shit.”
The snap was so hard that I could practically hear the kid’s spine come to attention.
Minutes later, the door swung open, and Rhodes entered like a force of nature, tall and brooding.
His gray eyes locked onto me with that intense, possessive stare for a moment before he pulled me into an unprompted hug, his arms wrapping around me like steel.
"You okay?" he growled, his voice a low rumble against my ear.
It was like he was ignoring all of our previous texts or the whole thing with Catherine. Instead of sinking into him like I wanted, I wiggled away even as Rhodes’s face fell. Maybe I should have felt bad, but I just wrapped my arms around myself.