“I’m too busy with the store,” I insisted. “Give Kash my date.”

Kash shoveled a bite into his mouth, saying around it, “I’ll take it.”

But Mom tsked. “No, this one is special for Lucas. You can’t have her.”

My frown deepened, my attention inward as Laney climbed on her soapbox to rant about societal pressures to get married and how unfair it all was.

I’d find a way out of whatever date my mother devised. That was all there was to it.

I had other plans.

The vision of Tess in my arms arrested my thoughts. The almost imperceptible smattering of freckles on her nose and cheekbones and the unbelievable length of her eyelashes. The little details of her face that I hadn’t seen until she was close enough to kiss, like the burst of honey gold around her pupils, the color vivid and full of light against the deep brown of her eyes.

I liked Tess, and it had been a long, long time since I felt like this … like there was possibility. She was the kind of girl I could see myself with because who else could truly tame a Bennet but a girl like Tess? She wouldn’t give me an inch. And she believed I wasn’t the kind of man to be responsible.

Which made me want to prove her wrong.

Despite that, she liked me. In the moment when she’d almost kissed me, I knew. Maybe against her will, but she liked me at least equally as much as she hated me.

And that was something I could work with.

9

Double Take

TESS

I was all smiles, bouncing into the shop the next morning like a rubber ball.

The difference with the white walls was night and day, and to see it in full daylight was astounding. The space looked twice as big, bright and full of sunshine, the effect lost on me and Luke last night when we’d finished after dark. But this morning, Longbourne was illuminated. The long walls were pristine, the tables and displays back in place, and in the back, the register counter was framed by freshly scrubbed red brick.

He must have hung up the old wooden Longbourne sign above the counter this morning, and my heart twisted with emotion at the sight.

I hummed behind smiling lips, making my way through the shop. Ivy smiled up at me from an arrangement she was working on—succulents, ivy, flowers in water tubes, all planted in a glass apothecary jar. One of our living arrangements I’d come up with last year, which had become an instant success. Dean stood next to her as he sometimes did—especially when he delivered supplies a couple times a week—a human brick wall with a smile as shiny as Las Vegas, his big hand resting in the small of her back.

“Well, aren’t you chipper this morning?” Dean said.

“I know!” I answered.

Ivy shook her head, but she smiled broadly. “Gee, I figured all that manual labor would have you moving a little slower than this.” She gestured to all of me.