Chapter 13 JACE
JACE
I’m still there for professional reasons.
That’s what I tell myself Thursday morning when I park on her street forty minutes before she opens. When I walk the block twice instead of once. When I find myself noting that she’s four minutes later than usual and standing at the corner watching for her before I’ve decided to.
Professional reasons.
Tyler’s predictable now. Obsession runs on rails—same stool, same window, same rotation of days he shows and days he doesn’t. I know his pattern well enough to know when he’s off it.
That’s what I’m here for.
That’s the story.
But I also know that Wren reorganizes the ribbon drawer when she’s stressed.
That she hums when she’s focused and goes completely silent when she’s not.
That she drinks her coffee in three long pulls and then forgets it on the counter for an hour.
That she has a tell when a customer is frustrating her—a barely-there pause before she smiles that nobody else would notice.
Somehow, I notice it every time.
* * *
By the end of the week, she’s bent over a large arrangement at the worktable, flowers spread everywhere, focused enough that the rest of the shop disappears around her.
I’m near the front watching the street when she calls back without turning around.
“Can you hand me the jasmine? Left cooler, second shelf.”
I find it. Bring it over.
She’d taken her apron off at some point—it’s draped over the stool behind her—and without it I notice what I’ve managed not to notice all day.
The jeans. Tight, worn soft, and doing something to my self-control that I have no business analyzing.
Her shirt’s ridden up slightly at the back, exposing a strip of skin above the waistband.
Weight braced on her forearms, hips angled back, completely lost in the arrangement.
I reach past her to set the jasmine down, and suddenly I’m standing directly behind her.
Bare lower back. The curve of her inches away. Close enough that if she shifted even slightly she’d be against me.
The jasmine’s on the table. She’s still working.
I haven’t moved.
There’s no reason for me to still be standing here.
My brain goes somewhere it has no business going.
I’m a man who spent years not thinking about Wren Ashford. Three weeks around her and apparently that’s over.
I swallow, clear my throat, and step back.
She looks up then, glancing at me over her shoulder. I watch her register the change in the air before she looks back down at the arrangement.
“Thanks,” she says quietly.
“Yeah.” My voice comes out rougher than I intended.
I go back to the window.
I stand there staring at the street and force myself to think about anything else. Contracts. Security reports. The seventeen unanswered emails on my phone.
It doesn’t help.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I pull it out, already grateful for the interruption, and stop.
Dawson.
I look at his name on the screen for one full second. Then I answer.
“Hey.” His voice is clear tonight, wherever he is. “Checking in. How’s she doing?”
I turn away from the shop floor. Face the window. “Good. She’s good.”
“Tyler?”
“Same as before. Texts, mostly. I’m on it.”
“Good.” A delivery truck double-parks across the street. “You sound off.”
“Bad signal.”
“Jace.” His voice shifts. Not suspicious—just Dawson, who has known me for a very long time and can read a silence like a map. “You good?”
Behind me I can hear Wren moving, the soft sound of stems being stripped, water running briefly then off. The ordinary sounds of her afternoon. The sounds I apparently now know well enough to identify without looking.
“Fine,” I say.
“Okay.” He doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t push it either, because that’s also Dawson. “Tell her I called.”
“I will.”
“And Jace—” He stops. “Thanks. I mean it.”
“Yeah.” I end the call.
I stay at the window another second. Then I make one more call—short, low, away from the floor—and ten minutes later Davis is parked across the street with eyes on the door.
Only then do I tell Wren I have somewhere to be. The first clean lie I’ve told her.
I leave.
* * *
My penthouse is forty-two floors up and it looks exactly like what it is—the home of a man who bought everything he needed and nothing else.
Clean lines. No clutter. Floor to ceiling glass on two sides, Manhattan below, a view that’s supposed to mean something and mostly just means I can see a long way in every direction.
I pour two fingers of bourbon I don’t drink and stand at the window.
It was the ladder.
Dawson still in my ear, and somehow I’m apparently doing this now.
She was up it. I was below her. That goddamn green dress and a sightline I had no business having. When the fuck did those legs happen? The curve of her thigh disappearing under the hem. Looking away took longer than it should have.
Walked around hard for the rest of the day because of it.
Then today — her bent over the worktable while I stood behind her like a man who’d completely lost the thread of why he was in Brooklyn in the first place.
I know exactly why I’m in Brooklyn.
Dawson asked me to keep an eye on her while he’s deployed somewhere he can’t talk about. That’s it. End of story. She’s his little sister. Eleven years younger than me. When she was fourteen, that age gap felt like a canyon. It should still feel like one now.
I don’t touch the bourbon. Just stand at the window staring out over Manhattan, thinking about the line of her back over that table, the moment by the cooler when we ended up too close and she looked straight at me without moving away.
Thanks.
Dawson’s voice.
I close my eyes.