Mia leapt to her feet, flower detritus spilling everywhere. “Oh my God, you’re my fuckinghero. These are perfect.”
Gus snorted. “Right. Because I was the one who noticed what you’d lost in the first place.” He jerked his head at me. “These are Luke’s. I’m just the loadie.”
Mia turned to me. “How did you know?”
I repeated what I’d told Gus. She nodded as though everything suddenly made sense and stepped up to kiss my cheek.
Her lips lingered, her breath warm againstmy skin. “You always were a details boy.”
Despite it all, something about her tone fired me up. I sucked in a breath, picturing what I’d do to her if her brother wasn’t stink-eyeing me from across the room, until Gus cleared his throat.
“Whatever,” he groused. “Are we nearly done here?”
Wishful fucking thinking. It was gone three a.m. by the time Mia was persuaded there was nothingmore she could do.
We put the shop back together, and cleared out the van. Thankfully, the refrigeration was still functioning, but I had work to do in the morning to make the smashed window safe. I helped Mia pack the new batch of wedding flowers into the shop fridge, then I ran a security check on the windows and doors. When I was done, I found Mia alone in the back room.
“Gus has gone,”she said. “I told him I was coming home with you.”
“You let him go on his own?” I didn’t want to say it out loud, but if whoever was targeting her was gunning for me, there was a chance they had Gus in their sights too.
“He took my car,” she said. “He drove it here earlier, and he’s not going home.”
She didn’t have to say any more. Before Mia had returned from France, Gus had rarelyspent a night alone. For a man who dodged commitment, he sure loved company.
I stepped closer to Mia. “So...you want to come back to my place?”
She shrugged. “Whatever. We’ve got a conversation to have, remember? I don’t care where we have it.”
It was the middle of the night, and she had to be up at first light to begin her delivery round, but suddenly I couldn’t wait another second.Ten years was long enough.
I took her hand and led her out of the shop, waiting while she locked the back door, and then triple-checking it myself. Then I claimed her van keys and drove us back to my place—a risky game with no insurance, but she was exhausted, and I was past caring about anything but getting her home to my bed.
At my house, we took bottles of cider straight upstairs, butunlike every other time we’d made the journey, we were still clothed when we reached my room.
I shut the curtains and gestured to the bed. “You wanna sit down?”
Mia rolled her eyes. “For now. I’ll have to get up again when I’m looking for something to throw at you.”
“You think it’ll come to that?”
“It always comes to that these days—fucking or fighting. It’s all we have.”
She was so wrong. If everything we’d done since she’d come back had been nothing more than sex and aggro, it would be easy to walk away from. Easy to leave her to her life and go back to mine. But nothing about us had ever been easy. I’d reached adulthood believing that was what made it worth it. Now?
Now there was nothing I wouldn’t endure to be with her, I just had to tell her.
