The man, who’d been leaning over to inspect a series of ceramic clocks that Mary had arranged along one wall, straightened up and grinned at her. Damn, he really was attractive. Tall and smiley. Just like she liked.

“Just, ah, looking. I guess,” he said, his eyes quickly tracing over her.

Mary smiled harder. She wore tight jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt with flowers embroidered over both shoulders and brown high-heeled boots up to her knees. Her hair, naturally wavy, was behaving nicely today. “You’re welcome to look,” she said, setting the box of mason jars down at the window display and starting to arrange huge handfuls of mismatched paper flowers into them.

“Never seen your shop before,” the man said in a smooth baritone. “You been here long?”

“Five years now. You must not live in the neighborhood.”

“Guilty. We—I’m up in Queens.” He had his hands shoved in his pockets and a slightly chagrined look on his handsome face when Mary turned back around.

She hadn’t missed the accidental “we.” She clocked him at about thirty-five years old. Definitely old enough to be married.

“You and your wife?” she guessed.

His cheeks went pink. “Ah. Ex-wife. Force of habit to say ‘we,’ I guess.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” She meant it too. She’d never been married, but she’d seen enough of her friends’ marriages dissolve to know just how much it could screw up somebody’s life.

“Don’t be.” He shrugged. “Long time coming. The name’s James, by the way.”

“Mary.”

“Well, Mary, pretty cool selection of, um, these thingies you have here.”

She laughed, finding his bumbling, blushing manner to be pretty freaking cute. “Those are napkin rings.”

James puttered around the shop as Mary worked on the window display, the two of them idly chatting about the knickknacks that she sold and his construction work on a brownstone three blocks over. He was glancing her way an awful lot, and Mary was starting to feel a little blushy. He was just so dang good-looking. A buzz started in her gut.

In her early twenties, she never, ever used to ask a man out. Her mother’s training had been clear. It was a man’s job to do that. Being too forward would only emasculate him.

Cora was the one who’d helped her see that if a man was emasculated, that was his problem, not hers. In her midtwenties, Mary had started to ask people out. That didn’t mean that it was any less scary now than it used to be.

Her cheeks went hot and so did her palms as she turned to James. “I was wondering, James...”

He turned to her, a complicated expression on his face.

The bell jingled on the front door, but Mary didn’t turn around to see who’d come in.