“You absolutely grumble.” I snorted.
He gave me a look that was half offended, half amused. “I’m just selective with my words.”
“That’s just a fancy way of saying you grumble.”
He shook his head, but he was smiling again.
The town came into view, the afternoon light stretching long across the shopfronts.
“You know,” he said, slowing at the curb, “I didn’t expect you to be… like this.”
“Like what?”
He hesitated. “Easy to talk to.”
Something warm fluttered in my chest. “Well,” I said lightly, “don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to protect.”
“Oh yeah? What reputation is that?”
“Bossy. Overly organised. Terrifying.”
He considered that. “I don’t think you’re terrifying.”
“Give it time.”
He smiled, shaking his head as he parked. “All right. Let’s go before you try to organise my glovebox.”
I gasped. “You have a glovebox?”
“Don’t even think about it.”
As we drove towards town, the vines blurred into gum trees, their shadows flickering across the windscreen, the ocean flashing silver through the gaps like something just out of reach.
By the time we reached the main street in Margaret River, the afternoon light was spilling lazily across the shopfronts, surfers’ jeeps lined along the curb with boards rattling against roof racks in the wind.
A teenager in a half-zipped wetsuit wandered past carrying a fresh croissant from the bakery a few shops down, leaving damp footprints along the pavement like this was completely normal behaviour.
Which, in Margaret River, I suppose it was.
A hand-painted sign readingEvelyn’s Boutiqueswung gently in the breeze in front of us.
The bell above the door gave a delicate jingle as we stepped inside, the kind of sound that could only belong to a shop where nothing had changed in fifty years.
The air was cool and still, perfumed faintly with lavender and metal polish. Dust motes drifted lazily through beams of light slanting across glass cabinets filled with neatly arranged treasures: vintage rings, tarnished lockets, strings of pearls glowing softly in the sunlight like tiny moons.
A woman sat behind the counter, whom I assumed was Evelyn, looking exactly like the sort of person who’d spent decades surrounded by antiques and had somehow become one herself in the most charming way possible.
Mauve cardigan, pressed slacks, a small pendant resting neatly at her throat. Her lipstick matched the shade of a well-aged rose, and her eyes, bright, shrewd, and kind in a way that could still cut glass, followed us as we crossed the creaking floorboards.
“Lovely afternoon,” she said, her expression bright. “Can I help you find something? An engagement ring perhaps?”
Noah and I exchanged a startled glance.
“No,” we both said at exactly the same time.
Heat crept up my neck.
Her smile only widened.
