“You’ll regret this.” His gaze drifted briefly back to Indy one more time.
The stranger turned and walked toward the door, his pace the gait of a man who was leaving because he’d decided to, not because he’d been made to. His hand found the door handle, and he pushed through it without looking back.
Indy was starting to really hate that chime.
From the sidewalk, just before he moved out of the frame of the window, the guy glanced back through the glass. His eyes found Colton, smiled, then he walked away.
Indy stood at the worktable for several seconds. The shop smelled like hyena and cut flowers and the faint metallic edge of his own adrenaline. The ribbon he’d been working with earlier was crumpled in his fist, no recollection of grabbing it.
“So,” Indy said, his voice coming out mostly level, which he considered a personal achievement of considerable magnitude, “that’s a thing that just happened.”
Colton turned from the window, the predator tucked away, but his gaze swept the room a few times. “You okay?”
“Completely fine.” Indy smoothed the ribbon flat on the worktable with two fingers. “Totally unaffected. I do want to say, for the record, that when Malik said you’d all keep me safe, I interpreted that as a fairly low-key arrangement. A bit of standing around, maybe some light hovering. I didn’t anticipate a rotating cast of supernatural grudge matches being conducted in my shop.”
Colton’s expression softened slightly at the edges. “It won't happen again.”
“That’s a very confident statement given the last forty-eight hours of my life.” Indy looked at the door, at the empty sidewalk beyond the glass. People were walking past, a delivery van double-parked at the corner, a woman wrestling with an inside-out umbrella against a gust of wind. Everything appeared normal. “The dogs,” he said. “They came from a fighting ring.”
Colton gave a single nod.
Indy looked at the ribbon in his hands. He thought about the terrier sleeping in his lap the night before, the fractured leg and the matted fur, how all three of them had pressed together like they’d learned that closeness equaled safety. Something moved through him that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite grief but sat in the territory between them, hot and quiet.
“Good,” he said.
Colton looked at him.
“What you did.” Indy set aside the ribbon and picked up his scissors again, trimming the lavender. “Whatever you all did. Good.”
For a moment the shop was quiet, just the distant sound of the street, then Colton made a low sound of acknowledgment and turned back toward the window.
Indy’s hands were mostly steady, and the familiar smell of the stems rising as he cut them was grounding in the way the shop always was, the work requiring enough attention to keep his brain from running too far ahead. He got through four bundles before he realized he was also listening, still tracking the street outside through the glass, waiting to see if the black-haired man would come back.
He didn’t.
By the time the noon light had shifted and flattened out across the front display, Indy had filled two more orders, reorganized the sympathy section because it had been bothering him for a week, and eaten half a granola bar he’d found in his apron pocket. Colton had answered a call at some point, stepping just outside the front door and keeping it propped with one foot, his voice too low for Indy to catch the words.
When he came back in, his expression had changed.
“Malik’s coming,” he said.
Profound relief struck Indy, making his knees grow weak. “Well, that’s, um, nice of him.”
Colton smirked. “You don’t have to front. You know you want him here.”
More than Indy had realized. Already he was falling hard for Malik, and the separation was killing him.
Chapter Eight
Indy was sprawled across Malik’s bed, one arm flung wide as the night breeze whispered through the window. He’d closed his shop three hours early, something he hadn’t done in years, but the thought of unfilled orders didn’t make him anxious. Malik’s fingers moved through his hair in slow, gentle strokes, and Indy found himself melting into the touch. Their conversation drifted between topics with the unhurried ease of summer clouds.
“You’re lying,” Malik teased with a devasting grin that made Indy’s heart flutter.
“Not even a little.”
“You’re telling me this guy bought every single rose you had and included a card that vowed to never again stick his dick where it didn’t belong?” Malik sounded more amused than shocked. His fingers continued to glide through Indy’s hair, the gentle scrape of his nails making Indy tingle all over.
“Cross my heart and hope my petunias die,” Indy shot back, making an X over his chest. “A few hours later, his wife stormed in like a hurricane in heels, asking for every funeral wreath I had. When I told her I didn’t have any, she marched to the back and grabbed the bucket of wilted hydrangea I’d forgotten to toss out. Then she threw fifty bucks at me, and demanded I deliver them with a card featuring her artistic rendering of garden shears aimed toward a cock.”
