Marco smiled at Rachel’s deliberate misquote of the famous movie line. “We could have had a love affair for the ages, but you never gave me a second look.”
“My heart always belonged to Andrew,” the pretty florist told him.
“He’s a lucky man,” Marco said.
“A fact I remind him of every day.”
He chuckled.
“So what’s the occasion?” she asked.
“Does there have to be an occasion?”
“Absolutely not,” Rachel said. “Any day that ends in a y is reason enough for flowers.”
“A good motto for a woman who makes her living selling them,” he mused.
She smiled. “Maybe I should have asked—who’s the special lady?”
“I’d rather not share that information just yet.”
“Now you’ve really piqued my curiosity,” she said.
“We’re in the early stages,” he confided. “Very early stages.”
“Then you want something simple. Something that lets her know you’ve been thinking about her but doesn’t make her worry that you’re obsessing over her.” Rachel sent him a look.
“I’m not obsessing.”
“Okay—does she have a favorite color or favorite flower?”
“Early stages,” he reminded her.
“Right.” She studied the buckets of flowers in the refrigerated case. “Let’s try...some hot pink carnations...bright orange gerberas and...yellow chrysanthemums.” She selected a few of each, gathered them together in her hand. “What do you think?”
“I like it.”
“I do, too,” she said. “But it needs a little something more...maybe some alstroemeria. Pink or orange?”
He studied the flowers she indicated. “Orange.”
“Good choice.” She added it to the bouquet in her hand. “And some green button poms.”
“You are truly an artist.”
She smiled. “And you’re as charming as ever. Vase or paper?”
“Paper,” he decided.
She nodded. “Do you want me to take care of the delivery for you?”
“I don’t think so—but nice try.” He took a few steps to sniff the white lilies in a decorative brass pot.
She grinned as she finished arranging the blooms. “It was worth a shot.” She gestured to the tray of cards beside the cash. “Card?”
“Not necessary.”
“You don’t want to make sure she knows they’re from you?”
“She’ll know,” he said confidently, picking up the lily and carrying it to the counter. “I’ll take this, too.”
He passed his credit card across the counter to pay for the flowers.
Rachel completed the transaction, then came around the counter with the completed arrangement.
“I hope she likes the flowers.” She kissed his cheek. “And I hope she knows how lucky she is to have you in her life.”
* * *
She was certain this was it—Wade was finally going to announce a date for his retirement and discuss the terms for Jordyn to take over O’Reilly’s. So she wasn’t just surprised but disappointed when she walked into her boss’s office at the assigned hour and found that he wasn’t alone.
“There she is,” Wade said to the man seated across from him. Then to Jordyn, “Come in—I want you to meet my nephew, Scott, from Kansas City.”
“Las Vegas,” Scott interjected. “I was born and raised in Kansas City, but I’ve been working in Las Vegas for the past few years.”
“Your nephew?” Jordyn didn’t understand why she’d been summoned to Wade’s office for this introduction, but she offered her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Scott.”
“You, too.”
He was young, tall and good-looking, and the way he smiled at her, he knew it.
“You’re in town visiting?” Jordyn asked.
“No,” Scott said. “I recently moved to Charisma.”
“Oh.”
“It’s good to have him here,” Wade said. “Especially now.”
She wanted to believe that he meant in North Carolina, but she suspected that he meant something different.
“Why especially now?” she asked, a sudden feeling of unease weighing on her shoulders.
“Because I want to get serious about retirement, and having Scott here to take over running the bar will let me do that.”
“Six months ago—” She had to pause to draw air into her lungs as the spots in front of her eyes warned that she’d stopped breathing. “Six months ago you said that I was going to take over running the bar.”
“What?”
“We talked about it. Not only six months ago but six months before that. In fact, we’ve been talking about it for almost two years.”
“I’m just going to...go...out,” Scott said, moving toward the door.
Wade nodded. “I’ll catch up with you in a bit.”
Jordyn sank into a chair in front of her boss’s desk, her legs as hollow as her stomach. “You don’t remember those conversations?” she asked Wade when his nephew had gone.
“I remember the conversations,” he confirmed. “But come on, Jordyn—you’re a Garrett with a business degree from UNC.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I always assumed that your decision to work here was more about some kind of rebellion against your family than any desire to take up bartending as a career. To be honest, when you first walked through the front door, I didn’t think you’d last three days, never mind three years.”
“So for the last three years, you’ve just been waiting for me to walk out again?”
“And hoping like hell that you wouldn’t,” he admitted. “You know I couldn’t run this place without you.”
“But now you’re going to turn it over to your nephew?”
“Try to understand—he’s my sister’s kid and she was worried about him in Vegas.”
“I’ll try to understand,” she said, rising to her feet again and heading to the door. “So long as you understand why I’m not going to hang around tonight to train my future boss.”
* * *
Jordyn thought about going home when she left O’Reilly’s, but she was afraid that if she did, she’d sit around feeling sorry for herself all night. She considered stopping at Zahara’s for some retail therapy, but she wasn’t in the mood to shop. Instead, she went to Valentino’s and took a seat at the bar. She insisted that she wasn’t looking for Marco, but she felt let down not to find him there.
“What can I get for you?” the bartender, whose name tag identified him as Rafe, asked her.
“I’ll have a glass of the Stonechurch Vineyards pinot noir.” She shifted on her chair, trying to peer into the dining room to see if Marco had been enlisted to help out in there tonight.
Rafe poured the wine, set the glass in front of her. “Are you looking for someone?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not really. I just wondered if maybe Marco was working tonight.”
The bartender shook his head. “Not tonight.”
“Oh.” She was surprised at the depth of her disappointment. Or maybe it was the cumulative effect of so many little disappointments, starting from when she got up that morning and discovered there was no French vanilla coffee to finding out that her boss had never seen her as a potential partner but only an employee easily replaced by another.
“Did you want me to give Marco a call for you?” Rafe asked.
“No,” she said quickly, because she really wanted to say yes.
“In that case—” the bartender leaned a little closer “—you should know that anything Marco can do, I can do better.”
She managed a smile. “I’ll ke
ep that in mind.”
“Hi, Jordyn,” Gemma greeted her as she passed the bar on her way to the kitchen. Then to Rafe, a definite note of warning in her tone, “Stop flirting with the customers.”
The bartender backed away, no evidence of his flirtatious smile remaining on his handsome face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were Jordyn.”
“Did I miss something?” she asked, intrigued by the short but obviously meaningful exchange.
He shook his head. “Just excuse me for a moment while I take my foot out of my mouth.”
“I didn’t realize you’d put your foot in it.”
“Good,” he said. “We’ll go with that. And if Marco asks—I definitely was not hitting on you.”
* * *
Jordyn sipped her wine and tried to rationalize Wade’s actions.
She understood his willingness to help out family, to give the kid a job, but to immediately offer him the keys to the kingdom—not that O’Reilly’s was much of a kingdom, but still—seemed not just extreme but unwise. Aside from the fact that Scott was his nephew, what did Wade really know about him? Did he have a head for business? What was his work ethic? On the other hand, at least her boss had been up-front about his intentions. Wouldn’t it have been worse, from her perspective, to let her retain her illusions about her future at O’Reilly’s, assuming that Wade had just hired his nephew to help out?
She glanced at her watch and decided it was time to go home. But she remembered that Tristyn had a date tonight—some guy she’d met while picking up lunch at the Corner Deli a few weeks back. Jordyn knew her sister had absolutely no interest in him and suspected that she’d accepted his invitation because he was the opposite of Josh Slater. Not that Tristyn would ever admit as much, but she was perverse that way.
Her usually decisive sister still hadn’t committed to Daniel’s offer to take over PR at GSR, but she’d been helping him out with some things, to give herself a feel for the job while still working at Garrett Furniture. Jordyn swallowed the last of her pinot noir and wondered if her cousin might have a job for her. Traveling with the team—getting out of Charisma for a while—might be just what she needed.
She set her empty glass down and Rafe immediately replaced it with a new one.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I should probably be going.”
“Hot date tonight?” he teased.
She managed a smile as she shook her head. “No, but I don’t want to be one of those pathetic women who hangs out at a bar drinking alone.”
“Beautiful women are never pathetic, only appealingly sad,” he assured her. “But if you really don’t want to drink alone—” He poured another glass of wine and set it on the bar.
In front of Marco, who settled onto the empty chair beside her. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she said back.
And inexplicably, her eyes filled with tears.
“That bad?” he asked.
She nodded.
He lifted a hand and brushed a strand of hair off her cheek, tucked it behind her ear. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She picked up the glass of wine she’d said she didn’t want and sipped. “The road I was traveling on toward my future just had a major roadblock dropped in the middle of it.”
Then she told him about the unexpected arrival of her boss’s nephew and Wade’s intention to groom Scott to take over the bar.
“Maybe it’s a sign for you to take a detour,” Marco suggested.
“I don’t want to take a detour,” she said stubbornly. Then, because she didn’t want to wallow any longer, “What are you doing in here on your night off?”
“I just thought I’d stop by.”
“Rafe called you,” she guessed.
“He might have mentioned that there was a really sexy woman sitting at the bar.”
“Are you sure he didn’t say ‘sullen’ rather than ‘sexy’?”
“I wouldn’t have left home for sullen,” he assured her.
She managed a smile.
“So why didn’t you call me?” he prompted.
“Because I knew I wouldn’t be very good company.”
“And yet you came here looking for me.”
She traced the base of her wineglass with a fingertip. “I’m not claiming my actions were rational.”
He covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry you had a crappy day,” he told her. “But I’m glad, when you had a crappy day, you came looking for me.”
“Why?”
“Because it shows that you’re starting to share parts of your life with me—the good and the bad. And it proves that you trusted me to make you feel better.”
She lifted her brows. “Are you going to make me feel better?”
“If you let me take you home, I’ll do my best,” he promised.
* * *
Marco opened the passenger-side door for her.
“I almost forgot—” he picked up the bouquet of flowers from the seat “—these are for you.”
“They’re beautiful,” she said. “But when did you get them?”
“A little earlier today.”
“Even before you knew I had a crappy day,” she realized.
“Well, I was thinking about you,” he said, then smiled wryly. “I do that a lot, you know—think about you.”
She put her face close to the colorful blooms and inhaled their subtle fragrance. “And what were you thinking?”
“How much better my life is with you in it.”
She kissed him lightly. “You’re starting to grow on me, too,” she said, and made him laugh.
She buckled herself into her seat while he went around to the driver’s side.
“I like your cousin,” she said. “He reminds me of you.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that,” he admitted.
She touched the smooth petals of a gerbera. “I just meant that he’s sweet and kind and charming.”
His gaze narrowed suspiciously. “Did he hit on you?”
“Well, he did say that anything you could do, he could do better.”
“After I drop you off at home, I’m going back to Valentino’s to beat him up.”
She laid her hand on his thigh, felt the muscle tense beneath her palm. “I’d rather you stayed with me.”
“Okay,” he agreed, lifting her hand from his leg and linking their fingers together. “Although I’m having serious second thoughts about offering to let him run the kitchen at Valentino’s II.”
“If he’s busy in the kitchen, he won’t be able to flirt with your female customers,” she pointed out.
“I don’t care about any other female customers—only you.” He pulled into her driveway. “Tristyn’s not home?”
“She was going out for dinner tonight.”
He helped her out of the car. “Speaking of dinner—did you eat?”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t hungry.”
“Are you hungry now?”
“Not really.” Her foot caught and she stumbled a little.
Marco’s gaze narrowed as he caught her arm. “How many glasses of wine did you have?”
“Just two.”
“On an empty stomach.”
She found her key, inserted it into the lock. “I feel fine, Marco. I promise.” She turned to lean into him. “But if you don’t want to take my word for it, you can feel for yourself.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. Then he reached past her to turn the handle of the door and shove it open. “Do you have any food in the house?”
“Probably.”
“Probably?” he echoed.
She shrugged as she stepped into the foyer. “Tristyn does most of the g
rocery shopping.”
He followed her into the house, halting inside the door when Gryffindor stepped in front of him, as if deliberately blocking his path.
“Do you want some wine?” she asked. “You didn’t have a chance to finish your glass at Valentino’s.”
“Maybe.”
She interpreted his response as a yes and reached for a bottle of valpolicella from the rack. While she uncorked the bottle, he opened the door of the refrigerator.
“There’s a package of chicken breasts, a bottle of white wine and a couple of lemons in here. I could make chicken piccata,” he said. “Do you have any capers?”
“I don’t even know what capers are,” she admitted, pouring the wine into two glasses.
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter—I can manage without.”
“Marco,” she said, with what she thought was infinite patience. “I’m about to start on my third glass of wine and we’re all alone in the house—can’t you think of something you’d rather do than cook?”
His gaze raked over her, so hot and hungry it made her knees quiver. “I can think of a thousand,” he admitted. “But I’m trying to be a gentleman.”
She moved closer, her lips curving in a slow smile. “You can be as gentle as you want...as long as you’re naked.”
He took the glass from her hand, set it aside. She laid her palms on his torso, just above his belt, then slid them slowly upward. He caught her hands in his, pulled them away.
“I want to make love with you,” he said, his voice strangled. “I don’t think there’s anything I want more.”
“Then why are we standing around in the kitchen?”
“Because you don’t want to make love—you want to have sex.”
Her brow furrowed. “I want to get naked with you. Do the semantics really matter?”
“Yes, they do,” he insisted. “Although when you say ‘naked,’ I have trouble remembering why.”
She tipped her head back. “Naked-naked-naked-naked-naked—”
He crushed his mouth to hers in a hard, punishing kiss intended to silence her taunting. She didn’t balk at the intensity but met it with equal passion. But just as quickly as he’d started, he pulled away.
“I’m going to make dinner for you,” he said. “And after dinner, maybe we can go out and catch a movie.”
The Bachelor Takes a Bride (Those Engaging Garretts!) Page 13