“No need to apologise.” I steady her a second longer than strictly necessary, and she feels… right there. Right against me. “Could’ve happened to anyone.”
She looks down at the water-flooded floor with despair. “I should clean that.”
“Probably,” I say lightly. “Unless we’re going for ‘swamp chic’.”
She lets out the smallest laugh. A real one. It lands somewhere stupidly important inside me.
I ease my arm away from her waist, slow and reluctant, giving her space even though every instinct wants to keep her close. She steps back, cheeks flaming, brushing damp petals off her clothes as if that might hide the blush climbing her neck. But when she glances up for the briefest second, there’s something new in her eyes. Still shy, still unsure… but softer. Curious. Like maybe she hasn’t ruled me out completely.
She looks away quickly, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear as if she’s caught doing something she shouldn’t.
We lock the door so no customers wander into the scene of floral carnage. She fetches a mop; I grab my tools. The room fills with the quiet sounds of cleaning and measuring.
Every time she moves, I feel it. Not in a dramatic way, just a quiet awareness threading through the room, tugging at my attention no matter how much I pretend to focus on my measuring.
After a minute, I risk breaking the silence. “Busy day?”
She gives a soft, tired snort. “Busier than I hoped. Mondays like to test me.”
When I glance over, she’s crouched over a puddle of water, carefully rescuing the least bedraggled flowers. Her bottom lip is caught gently between her teeth as she concentrates, and for a moment I have to look away before I get the urge to smooth it free with my thumb.
I turn back to the wall, marking up the plasterboard. “Well, at least you were able to rescue most of the flowers from the swamp life.”
She lets out a small, embarrassed groan. “Please don’t remind me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I say. A beat, then, “Although if someone had filmed that bucket domino, I’d pay good money to watch it again.”
Her head snaps up and she shoots me a mortified glare. It only makes me grin.
She tries to glare harder, fails spectacularly, and the corner of her mouth betrays her with the tiniest twitch.
It’s the first proper sign she’s relaxing around me, and something about that small shift settles pleasantly under my ribs.
I take mercy on her and change the subject. “Anything you miss from London?”
She leans on the mop, thinking. “Travelling,” she says at last. “Not London-travelling. My London life was… loud. Too loud. But before taking over the shop, I used to take myself off anywhere I could breathe. Just little trips. Nothing fancy.” She shrugs. “I liked having escape routes. But until we can hire help, I’m grounded.”
“That won’t last forever,” I say. “Shops grow. People settle in. You’ll get it back.”
She gives a shy half-smile. Small, but warm enough to give me some hope.
I go back to drilling the final holes, and the silence that falls this time is different. Calmer. Easy. Like we’ve both stepped into a gentler version of the moment without realising when it happened.
The shelves go up smoothly after that. Solid, level, exactly how I pictured them.
When I turn around, Emma is perched on the little stool behind the till, elbows propped on the counter, chin in her hands. She looks completely absorbed.
It takes me another second to realise she isn’t watching the shelves at all. She’s watching my arse.
I clear my throat.
She jolts so hard the stool squeaks across the floor, and in her scramble she knocks over a jar of pens. They scatter everywhere. She dives forward to grab them and promptly smacks her forehead on the underside of the counter.
“Ow.”
I cross the room. “Emma, are you alright?”
She presses her hand to the sore spot, mortified beyond belief, but she doesn’t pull away when I gently take her wrist and move her hand aside. Her breath catches, and mine almost does too.
