She lets out a breath, pressing her palm to her chest over her heart. “Oh, thank god.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Honestly,” she starts, but pauses to take another sip. “Like shit.” The corners of her eyes crinkle as she laughs and it’s the cutest thing. “But this is helping.”
Shaking my head, I let out my own string of laughter. “You take it easy then, and I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”
“Yeah, right,” she says, blowing a breath through her nose. She reaches for the bag behind her, and grabs a bottle ofheadache reliever, then shakes two into her hand. “You’re supposed to be helping, not doing all the work.”
I tilt my head to the side as she swallows back the pills. “Aren’t we a team on this project?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she says with a shrug as she swaps her water bottle for the coffee.
“Then we work as a team. If you can’t give 100% at the moment, I’ll cover for you and vice versa.” A piece of paper with something sketched on it in front of her catches my eye. “Are those your plans?”
“Yeah,” she says, her hands sliding beneath the paper to lift it up. “I’m not sure I love it.”
“May I?”
Willow hesitates, her hand lingering on the paper as she pulls her bottom lip between her teeth. She does that a lot when she’s nervous or unsure. She scans the paper and slowly exhales as she hands it to me. “I’m open to suggestions.”
Taking the paper from her, I hold it in front of me and stare down at her handdrawn design. It’s completely different from how the store was before. As you walk in the doors, the checkout counter has moved from the back of the store to the right. It doesn’t appear to be in the way of the door, and the design of it is more of an L shape than the rectangle that it currently is.
To the left are two rows of standing shelves, some more shelving along the wall and then the back where the checkout counter used to be is just empty space.
“What are you thinking of putting back here?” I lower the paper, flipping it for her to see it as I point at the blank space.
Willow rolls her lips between her teeth, biting down for a moment as she stares at the paper. Some pink has started to return to her cheeks, making her appear a touch more alive than she did when I first walked in. “I don’t know.”
“What are you planning for the shelving units you have drawn here?”
She scoots closer across the floor and I’m acutely aware of how her knee presses into mine. The faint smell of jasmine and vanilla drifts across the small gap separating us and I straighten my spine as my stomach flutters. It just smells like…her.
“I plan on this entire wall being maple syrups. I told you I want to do some infused ones, so the various shelves will have different infusions, different sizes, and obviously, they’ll all be original.” She points to the freestanding shelves. “These will have some of the smaller products, like candies and those kinds of things.”
“What else do you plan on having other than candies?”
She catches the loose strands of hair floating by her face and tucks them behind her ears. “Well, you said something about talking to Miss Maggie about making some cookies, so I think I’m going to do that.”
My eyebrows lift as my eyes find hers. “Really?”
“Yes,” she says with a sigh, rolling her eyes. “Don’t go engaging that god complex because of it. It was a good suggestion.”
A smirk tugs on my lips. “So, you admit I have good ideas then.”
Willow purses her lips. “You had one. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, buddy.”
“What about the coffee I brought you? And the Danish?”
She snorts, shaking her head. “Okay, correction. You had three good ideas.”
“I have more than that, if you want to hear them.”
Willow cocks an eyebrow. “This feels like a test.”
“I promise it’s not,” I say with a chuckle. “I think you should do merchandise. Shirts, mugs—people love mugs. Little trinkets.Christmas ornaments. Do you know how many people buy them when they go places?”
Willow’s silent for a moment, her eyes slowly searching my face before her gaze locks onto mine again. “How much thought have you put into this?”
