“KYLIE, GRAB THOSE two pink boxes from the storeroom, will you?” Mary called over her shoulder as she attempted to balance two armfuls of paper flowers she was about to place in the window of her homegoods shop. Mary had owned and operated Fresh on her own for almost five years now. And today was the day she got to put up her June window display, maybe her favorite of the entire year. She loved the chintz and glitz of the Christmas display as well, but in June she really let her flower flag fly. She let the colors clash and the fake greenery overfloweth. Mary loved the unabashed cheer of it.
“Can’t find them!” Kylie, her teenage part-time assistant, called from the back of the store.
“Maybe they’re purple boxes?” Mary shouted back. “They’re filled with the...you know...whatever you call those thingies.”
Mary lost every word in her head as one of the most devastatingly beautiful men she’d ever seen in her life walked past the front window of her shop. Tall, wiry and broad-shouldered, he had light brown hair and was wearing a construction vest to boot. He looked like he’d walked out of a porn that Mary herself had cast. The man did a double take at Mary checking him out through the shop window, shooting her a cheeky grin as he walked.
Damn. “Better than a shot of Red Bull,” Mary muttered to herself.
“Do you mean the red boxes filled with the fake grass?” Kylie called.
Setting the paper flowers down in a heap in the window, Mary walked back to the storeroom to help out Kylie. After half a minute of searching, Mary found what she was looking for.
“Ah,” Kylie said drily. “You meant the blue boxes filled with the mason jars. How could I have possibly misunderstood?”
Mary laughed. “Sorry. Got distracted by a hottie walking past.”
Though there was more than twenty years of an age difference between them, Mary and Kylie were closer to friends than they were boss and employee. When Kylie had come to live with her half brother, Tyler Leshuski, one of Mary’s best friends in the world, around last Thanksgiving, Mary had offered her a job in the shop. Both as a way to discreetly keep an eye on her when Tyler was at work and as a way to get to know Kylie. She hadn’t expected the kid to be so freaking helpful. Seriously, Kylie worked less than fifteen hours a week and got more done than Mary’s other two employees combined.
Mary’s phone dinged in her pocket and she tugged it out to make sure it wasn’t one of her artisans contacting her. It was just an email from her mother. The subject line was “Time Sensitive, Please Read Immediately.” Mary clicked into the email and was surprised when her molars didn’t crack down their meridians. It was an article about the drastic drop in a woman’s fertility after the age of thirty. Apparently her mother meant the phrase time sensitive in the cosmic sense. She deleted the email without reading the article.
The front bell on the shop jingled and Kylie peeked her head out the storeroom door. She ducked back in. “Was your hottie wearing a construction vest?”
“Eep! Is he out there?” All thoughts of her meddling mother evaporated away.
“Sure is. I’m gonna...grab lunch for us.” Kylie scampered toward the back door.
“Charge it to the company card!” Mary hollered before she smoothed her hair, sat a box of the jars on her hip and left the storeroom with a big old smile on her face. “Hi there, can I help you with anything?”
The man, who’d been leaning over to inspect a series of ceramic clocks that Mary had arranged along one wall, straightened up and grinned at her. Damn, he really was attractive. Tall and smiley. Just like she liked.
“Just, ah, looking. I guess,” he said, his eyes quickly tracing over her.
Mary smiled harder. She wore tight jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt with flowers embroidered over both shoulders and brown high-heeled boots up to her knees. Her hair, naturally wavy, was behaving nicely today. “You’re welcome to look,” she said, setting the box of mason jars down at the window display and starting to arrange huge handfuls of mismatched paper flowers into them.
“Never seen your shop before,” the man said in a smooth baritone. “You been here long?”
“Five years now. You must not live in the neighborhood.”
“Guilty. We—I’m up in Queens.” He had his hands shoved in his pockets and a slightly chagrined look on his handsome face when Mary turned back around.
She hadn’t missed the accidental “we.” She clocked him at about thirty-five years old. Definitely old enough to be married.
“You and your wife?” she guessed.
His cheeks went pink. “Ah. Ex-wife. Force of habit to say ‘we,’ I guess.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” She meant it too. She’d never been married, but she’d seen enough of her friends’ marriages dissolve to know just how much it could screw up somebody’s life.
“Don’t be.” He shrugged. “Long time coming. The name’s James, by the way.”
“Mary.”
“Well, Mary, pretty cool selection of, um, these thingies you have here.”
She laughed, finding his bumbling, blushing manner to be pretty freaking cute. “Those are napkin rings.”
James puttered around the shop as Mary worked on the window display, the two of them idly chatting about the knickknacks that she sold and his construction work on a brownstone three blocks over. He was glancing her way an awful lot, and Mary was starting to feel a little blushy. He was just so dang good-looking. A buzz started in her gut.
In her early twenties, she never, ever used to ask a man out. Her mother’s training had been clear. It was a man’s job to do that. Being too forward would only emasculate him.
Cora was the one who’d helped her see that if a man was emasculated, that was his problem, not hers. In her midtwenties, Mary had started to ask people out. That didn’t mean that it was any less scary now than it used to be.
Her cheeks went hot and so did her palms as she turned to James. “I was wondering, James...”
He turned to her, a complicated expression on his face.
The bell jingled on the front door, but Mary didn’t turn around to see who’d come in.
“Would you want to grab dinner with me sometime?” she finished, hoping her voice didn’t carry to whoever had just entered her shop.
“Oh,” James said in that same smooth voice that had been making Mary’s stomach flip for the last fifteen minutes. He took a step closer to her and tugged a hand through his hair. It was then that Mary saw the flash of gold. On his left hand.
Right. Rightrightrightrightright.
“When I said ex-wife,” he mumbled, his eyes flicking behind her toward the newcomer in the shop, “I probably should have said soon-to-be ex-wife. But we’re, yeah, in mediation and I probably shouldn’t...”
She refused to be the one who was embarrassed. He should be embarrassed. But she still couldn’t stop the flood of heat in her cheeks. And sure enough, here came the underboob sweat. Like freaking clockwork.
“Oh. Okay.” She rose up from where she’d been crouching to arrange the flowers, still holding a few of them in her hands. “That’s fine. Good luck with all that.”
James stepped forward. He seemed to be purposefully ignoring the other shopper. “I didn’t mean to mislead you or anything. You’re just so pretty and I was having such a bad day until you smiled at me.”
Ugh. Did he have to be so cute? “It’s totally fine. Good luck with everything!” She gave him a bright smile so that he wouldn’t continue this apology that was only allowing embarrassment to dig its claws more forcefully into her.
“Right,” he mumbled. “You too.” And then he ambled out of the shop, shooting Mary a fairly miserable look through the shop window as he went back the way he’d come.
Mary resisted the urge to crumple up into a raisin and die and turned to the new customer with a sunny smile on her face.
She’d once stood on a curb when a cab had driven past and splashed muddy puddle water all over her new Anthropologie skirt. This was pretty much the emotional equivalent of that.
Because standing in her shop was a sympathetic-looking Estrella and a bitingly disdainful-looking John, his elbow firmly in his mother’s grip.
The smile vaporized off Mary’s face and she just sort of stared at them. If there had been one person on God’s spinning earth that Mary would not have wanted to see her ask out a married man and be rejected, it would be John Modesto-Whitford. The memory of his surly judgment two nights ago was painfully fresh in Mary’s mind. She didn’t let that kind of thing get too under her skin, but this one definitely hadn’t quite healed over yet.
“Mary!” Estrella said brightly, obviously determined to ignore the romantic crash and burn they’d just witnessed. “How are you? The shop looks beautiful as always. You know John, my son. He was taking his mother out to lunch around the corner and I wanted him to see your lovely shop.”
Mary’s eyes flicked over to the man in the black slacks, white dress shirt and dark blue tie. And yup, shiny wingtips. It was Saturday, for God’s sake! How deep into the wingtip cult did a man have to be to wear wingtips on a Saturday?
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” John returned in a voice that was a bit scratchy, two-toned almost.
“I’m going to quick run to the USPS up the block,” Estrella chirped. “Mary, do you have a second to show John your shop?”
Estrella didn’t wait for an answer before she ducked toward the front door, nudging her son forward at the same time.
And then there was nothing but echoing silence in the wake of Estrella’s departure. John blinked at Mary. Mary blinked at John.
“Well,” Mary said, gesturing around her with the flowers she just now realized were still in her hands. “This is my shop. You’re welcome to take a look around. Let me know if you have any questions.”
Mary felt his eyes on her as she turned back to the window display and started messing around with the bouquets she’d already put together. They’d been bright and haphazard and happy only moments before, but suddenly they looked messy and lazy to her. Maybe she should start over.
She could tell that John hadn’t moved from where he stood in her front entryway, and she could still feel his eyes on her back.
“Mary,” he said a moment later in that double-layered voice of his. How had she not noticed his voice the other night? It was so distinct. “My mother and I weren’t eating lunch around the corner.”
Mary instantly decided that each vase of flowers was utter, cheery perfection exactly as they were. Screwing with them too much was bound to wring the magic out of them, like water from a sponge. She picked up an armful of the jars and began to set them around the shop. The rest she’d arrange in the window. “Oh?”
John cleared his throat. “She told me that the two of you talked about our, uh, date.”
Mary whirled and was lucky that none of those jars actually had water in them because she would have been soaked down to her toes if they had. “I didn’t rat you out or anything. I just told her that—”
“That you didn’t have a good time. I know. It’s fine, Mary. You were honest with her. And she showed up at my house last night, spitting mad, because she says that Mary Trace always has a good time, no matter what she’s doing, and if she didn’t have a good time, then it must be my fault. And if it’s my fault, then I owe you an apology.” John traced his wide hands outward, palms up. “So, here I am.”
Mary frowned. “Your mother dragged you to my shop to apologize to me?”
He grimaced, and for just a flash, that surly face had the grace to look a tiny bit chagrined. “I came willingly.”
“She had you by the elbow when you came in here,” Mary said, arching an eyebrow.
His mouth turned down. “I wanted to wait outside the shop while you had another customer. My mother didn’t have any qualms about that.”
Mary blushed, embarrassed all over again about James the married man. “Right.”
John glanced out through her front window, his eyebrows furrowed down, though not as aggressively as she knew he was capable of. His hands were pushed into his pockets.
“Look, Mary. You were more right than my mother is. I’m not a nice boy. Although at thirty-one, I like to think I’ve graduated from not a nice boy to not a nice man.”
She cocked her head to one side as she studied him. He seemed older than thirty-one. His dark, neatly parted hair was so shiny that she realized it gave the illusion of silver, but it was actually just a full head of black hair. And the lines around his eyes were more likely from fatigue than they were from age.
He cleared his throat, those bright blue eyes stuck on her face. “I’m busy and grumpy and preoccupied and...rude. But none of that is an excuse for making you feel bad. So, I apologize. Really, I do. I’m sorry, Mary. I’m sorry for the mess I made of the other night. And I’m sorry I was rude.”
Oh. That was actually a good apology. None of that fast-dancing, zero-vulnerability, I’m-sorry-if-your-feelings-were-hurt-by-my-actions crap. That was a real apology. He’d admitted he was rude.
He stood, without moving, in the same spot. His hands were in his pockets, his eyes on hers, his mouth frowning, his eyebrows pushed down and mean.
“Well,” Mary said as she stamped her foot. “It might be easier to forgive you if you hadn’t just seen me strike out like that.”
John smirked, a grunt coming out of him that might have passed for a laugh in another dimension. “Yeah. That was...hard to watch.”
Mary glowered at him. “It’s not my fault he was married.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“And honestly, I consider it a win that I didn’t find out he was married after I’d gone on a date with him. I can’t tell you how many times that has happened to me.” She turned and continued to set the vases around her shop, positioning them this way and that until they were perfect. “Apology accepted, by the way.”
“Oh. Good.”
The bell to the shop jingled and in walked Estrella. She and her son exchanged eye contact, communicating silently, and Mary gathered that John was forgiven in his mother’s eyes.
“Estrella, I’m glad you’re back. I wasn’t sure how to display the pots you brought over yesterday.”
Estrella was one of the artisans that Mary featured in her shop, which was how they’d first become friends a few years ago. The woman was a true creative. She’d started out with these intricately embroidered throw pillows that had immediately triggered Mary’s drool reflex the moment she’d first seen them. From there, Estrella had started into her tapestries phase, which rolled into the stained-glass windows phase, and now they were here, with these lovely pots that Estrella threw in a ceramics studio and glazed to perfection. Mary couldn’t have loved them more. And she couldn’t have loved Estrella more either.
The woman, unlike some of Mary’s other artisans, was even-tempered and realistic. If Mary couldn’t sell some of her pieces, Estrella traded them out, her pride uninjured. Mary deeply valued their professional relationship, but nowhere near as much as their personal one. It was almost once a week that Estrella stopped by for a lunch with Mary or just a quick chat. It was a miracle that she’d known Mary for so long before she’d tried to set her up with John. Mary had been weighted down with a full-body dread to tell Estrella that it hadn’t worked out between them. She didn’t want anything to damage her relationship with her friend. Apparently, though, it hadn’t caused too much damage, considering that Estrella was smiling as she marched across the floor and gave Mary a little side-hug.
“You could display them over there, with the other pots.” Estrella pointed.
“Never!” The idea was absurd to Mary. “Those pots are nothing compared to yours. No. I want yours prominently displayed, but I was wondering what you thought about me buying some plants to stick into some of them, to give the customer an idea on how to use them practically. I could put one or two in the front window and then the rest... Oh, I’ll have to unpack them and figure it out as I go.”
“Are they in the storeroom?” Estrella asked.
“Mmm-hmm. In the same box you brought them over in.”
“John,” Estrella ordered. “The box has blue painter’s tape on it. Bring it out here, will you?”
Moments later, the women were unpacking Estrella’s pots from the packing material and fussing with their placement around the shop. Kylie returned with a sack of tacos in one hand, adeptly realized that they were not taking a lunch break and took over dealing with any customers that came in while Mary and Estrella finished setting up the displays.
John dutifully followed his mother’s directions on where to put this and that, though he said next to nothing and scowled coldly the entire time. When half an hour had passed, and the task was over, he stood at the far wall, his hands in his pockets, looking like he’d gladly walk through the gateway to Lucifer’s private torture chamber if it meant getting the hell out of here.
Some of the friendly glow Mary had started to feel in the wake of his apology faded. Did he have to be so unpleasant? He was like a sinkhole for good feeling.
“Are you working next Saturday?” Estrella asked Mary.
“Hmm? Oh. Always.”
“Not in the afternoon, though,” Kylie called. “Right? I thought I was overlapping with Caleb next Saturday.”
“Oh. Right. I should be out of here around two o’clock if you wanted to come by earlier than that, Estrella. Will you be bringing more of your work or is it a social call?”
“Neither,” Estrella said, giving her a mischievous grin.
“Ma.” John’s tone was part warning, part admonishment, his voice gravelly from not having spoken in so long. He seemed to know exactly what his mother was up to and didn’t appear to approve one bit.
Estrella ignored him. “My block has a party this time in June every year. You should come. There’s plenty of our neighbors there you could meet.”
“Oh.” Mary loved parties, she always had. Especially outdoor ones in the summer.
“She doesn’t want to come to the block party, Ma,” John groused. That aggressive V between his brows was back.
Well, if Mary hadn’t wanted to go to the party, she certainly did now, if not just to prove Frowny McIceberg wrong. “Sounds fun. Is it a potluck? Should I bring anything?”
“Maybe a cake?” Estrella leaned in, ostensibly to cut John out of the conversation. “And dress up a little. There’s a few nice boys there that I’d like for you to meet.”
Mary held her smile in place, because she loved Estrella so dearly. But she was simply mortified to have the topic of dating brought up in front of John. Apparently the universe felt that Married James hadn’t been punishment enough. “You got it,” Mary said with a wink she hoped covered her true feelings on the matter. “I could be there around three thirty?”
“Perfect.” Estrella stopped just long enough to kiss Kylie on the cheek. “Goodbye, my loves.” She waved at both of them, grabbed John by the elbow again and tugged him out of the shop.
“Bye!” Mary called, shaking her head when she realized that John didn’t even look back as he left the shop. He certainly didn’t say goodbye.