Cara #2
“Hey.” Jasper’s voice, calm and quiet and absolutely deadly, came from just behind my left shoulder.
Something in me went slack with relief so fast it was almost embarrassing.
Eric’s hand dropped, and the tension that had been climbing steadily up my spine for the last thirty seconds released, leaving me slightly unsteady in a way I hoped didn’t show.
I felt my shoulders drop and resisted the urge to close my eyes for a second.
He stepped in beside me—not in front of me, not between us in a way that would make a scene, just beside me—and the solid warmth of him at my side was so grounding after the last thirty seconds that I had to make a conscious effort not to lean into him.
“Everything okay over here?” he asked.
“Fine,” Eric said, leaning back slightly, his smile returning with practiced ease. “Just asking her something.”
“She’s in the middle of the final round,” Jasper said. Still calm. Still pleasant. Not moving so much as an inch.
“I know that.”
“Then you’re good.” A pause, short and deliberate. “Sit. Down.”
I had a completely inappropriate reaction to that.
His tone—quiet and immovable, with certainty that didn’t need volume—did something to my nervous system that had nothing to do with the situation and everything to do with the man standing six inches to my left.
I kept my expression neutral and was grateful nobody could see inside my head.
Eric held Jasper’s gaze for a moment with the stillness of a man deciding whether to push back, and then something in his expression resettled. “Go ahead,” he said, nodding at me. “Don’t let me hold things up.”
I lifted the envelopes. My hands were steady, which surprised me.
“Final round,” I said again, stepping forward, and the room came back into focus around me—the candles, the faces, the warm layered smell of lavender and tea and old paper.
Jasper stayed where he was as I moved away.
I didn’t look back, but I felt him watching until I was safely across the room.
I distributed the last clues and let the game pull everything back into place, table by table.
The final round hit differently than the others—people were invested now, leaning over the pages with real urgency, piecing together everything they’d gathered through the evening into something that finally had a shape.
I moved between the tables and gave them time with it, watching the pieces fall into place for people in real time, watching the moment it clicked land on their faces.
I stepped to the front of the room. “And that,” I said, setting the final page down on the nearest table with a small, deliberate gesture, “is how it happened.”
A beat of silence.
Then the room came apart.
Gasps. Groans. A burst of laughter that started at Nancy’s table and spread. Someone said “no” with genuine feeling. Someone else said “obviously” in a tone that suggested it had been anything but.
Nancy pointed across the table at Hannah. “I told you it wasn’t the sister.”
“You absolutely did not,” Hannah said.
“I implied it strongly.”
“You argued for the sister for like, fifteen minutes.”
“I was keeping you off the trail.” Nancy straightened with dignity. “It was a strategy.”
“It was not a strategy,” Jasper said and slid back into his seat with a laugh.
The room dissolved. People pushed back from their tables and turned to each other, comparing notes, laughing over what they’d missed.
I moved between them, answering the questions that had been building all evening, watching the shop do exactly what I’d wanted it to do—hold people, keep them there, give them something to stay for.
I drifted back toward the counter eventually, the adrenaline of the evening beginning to settle into something I didn’t have words for yet. I ran water over the first stack of glasses, the warmth welcomed against my hands.
Lucy appeared at my elbow a few minutes later, sliding in close while Jasper was still across the room with Nancy and Hannah, who were apparently still debating the outcome at volume.
“So,” Lucy said, her voice low, “we’re going to talk about this.”
“Later,” I said, not looking up from the glasses.
“About him specifically.” She leaned her hip against the counter and studied the side of my face with the focused patience of someone who had all the time in the world.
“Jasper didn’t hesitate, Cara. Not for a second.
He’d been watching the whole time—I saw him.
Every time Eric got near you, Jasper was tracking it.
That’s why I didn’t step in. He had it handled before I even moved. ”
I rinsed another glass and set it aside. “I noticed.”
“I thought you might have.” She was quiet for a moment, and I could feel her deciding something. “I like him. I’m just going to say that clearly, for the record, so you can’t claim later that I never said it.”
“I heard you.”
“Good.” She made a small sound and looked back across the room, and I kept my eyes on the glasses and tried not to think too hard about the fact that she was right.
Jasper came back a few minutes later, moving around the small cluster of people near the display and stopping at the end of the counter. He looked at the stack of glasses, then at me. “I can help with that.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“I know.” He was already reaching for a stack of used cups from the nearest table, setting them carefully beside the sink. “I want to.”
Lucy’s brows lifted approximately one centimeter. She said nothing, which, for her, was its own form of commentary.
Jasper didn’t make a thing of it. He just settled in beside me behind the counter, moving with the easy practicality of someone who had decided to be useful and wasn’t interested in credit for it.
He gently stacked the teacups, wiped down the stretch of counter where someone had spilled, and straightened the empty trays.
The candles were still lit along the shelves, and in their light the shop looked the way I’d imagined it would at the end of an evening like this—warm and a little worn and full of the quiet afterglow of people who’d been happy in it.
I’d built this place into something, and standing here in it with the night winding down and Jasper beside me felt like more than I knew what to do with.
Lucy watched him for a long moment. Then she looked at me with an expression so loaded with unspoken things that I felt heat crawl up the back of my neck and had to look very deliberately at the glass in my hands.
“Well,” she said lightly, pushing off the counter, “I should probably—”
“Stay,” I said, immediately and without meaning to.
“I could,” she allowed, in the tone of someone who had already decided she wasn’t going to.
Spencer materialized at her side, slipping an easy arm around her waist and glancing between the two of us with a knowing grin that said he had read the room accurately and completely and was enjoying himself.
“Or,” he said, “we could not stay, and let whatever you’ve both been dancing around for the last hour unfold without an audience. ”
Lucy opened her mouth. He tugged her back one gentle step. “Don’t,” he said quietly.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were absolutely going to say something.”
She exhaled, the kind that conceded the point. “You’re right. I completely was.” She let herself be steered toward the door, twisting back over her shoulder as she went, her expression bright and entirely unrepentant. “Text me,” she called.
“I will,” I said.
“Tonight,” she added. “I don’t care how late it is.”
They left. The cool air rushed in briefly and then was gone.
The shop emptied out the rest of the way after that, chairs nudged back into place, last conversations wrapping up at the door, the bell chiming in small intervals as people filed out into the evening.
I moved through the space that opened up as people left, collecting the last of the notebooks and fountain pens, straightening the linen runners, blowing out the few real candles I’d put along the windowsill.
I walked to the front, turned the sign to CLOSED, and locked the door. The click echoed softly through the shop.
I stood there for a second with my hand still on the lock, aware in a way I hadn’t been all evening of how quiet it had become. The hum of conversation, the rustling of papers, the laughter, and the movement—all of it gone, the shop exhaling back into itself.
I turned back.
Jasper was still there, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed loosely, a small grin on his face, the warm light catching the sharp line of his jaw.
The sight of him standing in my shop, helpful and handsome in the candlelight, did something to my chest that I felt all the way down to my feet.
It was just the two of us. That fact registered with a clarity I hadn’t been prepared for, moving through me like a change in pressure.
All evening I’d been aware of him in fragments—across the room, at the corner table, beside me at the counter, but there had always been other people, other things to manage, somewhere else to put my attention.
Now there wasn’t. There was just me and Jasper Dean leaning against my counter, looking at me like he had things to say.
My heart had apparently made several decisions without consulting me. I walked toward him anyway.