Page 14 of Falling for Him (Honey Leaf Lodge #3)
Ben
I was an idiot.
An emotionally stunted, conversation-ruining, small-talk-averse idiot.
Fifi had just been making conversation. That’s all it was. A light, easy, harmless question about my two-week stay. And I’d clammed up like she’d asked me to open a vein and diagram my childhood trauma.
It wasn’t even a personal question. It was just… interest.
Curiosity.
Small talk.
I sucked at small talk.
I kicked a stray pebble on the sidewalk hard enough to make it skitter across the street. The sun was shining, birds were chirping, and I was stomping through this picturesque town like I’d been cast in the grumpy reboot of Footloose.
She’d been trying. That was the thing. Fifi had been so open, so easy. She’d laughed and teased, and then I shut the whole thing down like flipping a switch, like I wanted her to back off.
But I didn’t. Not really.
And now she was gone.
Back to the lodge.
Back to her world of honey soaps and lemon shortbread and people who didn’t bolt the second someone asked them what they were doing for two weeks.
I let out a sigh and slowed my pace as I passed a shop window filled with vintage books and lace curtains.
I stared at the sign for the antique store a second longer than necessary. Maybe because it felt like the right kind of quiet. Or maybe because I couldn’t keep walking around this town looking like I’d just lost a duel with my own emotions.
I pushed open the door and stepped inside.
A little bell jingled overhead, and the scent of old wood and lemon polish hit me immediately.
Sunlight filtered through the dusty front windows, glinting off glassware and tarnished brass lamps.
The store was packed in a charmingly cluttered way, like everything in it had a story it was just dying to tell.
A woman near the register looked up and smiled.
She was around my age, maybe a little older, with auburn hair twisted into a bun and a linen apron tied over a floral dress.
“Morning,” she said cheerfully. “Let me know if you’re looking for anything specific.”
“Just browsing,” I said. My default answer. Safe. Easy.
She nodded, then gestured toward a shelf of old maps and framed nature prints. “We just got a few new pieces in from a local estate sale, most of them mid-century. Fifi said you might like the older stuff.”
My eyebrows lifted. “Fifi? How’d she know I’d come here?”
“There are only so many places to go here. She’s good at the hospitality stuff.
You know, it’s what she does for a living…
meets her guests’ needs.” The woman smiled again and walked over, holding out her hand.
“My name is Grace. And that,” she added, tilting her head toward the corner, “is my Grandma Millie.”
My stomach sank.
Sure enough, perched like a cat in a velvet armchair, sipping what looked like tea from a floral china cup, was Millie. She wasn’t even pretending not to watch me. Her bright blue eyes sparkled behind her glasses like she’d been waiting.
“Ah,” she said, setting her cup on a dainty saucer with the precision of a woman who knew her way around polite chaos. “The mystery man.”
Grace gave me an apologetic glance and ducked back toward the register. “Good luck,” she mouthed.
I turned back to Millie and gave her a tight, polite nod. “We’ve met.”
“Indeed, we have.” She stood, surprisingly spry, and approached with the slow, measured grace of someone who knew she was about to pounce. “I had a feeling I’d run into you again. Things like this tend to align. ”
“Right.”
She eyed me up and down, as if taking stock of both my soul and the cut of my jeans. “You were at coffee with Fifi this morning.”
“I was.”
“And you’re staying at the lodge.”
“I am.”
She tilted her head. “And you’re broody.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Broody,” she repeated, like it was an accepted medical diagnosis. “Silent. Thoughtful. Hard to crack.”
I didn’t respond. Mostly because it was, well, accurate.
Millie folded her arms, clearly not thrown by my lack of defense. “You’ve got a quiet sort of gravity. A man with weather behind his eyes.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’ve seen things,” she said, voice softening slightly. “Which is fine. We all have. But some people wear it like armor.”
I exhaled, fighting the instinct to retreat again.
“Is this part of the matchmaking algorithm?” I asked dryly. “Psychological profiling via antique store interrogation?”
Her smile was positively wicked. “Oh, honey. This is mild. You should’ve seen what I put Grace’s husband through before he proposed.”
I tried not to smile. I really did.
But Millie? Millie was something else.
Still, her gaze shifted with less mischief and more meaning.
“Fifi’s a good girl,” she said. “Too good, sometimes. She gives more than she gets. Pours herself into everyone else’s teacup and forgets to fill her own.”
My chest tightened.
“She says you’re just a guest,” Millie went on. “And maybe you are. Maybe you’ll be gone before the butter even cools on your last breakfast biscuit. But if you see her, and I mean really see her, don’t pretend you don’t .”
I met her gaze. Steady. Honest. A little raw.
“I’m not sure I know what I see yet,” I said.
“Then take the time to figure it out,” she replied. “And don’t let fear keep you from asking the questions worth answering.”
Before I could respond, Millie patted my arm once, gently and decisively, and turned back toward her tea.
She was done with me, and I felt slightly…used, but I stood there for a minute longer, surrounded by forgotten treasures and half-buried truths.
And for once, I didn’t want to run.
Not yet.
The bell over the antique store door jingled as I stepped outside.
Sunlight hit me square in the chest, warm and full and unrelenting. It had been gentle earlier, filtered through trees and clouds. But now it was high and hot, pressing down on the pavement, baking the sidewalk until the air shimmered just a little.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and stared down Main Street, although technically it was Buttercup Lane.
Buttercup Lake was coming to life. A delivery van idled near the bakery. A pair of kids zipped by on bikes, all helmets and legs. Someone hung flower baskets on a storefront awning, humming like the world had never been anything but kind.
The heat soaked into my skin, but it was the kind that did more than warm you.
It unsettled you.
Made you feel things in the places you’d worked hard to keep quiet.
No wonder Fifi looked ready to crawl out of her own skin when she saw Millie. The woman was a force, sparkle-eyed, sharp-tongued, all-knowing, and all in your business. The kind of woman who made you question everything and hand you a cookie afterward.
She wasn’t cruel, but she didn’t blink, either.
It reminded me of my profession a little too much. I’d hate to face her in the courtroom.
I got the sense Fifi had spent a lot of her life under people’s watchful eyes, trying to be three steps ahead of the next question, the next assumption, the next push toward something she wasn’t sure she wanted yet.
I got that.
I really got that.
And maybe that’s why it rattled me more than I expected.
Because standing in that antique shop, with Millie reading me like an overdue library book and gently suggesting I figure myself out before I hurt someone like Fifi…
It hit a little too close, not because I was some great mystery, but because the truth was simple.
I no longer knew what I wanted.
I thought I did.
I had a plan once. A straight line I’d followed with the precision of a man who believed goals were gospel: climb the ladder, prove yourself, get the promotion, land the clients, and earn the title.
I’d finally gotten it, too. The office with the view, the team, the salary that could cover three mortgages, and still have room for overpriced scotch.
And it felt like a joke.
Every day, I woke up and walked into that place like I’d built a kingdom just to find out I didn’t want to rule it.
I started waking up tired. Not physically. Just… hollow. Like everything I’d built didn’t have walls anymore.
And then one day, I booked a two-week stay at a lodge in the middle of nowhere.
I told myself it was to reset.
To breathe.
To think.
But it wasn’t.
It was to hide.
Hide from the voices that said I should be grateful that I should be satisfied. That I was lucky, that I’d made it, that I had everything people were supposed to want.
But what if it wasn’t what I wanted?
What if I didn’t know what I wanted at all?
I turned and started walking slowly down the sidewalk, the sun warming my back, the ache in my chest building like a pressure valve no one warned me about.
I wasn’t good at this.
The introspection. The sitting still. The feeling things.
And then there was Fifi.
The bright, whirlwind woman with wide eyes and a voice full of too many thoughts.
Who always said the thing I didn’t expect.
Who made room for other people’s feelings without even realizing it, and accidentally made me realize I still had feelings buried under all the concrete I’d poured over my emotional landscape.
She scared me.
Not because she was intense. But because she wasn’t.
Because she made me laugh when I didn’t want to.
Because she made me talk when I didn’t mean to.
Because she looked at me like I wasn’t a walking shell of bad decisions and unprocessed trauma.
And because I wanted to sit across from her at a little café and talk about nothing.
Because I wanted her to ask questions.
And I hated that I’d pulled back.
Again.
It was instinct. The way some people dodge blows. I dodged closeness and connection. It just took a hint of someone getting too near the mess I hadn’t figured out how to clean up yet, and I’d close up shop.
And now, I had no idea if she’d ever ask again.
I reached the edge of the square and stopped, watching a couple walk into the bookstore together, holding hands and smiling. A pair of teenagers zipped past them on skateboards, laughing so loud it echoed.
Life.
So loud here.
So full of color.
And I didn’t know where I fit in any of it.
But I knew I didn’t want to keep running from it.
Especially not from her.