Page 4 of Coming for Her Brother’s Best Friend (Coming For Christmas #4)

SIDNEY

I woke warm and confused.

Light angled across a timbered ceiling I didn’t recognize, the thin winter sun turning the knots in the beams the color of honey.

For a second I couldn’t place the smell—smoke and pine and something faintly like cedar—and then the bed shifted as I breathed in, and last night clicked into place…

the burst pipe, the soaked room, the night manager’s panic, and Hayes saying, in that flat, steady way that left no room to argue, She can stay in my suite.

I was in his bed. He was on the couch. My dignity was somewhere in the sliver of space between us.

My phone buzzed and vibrated across the nightstand, reminding me of how much I needed to get done.

There was a text from the florist, a question from the bakery, and a string of smiley emojis from Harper.

Harper: One day closer!! You’re magic!!

I slid out from under the covers and pulled my hair into a quick twist. Hayes stretched out on the couch with one arm over his eyes, his feet hanging over the edge, and a blanket covering him from the waist down.

His chest was bare, and I took a second to stare at the outline of his pecs and ridges of a six-pack that trailed down to…

The floor creaked. His arm dropped, and he looked up at me through thick lashes, his blue eyes clear.

That readiness, the ability to instantly wake like he was prepared for anything, was like a tool he didn’t put down just because he wasn’t on a job anymore.

It shouldn’t have made my chest feel steadier, but it did.

“Thanks for last night,” I said. “I’ll get out of your hair.”

“I’m not in a rush.” He pushed up to sit. “You need coffee.”

“I need to clone myself ten times, but coffee might help.”

“I’ll go with you.” The firmness in his tone said he wasn’t giving me a choice.

Ten minutes later, we were crossing the lobby.

I had a large cup of coffee in my hand and was back on duty: assigning tasks to the banquet captains, confirming the lighting focus, and drafting a revised schedule while I walked.

The lodge’s public face ran on charm and soft lighting while the back of house ran on lists. Lists were how I breathed.

Hayes left me in the ballroom with a promise not to bother me again. Based on how many times he’d stopped by the day before, I doubted he’d keep it. But having him around was too distracting, especially now that I knew what he looked like unguarded and vulnerable while he slept.

At ten-thirty a murmur moved through the staff corridor, and one of the younger employees skidded to a stop in the ballroom doorway. “Ms. Kincaid? Flowers are here.”

“Great.” I clipped my pen to my clipboard and headed toward the loading dock. The florist out of Silver Creek had been a dream to work with, and I couldn’t wait to see the final arrangements she’d put together.

When I reached the loading dock, my stomach twisted around like a tornado had started to swirl around inside me. Boxes sat open, revealing white roses that had turned to gray. Table centerpieces collapsed in on themselves. Hydrangeas melted to gray-green mush.

All the air got sucked out of my lungs, making it almost impossible to speak. “What happened?”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Kincaid. Evidently, the flowers were delivered late yesterday afternoon, and someone on my staff left them sitting in the dock area.” The events manager I’d been working with at the hotel fingered a frozen rose petal. “We just realized the mistake.”

I nodded, my mind already working on a fix. The flowers were useless now. Everything from the bride’s bouquet to the flower petals that were supposed to scatter over the tables at the reception was ruined.

“We can fix this,” I said to the events manager. “I need the phone number of every florist, wholesaler, and greenhouse within an hour’s drive, please. Now.”

I already had a shop in Kalispell on the line. “Can I get two hundred winter white roses and clean greenery—ruscus, eucalyptus, spruce tips if the cast is blue? No yellow.”

“We can do maybe seventy-five roses,” the woman on the other end said. “With the holidays, everyone’s cleaned out.”

“Hold those for me, please,” I said. “I’ll call back with payment.”

The next shop said the same. A greenhouse on the edge of town said they’d call me back. Another wholesaler had a handful of stems but not enough to make the drive worthwhile. The numbers didn’t add up. There were too many miles, not enough hours, and a million other things that needed my attention.

“I’ll go with you,” Hayes said, like he’d been standing around long enough to know everything was about to fall down around me.

“I can’t leave,” I said. “I’ve got crews setting tables and a lighting team needing direction and?—”

“Write the list,” he said. “We’ll go now. You can boss everyone around from the passenger seat.”

“I need to be here.”

“You need to make sure the flowers are right.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “You can hand off the ballroom for a few hours. You know you can.”

He was right, and I hated that he was right because it made the decision obvious.

I turned to the banquet captain and gave her the stripped-down plan.

She could get enough done while I was gone that I wouldn’t be drowning in details when I got back.

The flowers were important. I needed to make sure they were done the right way.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We took his truck. The tires chewed through the iced ruts at the lodge entrance and eased onto the highway.

“Sorry you got drafted,” I said at last, my eyes on the road. “This isn’t in your groomsman job description.”

“I’m glad to have something to do that I’m good at.”

“Driving?”

“Getting things from point A to point B in bad conditions.”

That shut me up for a mile. The heater whirred.

Sun flashed off the hood and stung my eyes.

I adjusted the vent and forced my shoulders to unclench one knot at a time.

The road narrowed to two lanes with ditches on either side waiting to swallow us whole.

A truck ahead of us fishtailed, corrected, then fishtailed again before the tires found road.

I exhaled long and slow. I’d been holding air in my lungs like I could keep us on the road by sheer force of will.

“You always try to carry everything yourself, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. Honesty was faster than deflection, and I didn’t have time for games. “Not because I want to. Because if I drop something, it might break.”

He glanced over, not long, just enough to say he’d heard me. “Sometimes you need to hand it over to someone who won’t drop it.”

If only it could be that easy. “And sometimes you don’t have that someone.”

“Today you do.”

I didn’t answer, but the truth sat between us like an extra passenger the whole way into town.

Kalispell showed up all at once in a sprawl of low, flat buildings, roofs patched with old snow.

We hit the greenhouse first because it closed the earliest. The parking lot was a sheet of hard-packed ice.

Hayes parked at an angle that only made sense to someone who understood traction like a second language.

Inside, it was warm and damp and quiet enough to hear the drip of condensation from the rafters.

The woman at the counter had dirt under her nails and a pencil tucked behind her ear.

When I said “wedding,” her mouth twitched the way people’s do when they’re about to say, “ oh, honey” and decide they like you too much to say it out loud.

“We can do ruscus and eucalyptus,” she said, ticking items off with the side of her pencil. “Spruce tips if you want that winter look. The roses you’ll have to get at the wholesaler.”

“We’ll take what you have,” I said. “Blue-leaning on the spruce if you can.”

We loaded the truck. The air outside knifed inside our open coats and turned our breath into frost. The local florist was next.

“I need winter white roses,” I said when it was my turn at the counter. “As many as you can spare. And anything textural and white that isn’t yellow.”

“For roses, I can give you seventy-five. Maybe eighty if you don’t mind them tight.”

“Tight is fine,” I said.

In the parking lot we loaded again, boxes fitting together like a puzzle, and the puzzle locked into place with a thunk. The light had flattened to dull pewter, and a fine grain of snow drifted in out of nowhere, clinging to the edge of Hayes’s jaw and melting down into the collar of his coat.

We drove in a quiet that didn’t feel hostile. He adjusted the heat toward my side without comment. I pushed my sleeves up to my wrists and made notes, reworking the ceremony pillars in my head with the exact quantities we’d managed to scavenge.

“Have you ever thought about doing something else?” Hayes asked after a while. “Something with fewer emergencies?”

“This isn’t an emergency,” I said, and heard how defensive I sounded. “It’s a problem. Problems I can fix. Emergencies take time away from the fixing.”

He huffed, not quite a laugh. “Stetson always said you ran the ranch like a small country.”

“Someone had to.” Hearing my brother’s name was like putting up a tall wall between us. “And also, he exaggerated.”

Hayes didn’t respond, just navigated the truck along the snow-covered highway.

A pickup in the oncoming lane hit a drift and threw up a wave of white that covered the windshield.

Hayes didn’t flinch. The wipers swept once, and the road reappeared.

He kept his hands low on the wheel, one finger barely moving, making small corrections that kept us where the tires wanted to be.

We made the last stop at a small shop that looked like it had been built from two garages and a dream. It had exactly twenty-five decent roses, a handful of cream spray roses, and a clerk who apologized like she’d failed me personally.

The drive back to the resort was slow going.

Finally, the lodge came into view at four on the dot, the roof cut clean against the darkening sky.

By the time we backed up to the service door, a bellman had a dolly ready and two banquet servers were waiting with buckets of water.

I didn’t have to ask; someone had made a call while we were on the road.

The sight of those buckets made my throat go tight.

We moved fast. Hayes cut twine. I triaged stems. The roses were in better shape than I’d hoped, and the greenery was perfect.

I started with bouquets, wiring ruscus into loose spirals and tucking in roses until the shape felt right. My chest loosened like a knot coming undone.

“That’s it,” Hayes said, sounding almost relieved.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s it.”

We knocked out centerpieces next, falling into a rhythm without needing many words. By the time the last box was broken down and the boutonnieres set aside for refrigeration, the ballroom glowed with candlelight and the scent of roses and pine.

When I looked up, Hayes had a smear of green on his wrist and a nick on one knuckle.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I will be,” I admitted. “Thanks.”

He just tipped his chin, then handed me half a protein bar. We ate standing by the service door, watching the room settle into the promise I’d made Harper: gold and white, warm enough to forget the storm outside.

Tomorrow the wedding party would arrive. Tomorrow it would all get loud. But for tonight, I had something rare—margin.