Page 19 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

"She's going to tell no one. She's the most discreet woman I've ever met." I lift my hand out from under her shirt and tug the hem down and smooth it flat against her ribs the way she smoothed my tie. She watches me do it, her eyes bright and soft and still half-lidded. When I help her down off the table her knees nearly give. I steady her with both hands at her waist and neither of us says anything for a moment. The light has moved on the floor.

"Charlotte's at my mother's tonight," she says.

"I know. Cinnamon rolls."

"She's been planning it for a month." Rosemary looks up. The color is high in her cheeks and she's wiping at her mouth with the heel of her hand, and she's never been more beautiful, with her hair coming down and cinnamon on her sleeve. "I need to decide something."

"Then decide it however you want." My voice is steady. It surprises me. "I'll wait as long as you need."

"Even if it's no?"

"Especially if it's no."

She studies me a long moment. Whatever she's looking for, I stand there and let her find it. Then she stoops, picks up the spilled sachet and sets it back on the shelf with her back to me.

"That," Rosemary says, "is the most dangerous thing you've said yet."

She takes an armful of throws and goes out through the barn store with her head high and her wrist curled against her chest, and the door swings shut.

I stand alone among the wool bales and the spices with my pulse still going like a fist on wood, and I understand that I will wait precisely as long as it takes. It's the first thing in my life I've ever intended to be patient for.

Chapter 5 — Rosemary

I make it as far as the middle of the barn store before my knees stop cooperating. I set the stack of throws down on the nearest table and grip the edge with both hands, and the college kid at the register looks up from his phone for the first time all day.

"You okay, Ms. Brewer?"

"Fine." My voice sounds like it's been dragged behind a truck. "Wool's heavy."

His eyes go to my mouth, then my hair, then the cinnamon smeared the length of my sleeve. He gestures vaguely at his own collar. "You've got, um. Something."

"It's spice. From the storeroom."

"Totally."

"Eat your lunch."

I pick the throws back up and go out into the cold afternoon with my face on fire. The river road is carpeted in gold, the maples letting go in earnest, leaves spinning down around me. I walk fast, then slower.

At the bridge I stop and put my fingertips against my mouth. It feels swollen, the way your eyes feel after you've been crying. I can still feel his hands under my shirt. I can still feel the exact place on my ribs where he smoothed the hem back down, like he was tucking a child into bed, and it undid me more than the rest of it.

I'll wait as long as you need. Especially if it's no.

Danny never said anything like that. Danny said come on, Rosey, live a little, in a voice like a hand on the small of my back.

The rest of the afternoon happens to me like weather. I take the throws to Dolores, who counts them without looking at me and says only, "Blue's on the left," in a voice so dry I could strike a match on it. I go back to the gazebo and cut pies.

I cut the same apple pie into thirds instead of eighths and have to reassemble it with a spatula, and the woman waiting politely pretends not to see. I sell caramel apple and pumpkin and the last of the pecan to people who say Morning, Rosey in the afternoon, I hand over change, and all the while I know exactly where he is on the Green, the way you know where the stove is in a dark kitchen.

He keeps his distance. He does it like a man carrying a glass of water level.

He's across the lawn helping unload the cider truck, sleeves up, indigo on his forearms. He's by the hay maze, crouched to hear something a small child is telling him with great seriousness.

At some point he opens a second cider line with a card table and a cashbox, without asking anyone, and in fifteen minutes the queue has halved and nobody can say who to thank. He never once comes to the pie table.

But every time I look up, he's looking at me, he doesn't pretend otherwise, he doesn't come closer, and I find that I'd rather he did.

At ten to four I hand the whipped cream to a girl from the church youth group and tell her I'm getting a hot dog.