Willow in Bloom. Victoria Pade
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mind?”
She wouldn’t have minded even if she didn’t have a secret agenda. “No, honestly, I don’t mind.”
“That would be great, then. I really need a couple of tables—like a coffee table and maybe a kitchen table. I’m sick of standing at the counter to eat.”
“Good. Then it’s a date.”
Why had she said that? She could have kicked herself.
“Not a date date,” she amended in a rush. “I wasn’t asking you out or anything. I mean I’m not coming on to—”
“I know,” he said, stopping her before she made things any worse. Then he leaned slightly forward and confided, “It would have been okay even if you were.”
Willow was not a person who blushed. She’d grown up with four brothers, after all. She would never have survived if she had been overly sensitive. But she could feel her cheeks heating and she didn’t seem to be able to stop it.
And worse yet, she knew he was seeing it because his agile mouth stretched into an amused grin.
Unlike her brothers, he didn’t say anything about it, however. “When’s closing time? I’ll meet you at your store.”
“Six. Closing time is at six,” she managed to reply.
“Maybe after we’re finished shopping I could buy you dinner. As payment for your decorating services.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“How about if I just want to?” he said, a hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
“I guess that would be okay,” Willow conceded. “Nice, even.”
“Then it is a date.”
He was teasing her. She could see it in the sparkle in his eyes. In that quirk of his lips that let her know he was enjoying himself.
And then, from out of nowhere, Willow had a burst of memory from their night in Tulsa, and what hadn’t been clear in her mind before—how she’d gotten from the blues club to his room—became vivid.
It had started with a kiss. A good-night kiss he’d asked if he could have when he’d walked her outside after the club had closed and they were facing each other just the way they were at this moment. A simple good-night kiss that had lit a fire between them and gone on from there.
And in that instant Willow wondered if, were he to kiss her now, it would be as combustible.
But of course, he wasn’t going to kiss her.
She also knew it absolutely shouldn’t happen, even if it were a possibility. That she shouldn’t let it happen, since she was trying to amend the impression he would have of her if he could remember her.
But still she couldn’t help wondering…
“I’d better go,” she said more forcefully, heading for the front door. “Thanks for the tea.”
“Thanks for bringing the papers out,” he countered, following in her wake.
He reached the door in time to open it for her, and Willow went out onto the porch again, feeling oddly as if she’d just escaped something. Herself, probably.
“See you tomorrow,” she said as she kept on going down the porch steps to her truck.
“I’ll be there at six,” he called after her.
Willow missed the door handle on her first try and had to make a second attempt, hoping he didn’t realize why she was so flustered.
But it wasn’t a good sign that he was grinning again.
Be cool, she advised. Be cool.
Because Wyla would never have blushed or flubbed opening the car door, and Willow didn’t want to be a woman who did, either. She wanted to be smooth and self-confident and sure of herself, the way she had been that night in Tulsa.
The way she had been the first time Tyler had liked her.
That first time that he hadn’t just forgotten, that he actually had a medical reason for not remembering.
Which meant that he wasn’t a creep at all.
And that she wasn’t necessarily forgettable, either.
Chapter Three
“Hey.”
Willow looked up from the paperwork she was doing at her desk the next afternoon to see her oldest brother, Bram, standing in her office doorway.
“Hi,” she replied, setting down her pencil.
“Got a minute to spare for your favorite brother?”
“Sure.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“I already told you I didn’t rob that bank, Sheriff,” she joked.
Bram came in, closing the door behind him. “Don’t make fun,” he ordered.
But Willow knew he was only kidding. She and the rest of her brothers were proud of the fact that Bram was Black Arrow’s sheriff, and they’d made him aware of it.
Bram sat in one of the visitors chairs, leaned low in the seat and put his feet up on the corner of her desk.
“Anyone who puts their big clodhoppers up there has hell to pay with me,” Willow warned.
Bram was unperturbed. “Don’t make me come around there and give you a noogie to put you in your place.”
Noogies were what her brothers called it when they put her in a headlock and rubbed their knuckles on her skull.
His threat must have been more effective than hers because he grinned and left his feet where they were, and Willow didn’t do anything about it.
“Met Carl at the gas station last night,” her brother said then.
“Uh-huh.” Willow braced for what she knew was coming, since she’d already had this conversation with two of her other three brothers. Apparently Bram, Ashe and Logan had had breakfast this morning and discussed her, and if Jared hadn’t married and moved to Texas with his new wife, he would have been in the mix, too.
“Carl says something’s wrong with you,” Bram continued. “He thinks you’re sick or something.”
“And you reported it to the other Musketeers over breakfast,” Willow said. “Well, I’m not sick or anything. Just like I told Ashe and Logan when they called.”
But Bram wasn’t going to let it drop that easily. “Carl says he caught you sleeping at your desk. That you’re dragging your tail around here, and that you don’t even have the strength to move a feed sack.”
Willow had made a special call to her doctor to ask if it was all right for her to go on lifting the heavy bags of feed and grain that she’d always hoisted without a second thought before. The doctor had advised against it.
“I have the strength. I’m just trying to learn to delegate.”
Bram looked at her as if she were out of her mind.
“I know this comes as a surprise to you,” Willow said, “but I’m not a man. And I might want to have kids someday. Gloria always said I shouldn’t be lifting such heavy things or I was going to strain my insides, and I just thought maybe it was time to take that seriously.”
Bram laughed. “Right. You’re a delicate little daisy.” He was making fun.
“I didn’t say I was a delicate little daisy. But I’m also not one of the guys. And the guys around here can do the lifting. That’s what I pay them for.”
She hadn’t intended for that to come out so brusquely, but it had, and