‘And you don’t like being cute?’
‘Cuteness is for kittens and babies and little girls. Not grown women. Not people that want to be taken seriously. Have you ever heard of a CEO named Daisy? Or an astronaut?’
‘Do you want to be an astronaut?’
‘No! But that’s beside the point. I just…’ She sighed again. ‘I just thought I was getting away from this name and this shop and this life and… I got sucked back in.’
‘You don’t like it here?’ He hated to think that she was unhappy here in this little town that he’d grown to love, even if they’d barely noticed he was there.
She looked up at him with her amber eyes, and he wanted to tell her she was wrong, that she wasn’t cute, she was beautiful.
‘I like it here fine.’ She shrugged. ‘I just thought things would turn out differently.’
‘I get that.’ He was supposed to still be living in his three-bedroom house with the attached garage, the one Leigh had insisted on so they wouldn’t have to walk outside in the winter to get to the car, and the fenced-in yard for his dog, Sam. God, he missed that dog. He wasn’t supposed to be sitting in the back of a flower shop, sipping chamomile tea and eating cookies, in an apartment that smelled like roses with a woman he wasn’t supposed to have a crush on.
But he was finding that he was glad he was here.
She gave him a small smile that lit up his chest, and he was even more glad the universe had deposited him here.
‘Doesn’t it get confusing, though?’ he teased. ‘All having the same name?’
Daisy sighed again and scrunched up her face like she really didn’t want to answer that question. She spoke so fast, he barely understood her next words. ‘My grandmother goes by June, and my mother goes by May.’
Elliot couldn’t help the laughter rising in his throat.
‘Don’t you dare.’ Daisy pointed at him. ‘Don’t laugh.’
‘They go by their… birth months?’
Daisy’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. ‘Middle names that happen to be birth months.’
‘Daisy June and Daisy May?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what’s yours?’ he choked out, barely able to control his mirth.
She looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘November.’
‘DaisyNovemberScott.’
‘Maybe I will kill you after all.’
He held his hands up in surrender. ‘I like it!’
‘Shut up.’
‘It’s very sophisticated,’ he said, fully laughing now and Daisy cracked a smile as she crumpled up a napkin and flicked it at his face. ‘Like the name an astronaut might have.’
Daisy shook her head, laughter tumbling from her lips. ‘I don’t actually want to be an astronaut.’
‘Okay, you don’t have to be.’ He grinned at her.
‘I like running the flower shop.’
‘Good.’
‘Sorry I got grumpy on you.’
