I shifted in my seat, torn between two equally unwelcome outcomes: Daisy, alone and heartbroken, or Daisy, tied to a man who didn’t deserve her.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked after a few minutes of silence.
My hand braced on the steering wheel. “Anything.”
“I promise I’m not crazy, but when I woke up this morning, I just…knew I wasn’t getting married today.” She stared out the window as she spoke. “I don’t know what it was, but I woke up, pulled open the curtains, saw the bright red sunrise on the horizon, and I just knew.”
The poignant calm in her voice gutted me, like deep down, she wasn’t fucking shocked at all to have been abandoned.
It made me want to rip out my own beating but arguably broken heart and give it to her. It made me want to confess with every fiber of my being that I was in love with her. That I’d been in love with her for years. That I thought she was smart and incredible andmost beautiful, and deserving of someone so much better than Todd. I didn’t even care if that man wasn’t me. I just cared that whoever he was realized just how fucking lucky he was to have the opportunity to make her happy. To make her smile.
“Daze…”
“It reminded me of that saying your sister mentioned at one of Todd’s parents’ garden parties. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning,” she repeated the phrase Harper picked up from Kit, who lived—whoused tolive—in the keep of the Friendship lighthouse.
My teeth clenched, locking my foolish confession behind my lips and leaving me with, “You’re not crazy.”
“No, just hormonal,” she returned with a sigh. “Where to next?”
“I thought you were my navigation?” I nodded to my phone. “Erica texted me a list of the delivery addresses.”
Eager to return to her task, she grabbed my cell from the cupholder. “Got it.” A few taps on the screen and she had the directions up. “Looks like the next address is closer to Portland, so at the end of the driveway, turn right.”
When we reached the road, I caught Daisy slipping her feet out of her sandals and pulling her legs up onto the seat. Her dress bunched up her legs, but before I could look away, I saw her shiver.
“Sorry. We can turn the AC down.” Her hand on mine stopped me from adjusting the thermostat. Unfortunately, the delivery van wasn’t as electronically sophisticated as my truck, which allowed for dual temperature settings.
“No, I’m fine. You’re the one getting a workout in today,” she insisted, and I had to be imagining the slide of her gaze along my forearm. “Where did you put your jacket?”
“In…” My voice splintered.What if I hadn’t been imagining it?“In the back.”
She looked over her shoulder and found my discarded suit jacket a moment later. Even pregnant, when she wrapped it around her shoulders, it swallowed her whole.And the sight undid me.
The thing with fantasies was that as soon as you gave them an inch, they took a mile. I saw Daisy wearing my jacket, but I imagined her covered with me. My fingerprints. My mouth. My tongue. My cum.
“There. All better.”
Maybe for her.My cock, on the other hand, couldn’t be any more uncomfortable than if she’d stripped naked rather than covered herself with another layer.
I moved in my seat, adjusting myself twice before the pressure on my dick was bearable.
“How long?” I croaked.
“You’re on this for about thirteen miles,” she confirmed and then clicked off my phone, replacing it in the cupholder and reaching for the bag of pastries.
“We can stop and pick up some lunch in Portland,” I suggested, watching her pull out one of Ella’s famousnazooksfrom the depths of the bag Lou had sent with us. Nazooks were a rolled Armenian pastry and a customer favorite at Ella’s pastry shop in Stonebar Harbor, The Pastry Queen.
“No, I’d rather just eat these.” Daisy licked her lips, and my dick jolted.
“Are you sure?” I ground out. She shouldn’t survive all afternoon on sweets.
“They’re good for the soul.”
Well, the noises she made eating them while wearing my jacket were definitely very bad for mine. At this rate, the flowers left in the back of the van could be laid on my grave because the chance of my surviving a whole day like thiswith herwas less than the chance of her runaway groom returning.
It wasn’tuntil almost seven by the time I pulled the van back into the warehouse.
We’d finished the remaining dozen deliveries with no further confusion or conversation about who Daisy was getting married to—or who she should’ve been getting married to today. Instead, I let Daisy guide any conversation, which invariably ended on MaineStems and me and my family—anything that wasn’t about Todd—and it seemed to help. Or had until now.
