Page 31 of The Florist and Her Alphas

“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.