A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (30)

He raised a brow, interested. “Who’s your dad? He sounds menacing.”

“Richard Wilde. He owns a national chain of funeral homes.”

“Where he buries his enemies?”

“Okay, this isn’t about my dad,” she blurted out impatiently. It was maddening trying to get a direct answer out of this man.

He thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. “Look, I saw your portrait on the Sweet Colette flyers stapled around the neighborhood. I thought you were pretty.”

Shyly, she looked down at her shoes. “You thought I was pretty?”

“The portrait. I thought the portrait was pretty,” he said clumsily. “I didn’t even put two and two together that it was you. The woman I saw in the garden.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I wanted to remain anonymous, so I sent my assistant to buy it. She lives nearby. I just like to support young artists.” He shrugged. “I was a young artist, once.”

“Once?” Squinting at him, Ricki took three steps closer. “How old are you?”

He took three steps back. “Twenty-eight.”

This guy’s energy was confused, like he was caught between needing to get away from Ricki and wanting to stay.

“You do know how creepy this sounds, right? You bought it anonymously… for what?”

“I wanted it,” he said with a simple shrug. “No more, no less.”

Ricki’s breathing stuttered. He moved with such easy, masculine strength—even his shrug. Leonine.

“And do you get everything you want?”

He scratched his exquisite jaw slowly. “No. That would be boring, wouldn’t it?”

Ricki’s mouth went dry, and she swallowed.

This will not do. She could not join a circus for another handsome stranger. She had a business to run!

“Well. I’m sorry for stalking you,” she said. “Have a nice life.”

Ricki walked around him, headed down toward the gate.

“Hey.”

This time, he was the one to stop her.

Ricki turned around.

“I’m sorry I reacted the way I did when you showed up to my house. I’m a private person. I didn’t want to be found.”

“Whatever you say,” she said, anxious to leave. Between his overwhelming physicality, the jasmine-scented breeze, and the irresistible mystery of him, she was due to lose her head any minute. She had to save herself and get away.

But neither one of them moved.

“Should I go, or you?” asked Ricki.

“With all due respect, I was here first.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest. She saw his biceps flex under his coat.

“It’s a community garden—it belongs to all of us.”

“No, it’s mine,” he said quietly, a competitive edge in his tone. He was putting off his departure. “I’ve been coming here for years. You’re new to Harlem.”

She scowled, immediately on defense. “Wait. How could you know that?”

“I can tell. You have that fascinated look. Everything’s still interesting to you. Your eyes are ravenous, like you’re looking everywhere at once. Real New Yorkers have seen it all.”

“I’m from Atlanta, not Antarctica.”

“Okay,” he said with a satisfied smile, a mocking edge in his tone. “But Atlanta’s not New York.”

Hands on her hips, she asked, “Well, how long have you lived here?”

“I don’t anymore. But whenever I’m in town, I come back to the garden. That scent is really calming; it helps me think.” Hands still in his pockets, he cocked his chin toward the highly fragrant tall cluster of jasmine.

He smells them too, she thought, which was baffling. Ricki had assumed it was a side effect of her overactive imagination.

“Do you know how rare that is?” she asked. “I own a flower shop. Those flowers blooming in winter? It makes no scientific sense.”

“It’s February of a leap year,” he said. “Nothing makes sense till March.”

Ricki could feel him watch her. She moved backward, brushing against the bush. Petals fell to the ground, and she gently picked them up, cupping them gingerly in her palm. Something sparked in his expression, a quick flare that faded before she could grasp it.

“I hate hurting nature,” she said sadly.

“It hurts us all the time,” he said, his voice hard but his face soft.

Their eyes met, and then they both looked away.

And then, because she was completely in over her head, because her defenses melted a little, Ricki felt it again: the terrible urge to share a random fact. The compulsive need to make things weird with one of her extremely niche tidbits.

Don’t do it, she thought. Don’t unload the jasmine story onto this mysterious, enigmatic creature who’s already established that he has anxiety and just…

“Indian mythology has a story about night-blooming jasmine,” she blurted out. “There was once a beautiful princess who fell in love with the sun god, and he loved her, too. Deeply. But he refused her, because he was terrified that he’d burn her. She couldn’t live without him, so she set herself on fire. And from her ashes grew a lavish tree with yellow and white blooms that flowered only at night, releasing a sweet fragrance symbolizing her eternal devotion. But the petals closed during the day, because the memory of the sun, her lost love, was too painful to bear.”