Better Hate than Never (The Wilmot Sisters, #2)(113)

The man lunges again, catches my hand before I fall, and yanks me toward him, almost like a swing dance move that swaps our places, before he somehow also catches the gardenia plant and rights it on the table. When I try to yank my hand away, he turns suddenly, which pulls me with him, and, in a chaotic tangle of feet and pinwheeling hands, we crash to the floor, him on his back, me sprawled on top of him.

In an uncharacteristic feat of agility and speed that I can only attribute to the power of adrenaline, I lunge for a trowel that’s resting on the table beside me, then bring it to his throat, staring down at him, breathing heavily. “What,” I gasp, “the hell are you doing here?”

The man’s breathing heavily, too, eyes wide, hands back in surrender. “I . . .” He shakes his head. “What are you doing here?”

“Nuh-uh, you don’t get to ask questions.” With my free hand, I shove back the drenched hair that’s fallen into my face, trowel still at his throat. “You’re in my mom’s greenhouse—”

“Your mom’s?” he croaks.

“—and the last time I saw you, you were in the same Scottish pub as me seven and a half months ago, sitting at the bar, so you’re the one who’s going to do the explaining. Now tell me why you’re here.”

He swallows. I watch his Adam’s apple roll beneath the trowel’s tip. His mouth parts, working silently, until finally, he says, “I’m staying next door, with Christopher. I went for a walk and stopped in here.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Prove it.”

“Call Christopher right now; he’ll vouch for me.”

The man reaches for his phone in his pocket. I slap my free hand down on his wrist and pin it there, searching his eyes. “I’ll get your phone, thank you.”

I tug his phone from his pocket, swipe it to open, then spin it so it uses facial recognition to unlock. Straight to his contacts, I scroll down and find . . . Christopher’s name, and his cell phone number.

My jaw drops. Then the trowel follows suit, landing with a clatter on the tiles. Oh my god. The pieces fall into place. He’s here for the party, the one that I now remember Christopher saying was a birthday bash slash reunion for his friends from college—friends I’ve never met because Christopher kept to himself in his college years, while he was in the city. Christopher is my next door neighbor, has been my whole life; he’s like a brother to me. And I just tried to bludgeon his college friend with a short handle shovel.

Then I held him at trowel point.

Heat floods my face as I stare down at the man beneath me. I am mortified. And confused. Why, when he’s here for a party at Christopher’s, is he in the greenhouse?

“What are you doing in here, then?” I ask.

He swallows again and his hands start to lower to his sides. “Would you mind . . . if I answered you . . . while you’re not on my lap?”

If my face was hot before, it’s incinerating now. I glance down to where I sit, straddling his waist. My thighs are pinned against his ribs. My pelvis rests on his pelvis, where I feel a solid, thick weight—oh my god, I have to get off him.

I list sideways and scramble off the man in a very ungainly tumble of limbs, thanks to my embarrassment making me clumsy, my stiff joints resisting sudden movement. “Sorry,” I mutter, trying to arrange myself in a dignified seated position on the floor. I’m not even going to try to stand yet, not when I’m this turned around and discombobulated.

Slowly, he eases up, then leans against the table’s end, how he was when he was asleep. He draws up his knees and rests his elbows on them, rubbing his hands down his face.

“So,” I offer, trying to move past the tension, “you were saying what, uh, brought you to the greenhouse.”

He drops his hands, and his eyes meet mine. I bite my lip reflexively. Those eyes. They had no business being so beautiful back when I saw them across a pub in Scotland, and they have no business being this beautiful now, either.

But they are. They’re as rare and striking as his copper hair—pale green, slivered by shards of silver, like frost-streaked leaves. I tell myself to stop staring at them, but dammit, I can’t.

“The party was . . . a lot,” he finally says. For the first time, I register the quality of his voice—warm, yet edged with a smoky roughness, like whiskey that hits your tongue rich and smooth and finishes with a peat-tinged complexity that makes it taste infinitely better. “I needed a break.”

I tip my head. “So . . . you came in here, and then you fell asleep?”

Pink creeps up his cheeks, past the edge of his thick beard. “Passed out might be more accurate.”

“Ah.” I peer down at my soaked dress and pluck at the fabric to unstick it from my thighs. When I glance up, his gaze jumps up, too, as if it was lower, as if he was following my movement.

Our eyes meet. He blinks, then looks away, his focus traveling the flowers lined up along the far wall. He tugs down the brim of his ball cap, until his eyes are in shadow and his profile is distilled to the brim of his hat, his long, straight nose, and thick beard.

“You have to admit”—I set the trowel back on the table where I found it—“that this is pretty strange, that I randomly saw you in Scotland, and now you’re here. It’s a very weird coincidence.”

Serendipitous, even.