Page 56 of Where You're Planted

“Nobodykisses me like that,” he confessed, unable to mask the rush of feeling that came out with it.

“Well, then,” she said, as if this was his answer. She smoothed her dress again and frowned up at the glass ceiling, where the rain eased into a gentle patter now, the storm already passing. She shook her head at it and said, almost to herself, “God, I’m amother. What is wrong with me?”

He didn’t mean to keep laughing at her, but he couldn’t help it. “Moms don’t kiss?”

She glared at him. “Moms kiss. I’m just remembering mychild, whom I shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place.I need to go check on her. And you need to give your speech soon.”

“Of course,” he said, sobering at the reminders of both.

“You should find a friendly face in the crowd and just look at them if you feel overwhelmed,” she offered. “Ian. You could look at Ian.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” he asked. “Should I picture someone naked?”

Everything from her cheeks down to her heaving chest flushed pink. “Probably depends if you have a podium to hide behind.”

His chuckle rumbled through him. “Go,” he said, shaking his head. “Check on Briar.”

She backed toward the door. “You’re okay now, though?”

Jack was painfully hard and more than a little disoriented, but he figured that wasn’t what she meant. “Right as rain.”

She continued slowly backing away. When she caught her hip on a table, she yelped, and the black-and-yellow antennae on her head pitched down. She yanked them off with a sharp curse, embarrassed, and shoved them in her pocket. “I’m going now,” she announced.

But instead, she drank him in with a thorough once-over,biting into her kiss-swollen lip, her eyes openly burning. She straightened her dress and then her hair.

“You’re going,” he reminded her with a grin.

She laughed, breathless and dazed. “Don’t follow me out looking like that,” she warned, a flirty smile lighting up her face. Then she speedwalked out of his greenhouse.

17

Tansy

“Are we really not going to talk about it?” Kai asked, interrupting Tansy’s review of the festival. The librarians sat in the sunshine for their morning meeting on Thursday, enjoying the two-week window of perfect spring weather before humid summer heat would descend.

Tansy had finally sorted through all the data from the festival and compiled her report to admin. They’d hit every goal they’d set for new card registrations and on-site checkouts, and already program attendance this week was up, with several new patrons they’d met on Saturday. But all Tansy’s colleagues wanted to talk about was the mysterious, incremental facelift their shed had been receiving each night this week.

Monday morning following the festival, they’d arrived to find a new seating area with a picnic table and umbrella, two benches, and a hammock in the empty space just beyond their building, where they were sitting now. Tuesday, theweeds around the building’s perimeter had been pulled, and raised flower boxes adorned the side facing the path, little pink and purple flowers sprouting out of fresh soil. Wednesday, theirThe Little Green Librarysign that kept listing to one side since Saturday’s brief downpour was upright again, and a larger one that looked hand carved, its neat letters filled in with a darker stain, hung above the door. The single window had been freshly cleaned.

The latest eye-grabber was the pair of large pots overflowing with cheery, golden flowers on either side of the welcome mat that had turned up this morning. They looked like tiny pompoms, dancing in the morning breeze.

Tansies.

“My money’s on the goldendoodle,” Irma said.

“Couldn’t have been Ian,” Kai said from the hammock and then quickly snapped their mouth shut.

“And why is that?” Marianne asked in a singsong voice.

Kai rolled their eyes. “Ian was with me two nights this week, and he would have mentioned if he’d done this.”

“Oo-ooh,” Marianne sang. She shrieked as a chunk of Kai’s coffee cake sailed just past her face.

“It was obviously Jack,” Kai said.

“Jack?” Irma exclaimed. “Why? How?”

“Those flowers are tansies,” Kai said simply, nodding to the doorstep.