Page 98 of The Florist and Her Alphas

We pile into Julian’s car.

I sit in the back with August, his hand in mine, while Julian drives. The morning is warm and overcast, the river below the bridge the color of slate. August’s thumb traces patterns on my palm, and Julian hums along to something on the radio, and I let myself be held between them, safe and warm.

The new security panel at Marsh Florals reads my palm and lets us in.

The bell over the door rings, familiar and welcome, and I step into my shop and breathe the green-stem, old-wood smell of it and feel my chest unclench. The shop is exactly as I left it. The peonies in the cooler are still beautiful, their heads heavy and pink.

The chalkboard sign needs rewriting.

I walk through my morning routine—turning on the lamp behind the counter, opening the cooler, refilling buckets that need water, flipping the sign on the door to OPEN. Julian and August trail behind me, doing whatever I ask. Julian sets up the chalkboard sign on the sidewalk while I rewrite it in my looping handwriting: yellow ranunculus, white anemone, sweet pea, peonies. The chalk dusts my fingertips. I blow it off.

Mira shows up at eight twenty with a pastry box and a face that is going to ask me approximately three hundred questions. She sets the box on the counter. “Tell me about the proposal.”

I tell her between ringing up customers, between Julian wrapping bouquets passably and August handling the register with surprising competence. I tell her about each alpha’s small speech. The four kisses. The takeout on the floor.

Mira sighs, her hand over her heart. “You are going to have the grandest wedding ever.”

“I don’t know about that,” I groan. “I don’t have family or anything.”

“We’ll make it work,” she says determinedly before heading back to her bakery.

“You guys really don’t have to work,” I insist when the customers leave.

“You’re our omega, and if you choose to work, we’re going to help,” says Julian without question, and August nods as he puts away the returned flowers.

My phone rings at ten twenty. The wholesale supplier. I answer, holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder while I tie off a bouquet.

“Is someone coming to pick up your order?” the supplier asks.

I blink, my fingers stilling on the ribbon. “I have no idea what you are talking about,” I tell him.

“I received an email last night from your account asking to reroute today’s delivery from a doorstep drop to a pickup at the warehouse in Red Hook. The email has your name.”

I stare at Julian across the shop. He has gone very still, his hazel eyes fixed on my face, reading something in my expression that makes him set down the scissors in his hand.

“Umm, let me call you back about that,” I say, hanging up and immediately opening my email on my phone, my hands cold.

The ‘sent’ folder shows an email I did not send to the supplier the night before at eleven forty-three, asking exactly what the driver had described.

The email is perfect. The phrasing is mine. The signature is mine.

My stomach drops. Julian is already on the phone with Cole.

I can hear Cole’s voice on the other end, going clipped and fast, asking questions I cannot quite make out. Julian is asking him to pull the building’s security footage from my apartment from the previous afternoon and run it against every Frostwood email account to flag any access.

Julian hangs up. He looks at me, his face calm but his jaw tight.

“Someone spoofed your email,” he says. “I am going to handle it. I am going to drive to Red Hook myself to pick up the delivery, just in case it’s a trap. We’ll figure out the rest from there. It is going to be okay.”

“I want to come with you,” I say, but he is already shaking his head.

“I’ll have undercover cops with me, and hopefully we’ll have them arrested. Someone wants to lure you there, and there’s no way I’m allowing that to happen. Stay here with August where it’s safe.”

I want to believe him. But it’s so hard.

My heart’s racing with panic as he kisses me.

He kisses me hard, his mouth demanding, his fingers threading through my hair. He kisses my ring, his lips pressing to the peridot stone like a vow. Then he leaves, and the shop feels too quiet.