Nate held up his hands in surrender. “Nothing like that,” he said. “We had a leak at the hotel. The flowers are ruined. I need new ones… by Friday.”
Mahdi raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow at him and snipped the secateurs. “Yes? Well, I want my boyfriend to move back to the mainland and stop shearing sheep for a living. Life is full of wanting and not having.” He scooped the neatly trimmed flowers up off the table, turned his back on Nate, and poked four orange-petaled stems neatly into the bouquet already constructed in its vase. They nestled in among the furled ferns and baby’s breath sprays.
“So you can’t do it?” Nate asked.
Mahdi spun dramatically. “Can’t? Can’t?” he blustered. Then he deflated with a snort and a curled lip. “What am I? Six? I can’t do it because I don’t have four dozen ranunculus to hand, or—what was it—six feet of gold-plated wire to hold them together?”
“The wire could probably be salvaged.”
He got the gardener’s gloved finger for that.
“I fulfilled the contract,” Mahdi said. “It’s your problem now. I have other clients to tend to.”
Nate crossed his arms and rocked back on his heels. The sole of his sneaker was finally dry. No more squelching. He raised an eyebrow.
“Better than the Granshire? Because I manage the event accounts, and we pay you a considerable sum for the various weddings, parties, balls, and golf tournaments we run. So I’d love to know who else around here could use that many flowers.”
There was a pause as they stared at each other. Mahdi’s eyes narrowed.
“Are you threatening me?”
“Yes.”
“So, if I don’t sort out this mess, you’ll take your business elsewhere?”
“Exactly.”
Mahdi scoffed at him. “Good luck with that. Before I moved here, I worked for the florist you used. Remember? I know how much it cost to ship flowers in from the mainland.”
That was a fair point. It had been expensive enough that the memory of the invoices still made Nate wince. Obviously he needed to change tack.
“It doesn’t have to be the same flowers. You don’t even have to stick with the color scheme.” He hadn’t particularly liked the yellow and orange anyhow. Hopefully he could sell Katie on that too. “Just get me flowers that look pretty—by tomorrow—and I’ll pay youandowe you one.”
Mahdi pursed his lips and glanced around as he totted up stock in his head. Finally he nodded slowly. “On one condition.”
“Done.”
The ready agreement made Mahdi smirk. He braced his hands on the table, leaned over it, and dropped his voice to a suggestive whisper.
“Is it true that Delaney was a whore you and Max used when you were in London?”
And just when Nate thought he had the most outlandish theories about what Flynn’s past life was, the island gossip mill proved him wrong. He supposed he should be grateful. Without a lot of actual bad-boyfriend behavior to go by, people generated their own reasons for disapproval. Still. Bloody hell.
“No, he fucking wasn’t,” Nate said—snapped, even. Mahdi looked surprised and then smug. He probably read more into Nate’s voice than was actually there. “Whoever is coming up with these rumors should work for theDaily Mail. He wasn’t a whore.”
Mahdi pushed himself off the table and showed his still-gloved palms in a gesture of surrender.
“Hey, I’m just asking. I have nothing against sex workers,” he said. “I used to strip when I was at college.”
That threw Nate for a second. His extremely helpful imagination decided to toss its interpretation of a stripping Mahdi into his brain—all amber skin and sharp angles in a very small amount of skintight vinyl and glitter. Not that it was the first time he’d thought about it. Mahdi was a good-looking young man, and Nate wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t wildly helpful where the flushing was concerned. Particularly not when Flynn joined imaginary Mahdi on stage in low-slung jeans, a smirk, and a strut.
Nate knew he looked guilty… of something. He ignored it. “Neither do I. Flynn wasn’t.”
In Nate’s imagination Flynn tossed a smug wink his way and dropped his hands to the already low-riding waistband of his jeans.
It was distracting enough that, when Mahdi threw up his hands and agreed to “put something together” it took Nate a second to pull his brain back out of the gutter.
Jesus Christ. Nate took a deep breath. It should have smelled like flowers, but he could swear he tasted Flynn’s aftershave on the back of his tongue. Apparently he really was hitting his second adolescence.
