“They might be.” I was about to push my hand through my hair again before catching myself. “But I’ll probably bring them to my daughter.”
“Oh,” she rushed, before biting down on her bottom lip.
I shuffled, enjoying her delicate womanly presence in my otherwise dark space too much. It’d been a long time since I'd even let anyone in here, much less...
“I didn't realize you had a daughter.”
“She graduated a few years ago,” I blurted, before kicking myself. I slammed my eyes closed, thinking this was exactly the reason I didn't do things like people very often.
“She did? How old is she? Maybe I know her.”
“No—nevermind,” I cut her off, not used to sharing details of my private life with anyone. Anxiety bunched my shoulders and neck.
“What’s her name? One of my friends is a student teacher at the school.”
“Aspen is twenty-five now, I still think of her as a kid, but she just opened The Pine Cone Cafe in town.”
“Oh, I don’t think I know her. I’m only a year younger though, I would have thought I would have met her in school.”
A year younger? What did it say about me that I found myself attracted to a woman younger than my own grown daughter? I was forty-eight. That made Poppy half my age and a lifetime out of my league.
“Aspen was home-schooled,” I finally replied.
“Oh. Right.” She averted her eyes.
Eager to change the subject, I asked, “So you spent time up here as a kid?”
“It was my favorite place.” Excitement lit her eyes while she spoke. I hated that I was so drawn to her. “My dad always told me the story of the native woman who dove off the ridge—”
“The tourist shops did a real number on that story—heavy on the romance and left out all the real parts.”
“The real parts?” She frowned.
“The story the locals on the ridge tell is that her faithful warrior for the tribe went off to war and she didn't let the mud dry under his moccasins before she was in the teepee with his best friend. When the warrior came home from battle he found them shacked up together and put a boot in the bastard's ass before running off the ridge. Then he found someone who wasn't an asshole and got married and had kids and that's why his first lover jumped off the cliff...because she was an idiot for love. Some call her a victim, but she was the asshole in her own life if you ask me.”
“You know all of this how?” Amusement danced in her pretty leaf-green eyes.
“Born and bred on the ridge, I know these things.” I shrugged.
“Well, I've never heard that version.”
“Well, maybe whoever's been telling you the story all of these years is a sappy asshole too.” My voice was gruff compared to all of her delicateness. The soft angle of her cheekbones, skin a soft shade of petal pink. Petal.
She frowned at the bite in my words. “Maybe you're the asshole.”
“Come again?” I stepped closer, swallowing the space between us.
She sucked in a sharp breath, the tiny way she puffed out her cheeks so indignantly, like a little child denied ice cream for dessert. It made me want to tease her relentlessly. “I said: maybe the story depends on the perspective of the storyteller.”
I narrowed my eyes. “That makes more sense that I expected you to make.”
She shook her head, rolling her eyes to the unfinished ceiling before huffing, “That’ll be ninety dollars, please.”
“Is that all?” I fished a hand in the back pocket of my work jeans and pulled out my wallet. I passed her a crumpled hundred dollar bill. “Keep the change.”
She took it from my grease-stained fingers with slow movements. “Thank you, but I usually ask my recurring customers to set up an automatic electronic payment to make it easier—”
“I don't use electronics.”
“Anything?” She stumbled over the word.
I shook my head. “No credit cards. No electric power out here. Just me and the birds. And Winchester here.” I gestured to the old dog folded up in the corner. “Cash is king, right? Got some fruit that should be comin’ ripe soon, happy to trade you for a bottle of Cherry Falls’ best cherry wine. I prefer to work on a bartering system, only under very special circumstances do I part with my hard-earned cash. I don’t use a bank or checks, and that plastic shit is just a way for Big Brother to keep track of everyone anyway—hell if I want them to know what I spend my money on.”
“You don't want them to know you like flowers?”
I growled. “I don't like flowers.”
“Could have fooled me. I can't wait to find out what happens when the president realizes you're this into a place called The Flower Patch, maybe they'll think you're laundering money, because what kind of mountain man likes flowers this much, right? Unless, you know...”
“You know what?” I ground, growing more annoyed with the way she twisted around me with her words.
“The flower fetish.”
“Flower fetish?” I burst, unable to control the frustration any longer. A chuckle lit from her lips and her eyes lit in delighted joy as she wedged herself under my skin. Granted, it didn't take much, there was a reason I didn’t tangle with people much, things like conversation and communication were lost on me most days. Always had been, and I was fine with that. I'd always gotten more out of being in nature working with my hands than from chit-chat anyway. “Listen, I don't have a damn flower fetish, or any fetish, I'm as average as they come and just because you drove all the way up here, don't give you the right to—”
“To what?” She countered quickly and I faltered. She crossed her arms over her chest, squaring against me in a power pose that was in such a striking
