I don’t own it. But I live here. I’m the island caretaker.
“Are you alone?”
He examines me a moment.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to murder you or anything. I may be a jilted bride, but there’s only one person I want to murder right now.”
To my surprise, his lips curl up slightly on one side, before dropping, his face expressing something like anger mixed with disbelief.
I’m alone, he writes. Then he puts the pencil to the book again.I’m sorry about the guy in the closet. That fuck.
I can’t help it. I burst out laughing at how he uses my words.
Then I sigh, nodding. “I’m sorry too.” I walk over to the rose again, trailing my finger along the stem, skipping over a sharp thorn before dusting my fingertip over a leaf. “I think I am, anyway. I’m still kind of shocked. He’s supposed to be a family man, you know?”
I smell one of the roses—a more traditionally pink one in a cluster of blooms.
Then I remember I have to face him so he can read my lips. I repeat what I said before. Then I laugh kind of ruefully and say, “You know what’s funny? It’s the flowers I’m going to miss the most. From the wedding. It was going to be a beautiful bouquet. Jeff said he’d get the hotel to make it…”
I trail off. “It would have been you, wouldn’t it? Who made the bouquets?”
The gardener looks down, his ears pink. But he nods.
“I’ve heard about them, you know. People in town talk about the wedding bouquets you make. I didn’t know there was a single man behind them all.”
When he looks up again, it’s as if he’s lit from within.
And suddenly, I can’t breathe. That amalgamation of features before? It vanishes now. He’s just handsome. Beautifully handsome. Like an angel, with that hair curling at his neck and eyes that look like the ocean.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
He picks up his pad, stepping closer so I can read.Clint.
I swallow. “I’m Maggie.”
Something flashes behind his eyes. He nods, as if expecting a plain name like that.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” I say, reaching up to draw my finger gently along the petals ofA Rare Beauty.“Nothing can compete with this.”
He’s still a few feet away and hesitates only a moment before coming over to me.
I come up only to his shoulder, even in my heels.
I find, out of nowhere, my heart beating rapidly in my chest. A patter that seems to vibrate through my body. I can smell him, he’s so close. He smells like the earth. Like fresh air.
Like roses.
He puts his book in his pocket and pulls something else out. A pair of clippers. Before I know what’s happening, he’s reached forward, expertly grasping the base of the giant bloom.
He clips it, and the bloom falls.
I gasp, reaching my hands out to catch it, cupped like I’m trying to catch falling water.
I hold it, shocked. “That was your best one!”
Clint just smiles. Then he reaches his hand into mine. His fingers are huge, and when he slips them under the stem of the rose, I feel something warm open up in my lower half. It’s like he’s slipped his hand somewhere much more intimate.
I’m shocked at the thought, but even more so at the sensation. My cheeks feel like they’re on fire.
