"On three," Flynn calls. "Push them toward the birdbath."
"One."
A flamingo rips out a marigold and flings it sideways.
"Two."
Flynn drops into a crouch. An actual tactical crouch. Knees bent, weight forward, arms spread wide. He looks like a linebacker. A seven-foot green linebacker in a dad shirt preparing to sack a plastic bird.
"Three."
We charge.
The flamingos scatter.
Not toward the birdbath. Not toward each other. Every single direction that isn't useful. Two bolt under my porch. One launches itself into my jasmine trellis and hangs there, wire legs kicking, beak snapping at the vines. Three sprint for the fence gap back into Flynn's yard. The remaining four split into pairs and execute flanking maneuvers that would make a chess grandmaster weep.
"They're organized!" I lunge for the nearest one. My fingers close around its neck. The plastic is sun-warm and unnervingly smooth, and the bird pivots its entire body like an owl, beak jabbing at my wrist. I yank my hand back. A bead of blood wells on my thumb.
"Stop grabbing the neck. Grab the base."
"You grab the base! They bite!"
Flynn scoops one up from behind. Both hands around its midsection, pinning the wire legs against its body. The flamingo goes rigid. Then it starts vibrating. A low, mechanical buzz, like a phone on a table, and Flynn's expression shifts from determination to alarm.
"It's—"
The bird explodes out of his grip. Not literally. But the force of its escape sends Flynn backward into my rosemary bed, and the sound that comes out of my mouth is not a word. It's a noise. A primal, plant-mother noise.
"My ROSEMARY!"
"I didn't—the bird?—"
"You're SITTING on it!"
He scrambles up. His shorts are streaked with dirt and crushed rosemary needles, and the smell fills the entire yard. Sharp. Clean. Herbal. Mixed with his cedar-whatever scent, it creates something that makes my brain short-circuit for half a second.
He brushes rosemary off his thighs. "I'll replace it."
"You can't replace a two-year-old rosemary bush, Flynn."
"I'll find one."
"They don't sell—watch out!"
A flamingo dive-bombs from the jasmine trellis. It clips Flynn's ear, and he swats at it, and the motion brings his arm swinging backward into my shoulder. Not hard. But enough to knock me off balance, and I grasp the nearest solid thing.
His shirt.
The shirt bunches in my fist. Underneath, his stomach is a slab of warm stone. My knuckles press against actual abdominal muscles, and my brain catalogs this information against my will: ridged, firm, radiating heat like a furnace behind cotton.
His hand catches my elbow. Steadies me. His palm wraps all the way around my arm with room to spare. Every finger is a thick, calloused pressure point against my skin.
We're close. Too close. His body blocks out the sky. I have to tilt my head back to find his face, and when I do, those amber eyes are right there, wide, fixed on mine with an intensity that has absolutely nothing to do with flamingos.
A rosemary needle is stuck in his hair. Right above his left ear. The wild, dark strands hold it in place like a boutonniere.
His jaw works. The tendons flex.
