Page 4 of Flirting with Forever

He had just let himself into his third-floor apartment when a colorful blur snagged his attention. Actually, it was two colorful blurs. John’s mother, in a bright purple dress, her salt-and-pepper hair piled up on her head, stomped out from his kitchen, holding John’s cat, Ruth, who scrabbled and wheeled in Estrella’s arms, attempting to get away.

“Ma,” he said in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

His stomach plummeted.

She’d found out what had happened on the date.

CHAPTER TWO

“KYLIE,GRABTHOSEtwo pink boxes from the storeroom, will you?” Mary called over her shoulder as she attempted to balance two armfuls of paper flowers she was about to place in the window of her homegoods shop. Mary had owned and operated Fresh on her own for almost five years now. And today was the day she got to put up her June window display, maybe her favorite of the entire year. She loved the chintz and glitz of the Christmas display as well, but in June she really let her flower flag fly. She let the colors clash and the fake greenery overfloweth. Mary loved the unabashed cheer of it.

“Can’t find them!” Kylie, her teenage part-time assistant, called from the back of the store.

“Maybe they’re purple boxes?” Mary shouted back. “They’re filled with the...you know...whatever you call those thingies.”

Mary lost every word in her head as one of the most devastatingly beautiful men she’d ever seen in her life walked past the front window of her shop. Tall, wiry and broad-shouldered, he had light brown hair and was wearing a construction vest to boot. He looked like he’d walked out of a porn that Mary herself had cast. The man did a double take at Mary checking him out through the shop window, shooting her a cheeky grin as he walked.

Damn. “Better than a shot of Red Bull,” Mary muttered to herself.

“Do you mean the red boxes filled with the fake grass?” Kylie called.

Setting the paper flowers down in a heap in the window, Mary walked back to the storeroom to help out Kylie. After half a minute of searching, Mary found what she was looking for.

“Ah,” Kylie said drily. “You meant the blue boxes filled with the mason jars. How could I have possibly misunderstood?”

Mary laughed. “Sorry. Got distracted by a hottie walking past.”

Though there was more than twenty years of an age difference between them, Mary and Kylie were closer to friends than they were boss and employee. When Kylie had come to live with her half brother, Tyler Leshuski, one of Mary’s best friends in the world, around last Thanksgiving, Mary had offered her a job in the shop. Both as a way to discreetly keep an eye on her when Tyler was at work and as a way to get to know Kylie. She hadn’t expected the kid to be so freaking helpful. Seriously, Kylie worked less than fifteen hours a week and got more done than Mary’s other two employees combined.

Mary’s phone dinged in her pocket and she tugged it out to make sure it wasn’t one of her artisans contacting her. It was just an email from her mother. The subject line was “Time Sensitive, Please Read Immediately.” Mary clicked into the email and was surprised when her molars didn’t crack down their meridians. It was an article about the drastic drop in a woman’s fertility after the age of thirty. Apparently her mother meant the phrasetime sensitivein the cosmic sense. She deleted the email without reading the article.

The front bell on the shop jingled and Kylie peeked her head out the storeroom door. She ducked back in. “Was your hottie wearing a construction vest?”

“Eep! Is he out there?” All thoughts of her meddling mother evaporated away.

“Sure is. I’m gonna...grab lunch for us.” Kylie scampered toward the back door.

“Charge it to the company card!” Mary hollered before she smoothed her hair, sat a box of the jars on her hip and left the storeroom with a big old smile on her face. “Hi there, can I help you with anything?”

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.”

---