Chapter 5
Five
LIANA
The next morning, my flower shop is quiet as a small family picks out flowers. They’re all wearing black. They don’t say much, and I don’t expect them to.
The mother picks out white lilies with trembling fingers while her husband stands behind her, his hand on her shoulder, his face blank as fresh paper. Their daughter, maybe sixteen, stares at the floor tiles. I wrap the stems in kraft paper without asking if they want a ribbon.
“These will open by tomorrow,” I say quietly, sliding the arrangement across the mahogany counter. “Keep them in cool water. Change it daily.”
The mother nods. Her eyes are red-rimmed and dry. She’s past crying. I recognize the look.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
I ring them up. The old brass register dings. The bell over the door rings as they leave, carrying white flowers into a Brooklyn spring morning, and I watch them until they turn the corner.
The bell rings again. I turn around, and my stomach drops when I see who’s at the door.
Julian Frostwood, one of the men from yesterday’s meeting, is standing there. And he has a bird on his shoulder. Like an actual bird.
A parrot.
The parrot is emerald green with a brilliant yellow head and beady eyes that look perpetually annoyed.
Julian himself looks different. Less put-together than he was at the bakery.
His dark brown hair is slightly messy, his hazel eyes bright, his shirt open at the collar with the sleeves pushed up to his forearms. He smells like lemon and expensive cologne, and something warmer underneath that makes my skin prickle.
I cross my arms. Stay behind the counter. The distance between us feels necessary.
“Can I help you?” I ask sharply. I hope to god he doesn’t know that I’m an omega.
He doesn’t answer right away. He’s looking at my flowers. The parrot is muttering something I can’t quite catch, a scratchy stream of syllables that sound almost like words.
“Ranunculus,” Julian says, pointing at a bucket of yellow blooms. “Right?”
I nod once. Tight.
He moves to the counter. Puts both elbows on the mahogany and leans forward. His forearms are tan, strong, the kind of forearms that belong on billboards selling watches. The parrot shifts on his shoulder, tilting its head to look at me with one suspicious yellow eye.
“Do you remember me?” Julian asks. His voice is warm. Careful.
“Of course I remember you.” I keep my arms crossed. “You’re one of the men trying to steal my store.”
He looks genuinely offended. His dimple vanishes. “That’s not—we’re not trying to steal anything. We made a fair offer.”
“Seventy-five thousand dollars to walk away from my life is not a fair offer. It’s a bribe.”
The parrot chooses this moment to clear its throat. Or whatever parrots do that sounds like throat-clearing. A small, indignant squawk.
I glance at it. “That’s a cool parrot.”
Julian’s face softens. The dimple comes back. “This is Pepper. He’s nineteen. He’s an asshole.”
“Hi,” Pepper says in a scratchy approximation of Julian’s voice.
I blink. “Did he just say a real word?”
“He talks. Constantly. Mostly things he’s overheard. It’s embarrassing,” Julian says as he reaches up to scratch Pepper’s yellow head. The bird leans into it, eyes half-closing with pleasure.
Julian’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out, glances at the screen, and his expression tightens. “Shit. Excuse me for one second.”
He steps outside, phone to his ear. I can hear the low rumble of his voice through the glass. Ezra’s name floats through the gap in the door. The conversation sounds tense.
The door closes. Julian is outside the shop.
Pepper is still on the counter where Julian set him down. The bird sidles sideways along the mahogany, his claws making soft ticking sounds, and fixes me with both yellow eyes.
“Hi gorgeous,” Pepper says.
I stare at him. “Umm, what the fuck… excuse me?”
“Pretty girl,” Pepper offers, bobbing his head.
My hands find the edge of the counter. “Did Julian teach you that?”
“Like roses,” Pepper says.
I sink slowly onto my stool behind the counter. “What?”
“She smells delicious,” Pepper announces to the empty shop.
“Oh, my god,” I mutter, wondering if that’s something he picked up from his owner.
Pepper is gathering steam now, pacing the counter with the theatrical urgency of a Broadway diva delivering his final monologue. “I shouldn’t have taken those. Where the fuck did I put them?”
“Taken what?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to know.
Pepper stops. Puffs his feathers to twice his normal size. Looks me dead in the eye with the gravitas of a Shakespearean actor and says, with great feeling: “I’m in love with Liana. Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me.”
The glass vase in my hand hits the floor.
It shatters. Water and stems and glass shards explode across the wide-plank flooring, and I’m standing there with my empty hand still outstretched, my heart hammering against my ribs, and Pepper is surveying the damage with what can only be described as smug satisfaction.
“Bad bird,” he says.
The bell rings.
Julian walks back in.
He immediately takes in the scene of me standing amid broken glass, Pepper preening on the counter, the yellow ranunculus scattered across the floor like fallen stars.
His face goes still. “What did he say to you?”
I don’t look up. I’m staring at the largest piece of glass, a jagged crescent near my boot. “He said: I’m in love with Liana.”
Silence. Long, thick, weighted silence.
Julian closes his eyes. “...fuck.”
“Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me,” Pepper helpfully supplies.
“PEPPER. NO.” Julian points at the bird, which has absolutely no effect. Pepper just tilts his head and makes a soft kissing noise.
I laugh. I can’t help it.
It bursts out of me, raw and surprised, and Julian’s eyes snap to my face. The sound of my own laughter in this shop, amid broken glass and a talking parrot and the man who tried to buy me out, is so absurd that I keep laughing until my ribs hurt.
“He’s crazy,” Julian says, running a hand through his hair. “He just repeats things. He doesn’t know what any of it means.”
“It’s fine,” I say quickly, not wanting to think about what the parrot just said, but I’m still blushing all the same.
A small crunching sound draws our attention. Pepper has hopped down to the floor and is cheerfully destroying one of the yellow ranunculus, tearing petals with his beak.
“Pepper!” Julian lunges for him. The bird squawks and flutters up to the cooler, trailing yellow petals. Julian grabs the remains of the bouquet—half-eaten, bedraggled, missing three stems.
“Don’t worry,” I say, giggling at the sight.
“I’m buying this,” he says firmly.
“You don’t have to. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” he says, already pulling out his wallet. “He destroyed your flowers. I’m paying for them.”
He leans across the counter to hand me cash.
“Thank you…” I start to say, but my voice trails off when his alpha scent hits me. He smells so good, like lemon. My knees go weak, and I brace both hands on the mahogany to keep from swaying. My pussy throbs. Slick gathers. I hate my body for betraying me like this.
Julian notices. Of course he notices. His eyes drop to my white-knuckled grip on the counter, then back to my face. “You okay?”
His voice has dropped half an octave. Rough. Warm. The kind of voice that makes heat pool low in my belly.
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine,” I whisper.
His fingers linger against my palm as he hands me the cash. Skin on skin. One second. Two. I don’t pull away. I should pull away. I don’t.
When I pull my hand away, my skin turns cold, and I quickly shove the money into the cash register without looking at him.
“Sorry about my badly behaved bird,” he says, completely oblivious, but his nostrils are flaring like he can sense the sexual tension between us. My pussy clenches when he gives me a look. It’s a certain look that an alpha reserves for his omega. “Have a good day, Liana.”
“Bye,” I whisper, and I watch him leave.
My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat. I walk around the counter and kneel to gather the yellow petals from the floor. They’re soft between my fingers, torn and wet. I throw them in the trash and chuckle to myself. Pepper is something else.
But the shop is deathly quiet now. It’s way too quiet now.
I hate it.
The yellow bouquet is still on the counter. Half-destroyed and paid for, but he never took it. Picking up the bouquet, I rush out the door after him with the bell ringing wildly behind me.
“Julian!”
He’s twenty feet down the sidewalk, about to climb into a black luxury car idling at the curb. He turns. Sees me holding out the flowers. His expression softens. He walks back, takes the bouquet from my hands with a smile that makes my stomach flip.
“Thank you,” he says.
The driver revs the engine. Julian starts to turn away. Something cracks in my chest. A small, brittle sound I didn’t mean to make. My vision blurs.
Julian stops. Turns back. Looks at my face. Really looks.
Then he immediately pokes his head through the car window and tells the driver to go on ahead without him. The car pulls away.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Something’s off,” he says softly while still holding the yellow flowers. His eyes are on mine, warm and focused. “You look sad.”
I blink. A tear tracks down my cheek. Then another. I didn’t realize they were there. I wipe my face fast with the back of my wrist, embarrassed, my hands twisting the hem of my apron.
The words come out before I’ve decided whether to say them.
“I felt lonely for a second. In there. After you left. The shop got so quiet and I…I felt lonely. Just for a second.”
Julian goes very still. Beside him, Pepper goes still too—a small mirror of his alpha, head tilted, eyes sharp.
After a long beat, Julian says carefully. “Liana. Look at me.”
I slowly look up, totally embarrassed by what I admitted and wishing I could take it all back. But his gaze is warm and not full of pity or anything.
“Close the shop.”
I blink. “What?”
“Let’s close the shop. Right now. Let’s go do something fun.”