Sweetheart Reunion

Alma’s shock caused her to gasp. “Mine? You were never mine. And I’ll never be yours. You might have considered that before you decided to launch an attack on me.”

“I’m not attacking, darlin’,” he said on a sultry whisper. “I’m wooing. Yes, that’s what I’m doing. I want to make you mine.”

“Well, good luck with that.” She pulled away and started toward the café, her heartbeat pounding right along with her espadrilles.

She refused to even hope that Julien LeBlanc might actually be serious. How many times had she seen him sweet-talking other women? Too many to count. She might have fallen for that ploy in high school, but she was a grown woman now.

And she had two very good reasons to keep her distance from Julien. One, he’d broken her heart. And two, she carried a high risk of getting a disease that could kill her the way it had killed her mother and destroyed her sister’s life. Breast cancer wasn’t pretty. The odds didn’t look good. And the odds of Julien being able to deal with breast cancer didn’t look good either.

“Stop this nonsense,” she said, even while, in her battered heart, hope bloomed as brightly as Callie’s flowers.

“I’m just getting started, Alma,” Julien called after her.

“I mean it.”

Alma kept on walking. But her heart shouted loud and clear in its bumpy little chamber. And its plea echoed inside her head until she’d made it into the café and shut the door.

Prove it, Julien. Please prove it.

Chapter Four

He set out to prove himself to Alma.

He began with flowers, straight from her sister’s sweet nursery. The Blanchard girls loved flowers.

“What do you suggest?” Julien asked Callie two days later, after he’d tried talking to Alma.

Too busy to talk, that one.

But not too busy to stop and smell the roses.

“For Alma?” Callie shot him a level look, as if she might be comparing him to a bug on a leaf. “Why? Did somebody die? Or did you make her mad again?”

“She’s always mad and no, nobody died. I just want to send her some flowers is all.”

Callie smiled, but her sparkling eyes held a hint of doubt. “Hmm. She’ll be even madder now—mostly with me if I sell you an arrangement.”

“Do you want my business or not?” Julien asked, figuring like everyone around here, Callie couldn’t afford to turn him away.

“I do need business. It’s a slow morning.” She shook her head when he touched a finger to some fat red roses. “You don’t want to send her those. Too predictable for my sister.”

Frustration singed through him. “Then what do I need to send?”

“She has a thing for Louisiana irises. Alma likes things that just kind of spring up.” The look Callie gave him indicated he might be the exception to that.

“Then irises it is,” Julien replied, thinking, in spite of Callie’s questioning look, that he could spring up right along with the plants.

“I have a pretty one just about to bud in a nice pot,” Callie said. “She can put it on the front porch for now and then plant it later, maybe in Grand-mère’s backyard.”

“Why does she live in that old cottage anyway?” Julien asked, wondering why Alma didn’t live with their father in the big house on the edge of town where she’d grown up. The tiny little house tipped toward the bayou was quaint and pretty but a bit run-down and old.

Callie gave him another scrutinizing look then shrugged. “It’s near the restaurant and it keeps her close to our grandmother. Alma and Grand-mère were close. We are all close.”

She went to the rear of the big open floral shop and brought back a brightly painted pot holding one fat bulb with rich green shoots poking out of the moist, dark dirt. “Besides, why do you care all of a sudden?”

The Blanchard sisters were direct and they stuck together like a flock of geese. Could get just as mad as a fighting goose, too. He’d need to remember that.

“I don’t know,” he said, opting for honesty. Because even though his heart was tugging toward Alma and all that entailed, he wasn’t so sure of himself regarding how to go about achieving that particular goal. This turnaround was recent and still a bit shaky. He was still adrift but trying to find his way. “I guess…I just think it’s time.”

“Well, amen to that,” Callie said, giving him a card to go with the iris. “Do you want to write something? And are you going to deliver this, or should I?”

“I want you to deliver it,” he said, squinting while he tried to recall a verse. “I want her to be surprised. I’ll check in with her later.”

“This might get interesting,” Callie said. Then she leaned across the counter. “Just don’t hurt her, Julien. That wouldn’t be good.”

She gave him a lift of her arched brows to back up that statement.

“I don’t plan on hurting her. Not anymore.”

He paid Callie and stood there, staring at the little square of creamy paper, while Callie waited on another customer.

Then he grinned and wrote what he wanted to say. In big, bold, black letters.

* * *

“Je voudrais sortir avec toi.”

The card read “I would like to go out with you.”

Alma said it out loud again in French, the words playing a pretty tune off her tongue.

She stared at the single iris, knowing it would bloom a beautiful violet-blue one day.

Winnie came to stand beside her and both women stared at the blue and green-colored pot sitting on the counter.

Winnie read the card. “He wants to take you out on a date.”

“I get that,” Alma said, shaking her head. “What are we, fifteen again?”

“Maybe he wants things to be the way they were when you were fifteen.”

“Things can never be that way again,” Alma said, her eyes still on the bulb. The tender shoots of green were piercing the earth, breaking through to grow and form a beautiful flower.

One of her favorites. Maybe because she’d had to do the same, pierce through and grow up. Too quickly. Maybe she was just a late bloomer in the love department.

Or maybe she was too afraid to let go and go out on a real date with Julien. If she did that, she’d be crossing a line they’d long ago drawn in the sand. She’d always been caught between her feelings for Julien and her need to spread her wings and fly out of the nest. Her former feelings for Julien, she thought, correcting herself. And, maybe, her former need to fly away. Her life had become so routine, Alma wasn’t sure she could change it now.

But flowers. And not just any flowers. A bulb that, once planted, would take root and spread across her garden to bloom for years to come. Was Julien sending her a message?