Chapter 6 WREN
WREN
I’m elbow-deep in greenery when the door chimes.
I don’t look up right away. I’m holding a eucalyptus branch at an angle that’s taken me four tries to get right, and if I move now, I’ll lose it. “Be right with you,” I call out, tucking the stem into place and reaching for the floral tape.
“Take your time.”
My hands stop.
I know that voice. I heard it in my shop last week and I’ve been hearing it in my head every night since, which is embarrassing and irritating and not something I’m going to think about right now.
I look up.
Jace is standing just inside the door with his hands in the pockets of a dark jacket, aviators still on, face pointed in my direction.
He looks out of place here, the same way he did before.
Too tall, too sharp, too much of everything against the soft chaos of my shop.
The flowers look delicate next to him. The whole room does.
Then he pulls the aviators off and I remember exactly why I’ve been trying not to think about him.
I swallow. Look back down at the eucalyptus like it needs my attention.
“You’re back,” I say, and it comes out flatter than I mean it to.
“I was in the area.”
“You said that last time.”
“Still true.”
“Still not believable.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. The ghost of a smile, there and gone before it forms. Jace Carrington doesn’t smile easily.
“I wanted to check on the shop,” he says.
“The shop is fine.”
“The lock on your front door isn’t.”
I open my mouth to argue, but he’s already looking at the door. Same as last time and I still can’t decide if it makes me feel safe or exposed.
“It’s a deadbolt,” I say.
“It’s a deadbolt from 2006 that I could open with a credit card in thirty seconds.”
“Good thing you’re not trying to break into my flower shop.”
He looks at me. Holds it. “I’m not the one I’m worried about.”
That lands. I don’t want it to, but it does.
I go back to the centerpiece because I need something to do with my hands.
The eucalyptus branch isn’t cooperating anymore—it keeps listing to the right no matter how I angle it, and my fingers aren’t steady enough for the kind of precision work this arrangement needs.
I can feel him watching me, and it makes me suddenly conscious of everything—how I’m standing, where my hands are, how little space there actually is between us with only the counter in the way.
“You don’t have to keep checking on me,” I say without looking up. “Whatever Dawson told you, I can handle it.”
“I know you can.”
I glance up, waiting for the but that always comes after a line like that, but it doesn’t come.
“Then why are you here?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer that, which is answer enough.
I go back to the eucalyptus because looking at him is making it hard to think straight. “You know, Dawson used to talk about you all the time. Every phone call, it was Jace this, Jace that. I figured you’d end up running the military by now or something.”
He lets out a quiet laugh, and it hits lower than I expect, somewhere I don’t want to look at too closely. “I started my own thing,” he says. “Security. Protection.”
He holds my eyes.
I nod like that makes sense. Protection . I refuse to examine why that word feels different coming from him.
“Well,” I manage after a second, “that explains the lock obsession.”
He leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms, and my mouth goes dry. “What about you? Dawson said you were pre-med at one point.”
I snort. “For about five minutes. Turns out I’d rather keep things alive with water and sunlight than with a scalpel.” I nod at the shop around us. “This makes more sense for me.”
“It suits you.” The way he says it—quiet, like he means it more than he wants to—makes my hands fumble on the stem I’m holding.
I recover before he notices. Or at least before he lets on that he notices.
“You’re low on the left side,” he adds.
I blink. “What?”
“The arrangement. It’s heavier on the right. You need something taller on the left to balance it.”
I stare at him. “You’re giving me floral advice.”
“I’m giving you structural advice. The principle is the same.”
I look at the centerpiece. He’s right. It is heavier on the right. I’ve been so caught up in the eucalyptus that I let the whole thing drift off-center.
I hate that he’s right.
I grab a longer branch of Italian ruscus and start working it into the left side, and I’m so focused on proving that I don’t need his help that I misjudge the angle and knock the entire arrangement sideways.
Water sloshes across the counter, soaking the ribbon I’d already cut for the wrap, and I reach for the vase at the same time he does.
His hand closes over mine on the vase, steadying it, and the contact is so sudden and so warm that my brain goes completely blank for a second. His hand is big and rough and I shouldn’t be thinking about what those hands have done, but I am.
Neither of us moves.
The water is dripping off the counter onto the floor and I should be doing something about that but his thumb is resting against my wrist, right where my pulse is, and there’s no way he can’t feel how fast it’s going.
“I’ve got it,” I say. My voice comes out quieter than I want it to.
He doesn’t let go right away.
That’s the part I’ll think about later. Not that he reached for the vase. Not that his hand landed on mine. Those things could be reflexes, instinct, a man who moves fast in a crisis even when the crisis is a centerpiece full of water.
But the pause. The half second where his hand stays on mine after the vase is steady and there’s no reason for it. Where his thumb shifts, barely, against the inside of my wrist, and his eyes drop to where we’re touching, and I watch him make the decision to pull away like it costs him something.
This is different. I know it the way I know a stem will hold—because I can feel it in my hands.
He steps back, but his eyes stay on mine a second too long. His jaw tightens before he clears his throat and looks away.
I grab a towel and start wiping down the counter because if I don’t put my hands to work I’ll stand here replaying his thumb on my pulse, and that’s not happening. Not in front of him.
He watches me wipe down the counter. Then he moves toward the door, and I’m sure he’s leaving, and my throat tightens before I can help it.
But he doesn’t go.
“I’m having a new lock installed,” he says. “Tomorrow morning. My guy will be here at seven.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need you replacing my locks, Jace.”
“It’s already done.”
And then he’s gone. The door chimes behind him and the shop is quiet again, just me and the half-finished centerpiece and the water still dripping off the counter and the place on my wrist where his thumb was that I swear is still warm.
I stand there for a long time.
Then I lock the door. The terrible, outdated, 2006 deadbolt that apparently anyone could open with a credit card. I lock it and I lean against it and I press my wrist to my chest like I’m holding something in.
My phone buzzes. Unknown number.
I don’t answer.
But for the first time, the reason I check the lock isn’t Tyler.
It’s the fact that Jace Carrington just touched my hand for three seconds and I felt it everywhere, and the man who scares me isn’t the one who keeps calling.
It’s the one who just walked out.