The familiar scent of coffee, wood smoke, and bacon hit me instantly. Trigger sat at one of the tables cleaning a rifle while Havoc flipped through paperwork at the bar.
Both of them looked up the second I walked in.
“Oh no,” Trigger muttered. “That’s the face.”
Havoc snorted. “Flower girl again?”
“She has a name.”
That earned me three identical looks.
I grabbed the coffee pot off the counter and poured myself a cup. “What?”
“You’re smiling at your coffee,” Wolf pointed out.
I glanced down.
Hell.
I was.
I wiped the expression off my face immediately. “Mind your business.”
Trigger leaned back in his chair, grinning now. “Ace has it bad.”
“I don’t have anything.”
“You stood outside her shop for forty-five minutes yesterday,” Havoc said.
“That was surveillance.”
Wolf barked out a laugh.
I pointed at him with my coffee mug. “You of all people should understand this.”
“Yeah,” he said easily. “And I also recognize the exact moment a man becomes hopeless.”
The tavern erupted with laughter.
I flipped them all off and took another drink of coffee.
But the truth settled low in my chest anyway.
Because every one of them was right.
Tessa Bloom had somehow slipped under my skin before I even realized it was happening.
And judging by the way she looked at me this morning—
I was getting dangerously close to slipping under hers too.
4
Ace
By the third morning in a row, even I was starting to question my life choices.
I stood outside Bloom & Vine with a paper bag in one hand and coffee in the other, staring at the shop window while early morning sunlight spilled across Main Street.
