“I could,” she allowed, in the tone of someone who had already decided she wasn’t going to.
Spencer materialized at her side, slipping an easy arm around her waist and glancing between the two of us with a knowing grin that said he had read the room accurately and completely and was enjoying himself. “Or,” he said, “we could not stay, and let whatever you’ve both been dancing around for the last hour unfold without an audience.”
Lucy opened her mouth. He tugged her back one gentle step. “Don’t,” he said quietly.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were absolutely going to say something.”
She exhaled, the kind that conceded the point. “You’re right. I completely was.” She let herself be steered toward the door, twisting back over her shoulder as she went, her expression bright and entirely unrepentant. “Text me,” she called.
“I will,” I said.
“Tonight,” she added. “I don’t care how late it is.”
They left. The cool air rushed in briefly and then was gone.
The shop emptied out the rest of the way after that, chairs nudged back into place, last conversations wrapping up at the door, the bell chiming in small intervals as people filed out into the evening. I moved through the space that opened up as people left, collecting the last of the notebooks and fountain pens, straightening the linen runners, blowing out the few real candles I’d put along the windowsill.
I walked to the front, turned the sign to CLOSED, and locked the door. The click echoed softly through the shop.
I stood there for a second with my hand still on the lock, aware in a way I hadn’t been all evening of how quiet it had become. The hum of conversation, the rustling of papers, the laughter, and the movement—all of it gone, the shop exhaling back into itself.
I turned back.
Jasper was still there, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed loosely, a small grin on his face, the warm light catching the sharp line of his jaw. The sight of him standing in my shop, helpful and handsome in the candlelight, did something to my chest that I felt all the way down to my feet.
It was just the two of us. That fact registered with a clarity I hadn’t been prepared for, moving through me like a change in pressure. All evening I’d been aware of him in fragments—across the room, at the corner table, beside me at the counter, but there had always been other people, other things to manage, somewhere else to put my attention. Now there wasn’t. There was just me and Jasper Dean leaning against my counter, looking at me like he had things to say.
My heart had apparently made several decisions without consulting me. I walked toward him anyway.
Chapter 11
Jasper
The quiet that settled in after everyone left was the good kind—warm and a little spent.
Cara stood behind the counter with one hand resting against the worn wood, fingers spread slightly, like she was grounding herself. She looked at the room the way you look at something you’ve been working toward for a long time, in disbelief, as if she was still catching up to the fact that it had actually happened.
I let her have that for a moment. Then I stepped closer and reached for a stack of saucers she hadn’t gotten to yet and misjudged the distance between us by about an inch. My forearm brushed hers, and I felt it register all the way up my arm in a way that had nothing incidental about it.
She went very still for a half-second. I did too.
Up close like this, in the candlelight, I could see the length of her lashes behind her glasses, the small crease at the corner of her mouth from smiling all evening, the faint scent of something warm that was her and vanilla and old books, and I had to make a deliberate choice to set the saucers down beside the sink and take a half-step back and give her room, because the alternativewas staying exactly where I was and I didn’t think either of us was ready for that.
She glanced up, color high in her cheeks. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.” I kept my voice easy. “But I’m here, so...”
She looked at me for a second with an expression I couldn’t fully read. Then she shifted slightly, making space without making it a thing. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”
I went back to the saucers and said nothing, and the silence between us settled into something that felt less like absence and more like something waiting to be said.
We worked like that for a few minutes, quiet and in step. I rinsed glasses and stacked them, wiped down the stretch of counter where someone had left a ring from a teacup. She moved through the room behind me, straightening displays, aligning stacks, resetting things to their proper order with the focused ease of someone who knew every inch of the place. The candlelight caught her face as she moved between the tables—the soft amber of it warm against her dress, her hair a little looser than it had been at the start of the evening. I noticed it more than I meant to.
She caught me looking once and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said.
