“I’ll be there,” I responded, doing my best to mask the tiny bursts of excitement that were pinging around my insides.
“Great,” he said. “And Scarlett?”
“Yeah?”
“Happy Valentine’s Day. Sounds like you’ve got quite the admirer.”
Before I could respond, he’d hung up.
I turned to inspect the bouquet. Multiple dozens of bright orange and red poppies filled the glass vase. There were so many of them I wasn’t sure how they all managed to fit. Intermingled within the poppies were tiny sprigs of baby’s breath.
The bouquet was beautiful, but I couldn’t get past the poppies.
A tiny white card poked out from behind a few stems.
To match the poppy on your left arm—the tiny one that decorates the space where your forearm meets your bicep. – A Lost Cowboy
My heart dropped to the floor.
I pulled the card to my chest and took a deep breath, inhaling and exhaling a few times in an attempt to slow my heart rate.
As if whatever was between Stetson and I weren’t complicated enough, he went and sent me flowers on Valentine’s Day.
What in the hell was I supposed to do now?
“Did you ask him?” Maggie questioned me as soon as she picked up the phone.
“He sent me a bouquet of poppies. Like a massive fucking bouquet. I’m talking big enough to take up my entire desk and then some.”
“Slow down,” Maggie said. “There is a lot to unpack here.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it,” I huffed. “And it’s Valentine’s Day.”
“Oh shit. I didn’t even think about it being Valentine’s Day. Damn. That man isn’t even in Quincey Falls and he’s still making sure you know he’s thinking about you,” she said suggestively. “And poppies. How did he even know about that?”
“He saw my tattoo,” I said, the words making the invisible butterflies ramp back up.
“Holy shit. That man is down bad.”
“Is he? Or does he do this to all the girls he’s trying to sleep with? I mean, they’re just flowers.” The negative thought had been lingering in my brain like an unwanted pest.
“First off, that man doesn’t have totryto sleep with anyone… well, except you.” She laughed. “Secondly, no man—I don’t carehow famous they are—takes the time to send a bouquet of flowers to someone they’renotinterested in, especially not on Valentine’s Day, and…” She dragged out the wordand, making sure I understood the gravity of the situation. “…even more so, they don’t make the effort to notice a tiny detail like a tattoo that’s the size of a bobby pin.”
Was she right? Did Stetson actually want something more? I had started to let myself believe that maybe the idea of him being interested in me wasn’t so far-fetched.
And for obvious reasons, that scared the living shit out of me.
“Yeah, I guess, maybe you’re right. Now, what the hell am I going to do?” I asked, somewhat as a rhetorical question but still looking for Maggie’s advice.
“What do you mean?” The sarcasm in her voice was so strong I thought it might come through the phone and smack me in the face. “There is simply one right answer in this situation,” she demanded. “You absolutely have to give this man a chance.”
“Ugh. I knew you were going to say that.” I grunted. “But what do you think people would say? My god, the last thing I need is to be the talk of Quincey Falls again.” The thought itself repulsed me.
“Who gives a fuck. They’ll move on, just like they did with the wedding,” she said. Her tone was so confident it was hard not to believe her. “And honestly, would it be that bad to be the talk of the town because everyone is jealous of you?”
The simple thought of others thinking I was seeing Stetson Walker made my head dizzy. Not just because it was him, but because everyone had spent so much time feeling sorry for me.
“And Donna?” I asked. “She put me on this article because she specifically felt like she could trust me to be professional, unlike”—I looked around the room to make sure it was still just Moriah—“Delilah. How’s it going to look if something does come from this?”
