Coming Up Roses - Staci Hart Page 0,1

excellent grope.”

She made a noise somewhere between a squeak and a growl, her jaw bolted shut as she stormed past. But I hooked her arm, chuckling.

“Hang on, Tess. I’m sorry—I really am. I thought you were Ivy,” I admitted.

Instead of looking forgiving like I’d hoped, she seethed. “Well, sorry to disappoint,” she ground out.

“Who said I was disappointed?”

I stepped into her before she could speak, and she froze when I cupped her face. The first taste of her skin against my palm was cool, warming immediately as her cheeks flamed with a brilliant flush. I couldn’t tell if it was an angry flush or not.

But I didn’t hesitate to consider it as I inspected her, turning her head so I could check it for bangs or cuts.

“You hit your head pretty good,” I said gently. “I wouldn’t have grabbed you like that if I’d realized it was you. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she snapped, removing herself from my grip.

She turned on her heel, blowing past the table and to the back where we kept the cleaning supplies.

I followed her like an asshole. “I’m looking for Mom. Have you seen her?”

Tess swiped a scratchy white towel off a stack and blotted her face. “She’s at home, waiting for you. You should go. Now.”

“Oh, you’re not getting off so easy.” One of my brows rose with one corner of my mouth.

She rolled her eyes so hard, I was pretty sure she saw Bleeker Street. “Go away, Luke.”

My smile slipped, and I glanced back at the coolers. “I mean it. At least let me clean up the mess.”

“I’ve got it,” she fired because surely her mouth was a weapon.

“I insist,” I said with velvety persistence, reaching around her for a couple of towels. “Let me try to make it right.”

She froze but for her eyes, which tracked my hand like it was a goddamn cobra.

“You know,” I started with what I hoped was a reassuring smile. Her eyes cut to me with a flash. “I don’t bite.”

“That’s not what Ivy said,” she countered.

That bought her a full-blown laugh. “Fair enough. But I haven’t nibbled on Ivy in half a decade.” I turned for the coolers. “Where’s she at?”

“She’s off,” Tess said, toweling off her hair. When she thought I was out of earshot, she let out a heavy sigh.

I propped open the cooler door and knelt down, towel in hand as I inspected the damage. Nothing had broken, though some of the flowers had been smashed in the fall. I pushed up to stand with a sigh of my own and began hauling the damaged arrangements out of the cooler, fixing them up as best I could.

Tess scowled at me from across the room. I smirked back at her, unfazed, if not a little guilty.

Really, very little could faze me. It happened to be one of my special gifts along with the unfastening of a bra with two fingers, making a woman orgasm in under two minutes, and generally getting my way by sheer force of charm.

One of the few women immune to that charm was Tess Monroe.

Tess had been working for my mother since high school. Of course, that was back when we’d had half a dozen flower shops spread over lower Manhattan before the slow choke that brought on a retreat that left us with only the flagship store. Where Ivy was always up for a flirt, a laugh, and a subsequent romp behind the banana plants, Tess was her unamused, disapproving opposite. One of my particular joys in life was making her uncomfortable in the hopes she’d reveal a crack in the wall or the flesh of her soft little underbelly. I knew it was there—I’d seen her light and laughing and kind with literally everyone else. Once upon a time, we’d even been friends.

But now? My presence alone shot her hackles off her back faster than you could say Pass the peonies. And that drove me just a little bit crazy.

As I set the last vase on the table and turned for the cooler once more, I resolved to give grown-up Tess all of my grown-up charm.

While I mopped up the water, she worked behind me, the snap and click as she rearranged what I’d already arranged sharp and irritated. It was always like this with her, an impatient, intolerable sharing of space.

She was the literal worst person on earth for me to have inadvertently groped, and I had a feeling I’d be paying for that infraction for a good