Chapter 7
Seven
LIANA
The metal chair is cold through the back of my thighs, even through my jeans, and I wrap both hands around my coffee mug and let the heat seep into my palms.
It’s barely past five in the morning.
The street is still dark — streetlights throwing orange pools onto the wet pavement, the city holding its breath before the day starts.
Mira’s bakery glows behind me as I sit on the roof of her cafe, warm yellow through the window glass, the smell of butter and caramelizing sugar drifting through the cracked door.
She made my coffee the way she always makes it.
Heavy cream, two sugars. She has never once had to ask.
A delivery truck idles at the corner, its engine a low, steady vibration. Someone’s radio plays faintly through a cracked cab window. Down the block, a pigeon investigates something near the gutter with the single-minded focus of a creature who has given up on dignity.
I’ve been awake since four. Mira has been awake since three.
The paper bag between us holds two croissants, still warm, the laminated layers crackling when I tear mine open. I eat without tasting it, watching the street, remembering the flower crown and Julian. I hate that I’m thinking about him.
Mira leans forward. Both elbows on the table, chin in her hands, her eyes bright in the bakery light. She looks like she has been waiting for hours.
She has been waiting for hours.
“Every single detail,” she says. “Start with the kiss.”
I open my mouth. “I didn’t—”
“You did.” She leans forward another inch. “You think I don’t watch my doorbell camera? The app sent me a motion alert at nine forty-seven PM, Lia. I watched the whole thing.”
“Mira.”
“His hand was on your face.” She says it reverently, like a benediction.
My face is already burning. I press the coffee mug to my cheek and look at the pigeon.
“He took me to a fair,” I say finally, because the smile breaks through before I can stop it, cracking the surface of my very reasonable intention to be dignified about this.
Mira’s eyes go wide. “A fair.”
“On the waterfront.”
“Of course.” She sits back and shakes her head slowly. “Of course it was the waterfront. With the view. Tell me everything.”
So I tell her. Not everything, but enough to appease her. About Pepper, who destroyed my flowers, and Julian paying for it. About the bench by the water, and his apology.
“He apologized,” I say. “For how they came at me at the meeting.”
Mira is quiet for a moment. “And?”
“And I believed him.” I pull off a piece of croissant. “He said he’d fix it somehow.”
“Can he actually fix it? Or is this what it looks like when a charming alpha talks a woman into trusting him so she stops fighting back?”
I look at her. She looks at me. The question hangs between us, honest and cold, the kind of question I’m glad she asks because I’m not sure I’d ask it myself.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
“Okay,” Mira says. “And the kiss?”
“He asked,” I say quietly.
Mira’s expression changes completely. Her eyebrows go up. Her mouth opens. “He asked.”
“He said, ‘May I?’” The words are strange to say out loud. They feel too soft for the air. “He waited for me to answer.”
Mira stares at me. Her eyes are very bright. After a moment, she picks up her coffee and takes a long sip. “Okay. So he’s not entirely an alpha-hole.” She points her cup at me. “But Lia. He still wants your shop. He could be buttering you up so you don’t get a lawyer.”
“I know,” I say.
“Do you?”
“I’m not stupid,” I say. “I don’t trust easily, especially with how I was treated in my past.”
Mira nods, looking down, going awfully silent as she reaches for a second croissant. “Sorry for being too harsh on you. You’re literally my only friend who’s an omega too. I know you're not stupid.”
Tears spring to my eyes as I smile. “Well, that’s good to know.”
We both laugh, but Mira’s eyes move past my shoulder and fix on something down the street, going sharp.
I turn.
A black SUV sits at the curb next door. Quiet engine. Blacked-out windows. The back passenger door opens.
Cole Frostwood steps onto the sidewalk.
Dark hair, shorter on the sides, slightly longer on top. He’s wearing a black shirt under a dark jacket that sits across his shoulders, paired with black jeans and combat boots.
“Who is that?” Mira says, low.
“One of them.”
“Which one?”
“I think his name is Cole.”
Cole crosses the street. He walks up to the sage-green door of Marsh Florals and tries the handle.
Locked. He steps back. He tilts his head up toward the second floor, to the windows of my apartment, the ones I leave cracked at night because I like hearing the street.
He looks like a man trying to decide how long he is willing to stand on a sidewalk.
The answer, apparently, is indefinitely.
“Lia,” Mira says. “Why is a Frostwood at your shop at five in the morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
I look at him. He still hasn’t seen us. He’s standing with his hands at his sides, perfectly still, looking up at my window with an expression I cannot read from here.
“No,” I say. “But I want to know what he wants.”
“Are you sure?” Mira’s voice drops.
“I’m sure,” I say, standing up from my chair. I brush the croissant crumbs from my apron with two quick strokes. “Don’t worry about me. I can handle this.”
Mira looks at Cole. Looks back at me. “If he tries anything, I’m calling the police.”
“Mira…”
“Okay, okay.”
My footsteps on the sidewalk are soft. Cole hears them anyway. He turns before I’ve covered half the distance, and his slate-blue eyes find me in the dim light with the ease of a man who never stops watching.
“Liana Marsh,” he says.
“Why are you here?” I ask bluntly. I don’t trust him, like I do Julian…at least somewhat.
“I want to talk to you,” he says. “May we go inside?”
I look at him. He waits. He doesn’t reach for me, or fill the silence with charm or explanation or anything at all. He just waits, and his patience undoes my defenses.
I pull my keys from my apron pocket.
“Sure,” I say.
Inside, I flip on the single warm lamp behind the counter. It throws a low gold circle across the mahogany, leaving the rest of the shop in soft shadow. The cooler hums. The radiator ticks. The shop smells like damp soil, eucalyptus, the faint beeswax candle I burned yesterday evening.
Cole steps inside. He stops two feet from the door, not advancing any further.
He looks around systematically, carefully, missing nothing. His gaze moves from the divided-pane windows to the mahogany counter to the wall of cubbies to the glass cooler full of sleeping stems.
“The shop is beautiful,” he says, sounding like he means it.
“Thank you,” I say a little too defensively.
He looks at me. “You made something out of nothing three years ago.”
I go still. “How do you know that?”
“I just did a little research since we met with you.”
The air shifts. It suddenly feels cold.
My arms tighten across my body. Without thinking, I reach for my sleeves, tugging them down toward my wrists. I pull too fast. The left cuff catches on my elbow.
My scar is exposed.
The silvery, jagged arc of Magnus’s failed claiming, all attempts layered over each other across my inner forearm, sits there in the warm lamplight. Bare. Undeniable.
Cole’s eyes drop to it. They stay there for exactly one and a half seconds. Long enough. Then they come back to my face.
“Who did that?” he asks. His voice is quiet. Completely calm.
“I—what?”
“You don’t have to hide that from me, Liana.”
My hand is frozen halfway through pulling the sleeve back down. My throat closes tight. I’ve never explained it to anyone.
“Uh,” I say at first. “It’s nothing.”
Outside, a delivery truck bangs to a stop at the curb.
Oh, thank goodness, my plants are here.
The driver stops just outside my store, dumping the crates. I hear the heavy thud of the first crate hitting the sidewalk, then the second, then the third.
I move automatically as I push through the door and crouch toward the first crate. Three buckets of sweet peas and garden roses, heavy with water and stems.
I get my hands under the edge and lift.
The world tilts.
The lack of sleep hits me all at once— the four AM waking, the pre-dawn dark, the conversation I’ve just had, the adrenaline of Cole’s eyes on my scar. My hands shake. The crate slips.
“Whoa, whoa,” Cole says, suddenly beside me and immediately taking the crate from my hands with one arm, easy, like it weighs nothing. His other hand finds the small of my back, and holds me there while the dizziness passes. “Hey, you okay?”
“Just tired,” I say, my face reddening as I blush under his gaze. He’s strong as hell carrying that heavy crate with one arm. His hand stays on my back there for three seconds, and I feel the heat of it through my shirt like a brand as he leads me inside.
“I got the rest, just stay inside,” he says in a low voice. He carries all three crates inside without being asked, setting them down beside the cooler where the rest of the unopened crates went. “You look like you’ve got your work cut out for you. Want some help?”
Thirty minutes later, I watch as Cole works next to me, holding shears in his gloved hands. His sleeves are pushed up, and I can’t help but watch his forearms move as he works.
He is good with his hands.
He is fast, precise, and gentle with the flowers in a way that surprises me in a man his size.
There is a small, focused crease between his eyebrows when he’s working.
Cole carries the bucket to the cooler when it’s full and doesn’t ask what to do next.
He looks at what I’m doing and does the same thing beside me.
He doesn’t crowd me.
He never once brushes my shoulder or reaches across me or stands too close. I find, against every wall I built last night to keep him at a safe theoretical distance, that I like it. The quiet. The efficiency. The way he hands me the stem tape before I reach for it without my saying a word.
“Working here must be peaceful,” he says, clipping an anemone stem.