“Well, it’s not going to hurt!” Maya declared. “And the full moon was last night, so we’re close enough.”

“All right, all right!”

He smiled at the way the women bickered like old friends. That was Maya for you. She knew everyone. If anyone was going to roll out the welcome wagon for a newcomer, it was Maya.

Not that Evie was a newcomer.

And not that she was staying.

A fact he was thankful for, given the way she glared at him as she stepped out of the refrigerator.

“Wait,” she said to Maya as she set the flowers on the cash desk. “These aren’t moonflowers.”

“They’re sort of…” Maya lowered her voice to what she probably thought was a whisper, but she was too drunk to achieve subtlety. “Decoys.”

“Decoys? What?”

He stepped in to explain. “A few years ago, the wishing thing got so popular that everyone’s flowers were getting stolen. There’d be none left by midsummer. And since moonflowers grow on vines, florists can’t really sell them cut, like other flowers.”

“So my dad did this presentation to the town council suggesting that he start importing amaryllises.” Maya cocked her head. “Amarylli? I never know what the plural is.”

“The Heritage Preservation Commission, which decided the actual moonflowers on Main Street were under their purview, had plaques made encouraging people to buy their flowers here, rather than take them from Main Street,” Sawyer said.

“The town actually passed an ordinance making the theft of a live moonflower finable by up to five hundred bucks!” Maya finished.

Evie seemed out-of-proportion aghast at this story. “So what you’re telling me is that the town is engaged in an organized effort to defraud tourists.”

“It’s not fraud! Nothing in here says moonflowers!” Maya tapped the glass in front of the big bucket of flowers inside the cooler. There was a sign on it that said, “Wishing Flowers.”

“Wishing flowers.” Evie scoffed. “So it’s just a coincidence that an amaryllis looks remarkably like a moonflower?”

Maya performed an exaggerated shrug, and Sawyer chuckled. Evie was right: the town was basically conspiring to protect its blooming Main Street by tricking unsuspecting visitors into using the wrong kind of flower for their wish making. The whole thing was, frankly, absurd. But that was Moonflower Bay for you. A town full of professional meddlers.

When Evie, still seemingly wildly offended, shot him a look of disgust, he said, “Hey, I don’t make the law; I just enforce it.”

“So you honestly write people five-hundred-dollar tickets for stealing a flower?”

He smirked. “When I feel like it.” In other words, when drunk tourists got lippy. He’d never issued one to a local. But no one knew that. He had to hold on to the upper hand where he could.