"We're not—" I start.
Finn moves.
He unfolds from the bench with the easy, unhurried motion of a man who has made a decision and is executing it, crosses tome, and puts his arm around my waist. The contact is warm and immediate—the bourbon-citrus of his scent wrapping around my general vicinity with the comfortable authority of someone who has decided this is where he's standing. He presses a kiss to the top of my head, brief, light, the kind that manages to be entirely casual while also being the most disarming thing anyone has done to me before noon in recent memory.
"We really do have to spoil our Lucky Charm properly," he tells the shop owner, with the convivial warmth of someone who has been in enough social situations to know how to fill a room. "She's stunning, right?"
"Absolutely," the woman says, fully delighted.
I look up at Finn.
The blue eyes, when they come down to mine, are doing the specific thing that happens when someone has made a move they know is slightly unfair and is waiting to see how it lands. There's a trace of color across his cheekbones that the shop's warm afternoon light is not responsible for.
"Would you like to wear it out?" the shop owner asks me. "I can take the tags now if you'd like to keep it on."
I have no clothes.
That's the simple arithmetic of the situation: everything I own besides what I'm currently wearing is either in a flooded apartment or stuck in a car on a road and inaccessible until the tow arrives. The pajamas I woke up in are Finn's. I have the bar apron from last night's shift folded in the bag that Declan retrieved from the apartment alongside the coin and the business card and the two items the rain hadn't fully destroyed. The dress I'm wearing is technically still the shop's inventory.
I look at Finn.
"Is it okay if I just—" I keep my voice low enough to be just for him. "Wear it now?"
The pink across his cheeks deepens by a shade. He looks away briefly—toward the window, which is apparently very interesting—and then back.
"You can have whatever you want, Lucky," he says.
He says it simply, the same way Declan said the thing about the donuts—not with weight or intention of landing anything, just as the true answer to the question.
Something does a small, inconvenient thing in my chest.
Rowan, who has been a neutral observer of this exchange from his position by the wall, pushes off and approaches the shop owner with the contained efficiency of a man who has assessed the situation and is resolving it. "Do you carry nightgowns? Similar weight fabric, similar patterns?"
"Oh, yes—several, actually. I have a spring collection in the back that came in last week."
"If you could package a selection—enough for two weeks, practical as well as decorative—we'll take them to the car."
"Of course!" She's already moving toward the back.
I watch her go.
"I can do a layaway," I say to the general space. "Danny pays me weekly. It'll take a few rounds but I can sign a contract for it—I know how to make repayment schedules work, I've been making them work for fourteen months?—"
Declan comes to where I'm standing.
He reaches for my hair—two fingers, lifting the section that's fallen across the side of my face and tucking it back, the same gesture from the hotel couch that's already becoming something I identify as specifically his. His knuckles pass close to my cheek and the cedarwood scent is immediate from proximity.
"You have nothing," he says, "because of what was done to your apartment. Clothing is not a luxury you owe us for providing."
"It's still money?—"
"It's not your money," he says. Not unkindly—the way you correct a calculation that's being run wrong. "Stop trying to pay for being taken care of."
I open my mouth.
Close it.
"While I'm at it," Declan says, pivoting toward the clerk at the register, "do you have an undergarments section?"
