“Gypsy wedding?” she asked.
He smiled blandly. “Just a dinner party Patricia is throwing tonight for Alexandra Skouras. Do you know her? She’s the new head of marketing for General Mills. She and her husband Creighton just bought a second home over at Palmetto Bluff.”
“Never met them,” Cara admitted. Or heard of them, she wanted to say.
Her sales rep had finished tallying her order, and silently handed her the receipt.
Ignoring Cullen Kane, Cara checked the total on the receipt against the one on her calculator.
“Looks fine,” she told the young woman, whom she hadn’t worked with before. “Just put it on my account, please.”
“Name?”
“Cara Kryzik. It should be under Bloom.”
The clerk tapped her keyboard, found Cara’s name in the system, but frowned.
“Um. It looks like there’s a hold on your account.”
Cara felt the blood drain from her face.
“Ouch,” Cullen said, under his breath. He gave Cara a mock sympathetic smile, and finally moved back to his own side of the counter. But Cara knew he was watching. And listening intently.
“That’s got to be a mistake,” Cara said quietly.
The girl shook her head. “I only know what’s in the system. This says you’ve got an outstanding balance.”
“Look,” Cara whispered. “I paid that bill yesterday. In full.”
“But it’s not been entered into the system,” the girl said.
“I get that,” Cara said, losing patience. “But the check is probably in your accounting office right now. Maybe it hasn’t been posted yet.”
“Probably not.” The girl shrugged and looked meaningfully over Cara’s shoulder, at another florist, who was hovering nearby with a bucketful of pink and white carnations.
“Okay. So what are we gonna do?” Cara asked. “I’d just write you another check, but I didn’t bring my checkbook with me. I literally just ran over here to get these flowers for the wedding I’m doing tonight. I can come back later. All right?”
“Nope,” the girl said. “Sorry. New policy. I can’t let you take any product out of here until that hold is lifted.”
“This is crazy,” Cara moaned. “I’ve never had this happen before. And I need these flowers.”
“Sorry,” the girl said, but clearly, she wasn’t sorry. She wasn’t even terribly interested in Cara, or her credit hold. “Next.”
The florist with the carnations stepped around Cara, giving her a quick, pitying look, the kind you’d give a crazy bag lady with a shopping cart full of recycling.
But Cara wasn’t budging, and she wasn’t leaving Breitmueller’s without her damn flowers.
“Call Wendy,” she told the girl. “Please.”
***
Thirty minutes later, they found Cara’s check in a stack of unopened mail on the bookkeeper’s desk.
“Cara, I’m so sorry,” Wendy Breitmueller said. They were sitting in her glass-walled office, located on a catwalk overlooking the warehouse. “Obviously, Janet didn’t handle that very tactfully.”
“No,” Cara said, remembering the looks of pity and contempt she’d been given by the other customers in the warehouse. “She didn’t. I was mortified.”
“She’s new,” Wendy said. “But I’ve explained to her that that’s not how we handle credit issues. You have my promise, it won’t happen again.”
