Annika glanced down at herself, her hands fiddling with the drawstring on her shorts. “Oh—thanks. Um—so do you.” In fact, it was kind of hard to look directly at him. No one man should hoard so much beauty like that. It was immoral.

“Rose? Rose for the lady?”

They turned to see an old man in a tweed suit who’d wandered over to the sitting area, holding a basket full of pale pink roses. He smiled at them, his teeth too straight and even to be anything but dentures. “Beautiful couple. Rose for your lady, sir?”

Annika jerked her head to look at Hudson, her eyes wide, her cheeks warm. Turning back to the old man, she began to say, “We’re not a—”

“I’d love to,” Hudson interjected, reaching smoothly for his wallet.

Annika couldn’t breathe. She wanted to laugh and tell Hudson to stop being silly, but that part of her was very small and … quiet. After all, they’d called a truce, he was rethinking running Break Up, and June had told her to relax. And maybe because of those things, a bigger part of her wanted him to buy her a rose.

The man took the money, stuck it into his pocket, and handed the rose to Annika. She took it with trembling fingers, the stem firm and cool under her skin.

“Wish you both a happy life!” The old man waved and walked away with his basket, his eyes set on another couple across the lobby.

Annika turned to Hudson, swallowing. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”

He grazed his fingers over the rose petals and Annika’s body responded as if he’d touched her instead; her skin tingled like a hundred butterflies had fluttered their wings against her. Ridiculous, hopeless idiot. “I wanted to,” he said.

Annika attempted to distract herself from her traitorous body by looking around them at the busy lobby. “So—where are we going? The hotel restaurant?”

Hudson cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his head. “Actually, uh—I took the liberty of getting us two tickets to the Napa wine train, if you’d like to go? It’s the moonlight tour of the vineyards in the area; I heard it’s supposed to be really good. Plus, it still counts as dinner. They serve a meal on the train.”

She didn’t laugh at his attempt at a joke. There was a heavy moment between them; his eyes looking for answers in hers. If she didn’t want to, this was the time to say so. A moonlight tour on a train wasn’t the casual dinner she’d been expecting. It would be perfectly fine to tell him she’d prefer to eat an avocado sandwich at the hotel restaurant. She took a breath, fiddling with the stem of the rose, preparing to say no.

“Um, sure. That sounds cool.”