Page 1 of Tangled Up with the Firefighter

1

LAURELLE

Isee him before he sees me.

He’s crossing the courtyard with a piece of paper in his hand, moving past the coffee shop and the bookstore like he knows exactly where he’s going.

Dean Corbin. I know his name the way I know all of the firehouse crew—from the mornings they cut through the Trading Post for Lea’s coffee. He’s the quiet one. The one who doesn’t stop to talk, doesn’t linger, doesn’t look around. He walks through like a man with somewhere to be and no interest in being anywhere else.

But he’s not heading for Lea’s today.

He’s walking straight toward my door.

I’m at the workbench, stripping thorns from a bucket of roses, when I see him through the front window. He reaches the door and stops, and something about the pause holds me still too. He adjusts his collar, rolls his shoulders back, then pushes the door open.

The bell rings, and he fills the doorway for a second before he comes all the way in. His hands are clean but rough, knuckles scraped in places, and he’s holding that piece of paper like it owes him money.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

He glances around the shop, his eyes moving from the flower buckets along the wall to the cooler case to the workbench where I’m standing with a thorn stripper in one hand and a half-finished rose in the other. Tourists scan for something pretty to grab on their way to the mountain. He’s reading the space like it has instructions he hasn’t found yet.

His eyes come back to me. “I need to order flowers.”

“You’re in the right place.”

His expression stays level, like smiling is something he’d have to remember to do and he’s too focused for that right now. He looks down at the paper in his hand, unfolds it, and sets it on the counter between us.

“It’s for my mother,” he says. “Her birthday is Friday.”

I set the rose down and wipe my hands on my apron. The paper is a printout of my order form from the website. He’s filled it out in neat, square handwriting, every line completed. Name, date, delivery or pickup, budget range. Under arrangement style, he’s written nice.

“Nice?” I read it back to him without meaning to.

“I don’t know flower names.”

“That’s okay. Most people don’t.” I pull the form closer and scan what he’s given me. Friday pickup. Moderate budget. “What does she like? Colors, scents, anything you’ve noticed when she’s around flowers?”

He stares at me like I’ve asked him to translate something.

“She likes purple,” he says after a second. “And she has a garden at home. Tomatoes, herbs. Zinnias along the fence.”

“So she grows things.”

“Everything she touches grows.”

The sentence sits between us for a second, warm and unguarded, and then he’s already past it, waiting for my answer like he said something ordinary.

“Zinnias are great,” I say, because I need to say something. “They’re bright, they last, and they’re not fussy. If she grows them herself, she’ll appreciate an arrangement that doesn’t try too hard. Something that looks like it could have come from a garden instead of a catalog.”

He nods. “That. Whatever that is.”

“I can do a mixed arrangement. Purple as the anchor, ranunculus and stock for texture, some greenery to ground it. Garden style, not formal. Nothing stiff.”

“Good.” He pauses. “She’d hate stiff.”

I pull a scratch pad from under the register and start sketching the arrangement—just a rough shape so he can see what I’m thinking, the way I do for every order. The tall stems in the back, the round blooms in the center, the trailing greenery softening the edges.