Page 7 of Where the Roses Bloom

Rhett didn’t talk much as we pulled back onto the road, and I was grateful for that. I didn’t think I could handle small talk, not yet. Not with my brain still mush from crying and sleeping in the fetal position and then waking up to find a gorgeous man standing outside my window offering me coffee. I kept my hands wrapped around the mostly empty cup he’d given me, fingers tight on the porcelain like I was still bracing for something to go wrong.

Maybe it already had…but it felt like things were going perfectly right.

The trees blurred past in soft greens and golds. Every once in a while, the branches arched overhead like a cathedral, and I found myself exhaling without meaning to. This place…Rhett wasn’t the only thing that felt good. The land felt good. The air, the sky, the trees.

The fairies, maybe.

I took the opportunity to look over at him, getting a better peek. He was…damn, he was hot. Like hot hot.Sohot. Rugged features, green eyes, thick, dark hair and a matching beard with a silver streak through his waves. He was wearing a white t-shirt that left absolutely nothing up to the imagination, every line of muscle clear and defined.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Rhett said without taking his eyes off the road.

I almost choked on the coffee I’d just sipped. “What?”

“The land,” he said. “The trees. Mornings here…the light hits just right.”

I smiled. “Yeah…it doesn’t look real.”

“It’s real,” he said. “Just old. The land here remembers things.”

“Yeah…you said something like that earlier too,” I mumbled. “Fairies or something?”

He chuckled, his voice low in his throat. God…I’d never seen someone who looked like that; I didn’t even think they existed. And his voice made it a million times better.

“Just something my grandma used to say,” he said. “She was a bit of a local legend. People thought she was a witch.”

I smiled. “Yeah…people used to say that about me, too.”

“Oh really?”

I shrugged. “I’ve always had an interest in that kind of stuff? Got my nursing degree, but I decided to become a doula rather than getting a job at a hospital.”

“A what now?”

“A doula,” I laughed. “For home births and birth coaching. I work with moms. Or…I did, I guess.”

He frowned, clearly picking up on the fact that there was more to my response than I was letting on. “And now?”

I hummed. “Not sure.”

We pulled into town a few minutes later, just a few weathered buildings gathered around a narrow road, their signs faded and edges softened by sun and rain. Nothing fancy. No boutiques, no souvenir shops. It was the kind of place most people would drive through without slowing down.

But something about it made me sit up straighter.

The stoplight in the center of town blinked red into empty air, a few weathered cars and trucks driving through every so often. A hand-painted sign stood at the edge of the square, the teal letters barely legible beneath a curl of creeping vine:

WILLOW GROVE — EST. 1834.

WHERE THE ROOTS RUN DEEP.

There was a row of well-kept shops on either side of the street, even a bookstore with a full Pride display in the front window. A coffee shop…an antique store. I could see the steeple of a church on the far end of the street, but I didn’t think it was open.

It was too charming to be this quiet.

No traffic. No chatter. No out-of-towners with cameras or iced lattes. Just a stillness that settled under the skin, not unfriendly—just…watching.

“Pretty small town, as you can see. That’s the library,” Rhett said, motioning toward a white clapboard building with ivy wound tight around the porch rail. “We’ve got the bakery, the bookstore, my brother’s shop is just a quick way’s down…and over there is Mabel’s.”

The diner had wide windows, a crooked sign, and two rocking chairs that moved a little in the breeze. I couldn’t smell food yet, but I knew I would. It had the kind of front door that probably jingled when it opened, the kind of counter where regulars sat with the same mug every morning.