Page 56 of Where the Roses Bloom

I took her hand. We started back down the path in silence, the world around us still quiet, but not heavy anymore. It felt like a beginning.

And maybe it was.

CHAPTER 19

Willow

The bathwater had already gonelukewarm, but neither of us moved to get out.

We were curled together in the old clawfoot tub upstairs, my back pressed to Rhett’s chest, his arms wrapped around my middle. Candles flickered on every windowsill, every ledge. The storm had passed, but the wind still whispered outside.

I’d been quiet since the grove—not because I had nothing to say, but because I didn’t have the right words yet. I kept turning the memory over in my mind, trying to figure out what it all meant.

Magic. Love. Madness. Maybe all three.

Rhett’s thumb moved in slow circles just under my ribs, lips trailing a lazy line along my neck, up and down. My old life felt far away…like I was meant to come here from the beginning, like all those wasted years with Carter were just a dream.

“You good?” Rhett asked, voice a low rasp against my skin.

I nodded, turning my face back toward him. “I feel like we did something bigger than us.”

“We did,” he said.

There was no hesitation, just…certainty. As if he’d known all along that this was where we’d been headed.

I turned deeper in his arms, facing him, my eyes tracing the shape of his face. Rhett Ward…I didn’t even know how old he was, not exactly. Mid-thirties, maybe, forty? The oldest of five brothers, and his parents had died twenty years ago…so yeah, thirty-five, maybe. Prematurely grey.

I was still working out the most basic facts about him, but he felt more like home than anyone I’d ever met.

I ran my fingers through the damp salt-and-pepper curls at his temple, watching the way his lashes fluttered at the touch, the way dimples appeared even beneath his beard when he smiled. He let me look at him, let me see him.

“You don’t feel like a stranger,” I murmured. “Even though we barely know each other.”

He reached up and tucked a piece of wet hair behind my ear. “That’s ‘cause we do.”

“How do you mean?”

“We know each other,” he said. “I mean—whatever this is between us…it started a long time ago. Feels like we just caught up to it.”

I laughed softly. “And you said you weren’t superstitious.”

“Pretty sure we just did sex magic out in a haunted forest,” he chuckled. “Don’t got much choice but to be superstitious after that.”

The candles flickered with the draft, golden light dancing over his collarbone, the line of his jaw. I traced a finger down his chest, finding little childhood scars, a constellation of barely-visible freckles, threads of silver in his dark chest hair.

“You think it worked?” I asked.

“You mean the spell?”

I nodded.

Rhett hesitated, then said, “I think somethin’ shifted. That knot in my chest I’ve been carrying my whole life…? It’s gone. Don’t mean I’m not scared, but I don’t feel cursed. Not anymore.”

I exhaled and rested my head against his shoulder. The bathwater sloshed gently as we settled deeper together, skin to skin, breath to breath.

“I want a life with you, Rhett,” I said. “I don’t want to just…break the curse and run. I want enchanted gardens and homemade breakfasts and squeaky floors. I want to stay.”

He stilled for a beat. Then I felt the slow, heavy press of his lips to the top of my head, his hand traveling down my belly, between my legs.