Pride and Papercuts (The Austens #5) - Staci Hart Page 0,64

her before our family dinner, and the date couldn’t have come at a better time.

Bleecker was bustling with weekend foot traffic, and when I reached our flower shop, I found it full. I was sure the window displays had something to do with it—Tess and Luke, the masterminds behind that facet of our shop. This week featured giant suspended butterflies made of tan pampas grass. Flowers of gold and amber dotted the wings in identical patterns, poised mid-flight. They managed to look both fresh and fallish, positioned over a hanging flower box built in the shape of a script font spelling the word autumn in one window and harvest in the other.

My first smile of the day brushed my lips at the sight, and when I pulled open the turquoise door of Longbourne to the sound of the ancient, tinkling bell, that smile bloomed in full.

A jazzy, ’40s tune played over the speakers of the white-walled space, and patrons milled around the tables, weaving in and out of displays of market bouquets. One of the walls had been stocked with single stems in what felt like every color, organized in a gradient of the spectrum, the greenery stocked below.

This was home.

Pride rose in me like creeping ivy, threading through my ribs. Generations of Bennet women had run this store, our family name so vital, not one had taken her husband’s name. In fact, Dad had taken Mom’s when they got married, which had pleased my grandmother to no end. But where the Bennet women had historically grown the shop and our standing in the community, my dear, darling mother didn’t acquire the business gene. She was a genius with bouquets but a self-proclaimed ninny when it came to business, and after years of mismanagement and terrible business advice, Longbourne almost hadn’t survived. But we were nothing if not tenacious—a trait that had both helped and hurt us in life and love.

Currently, we were in better shape than we had been in decades, thanks to my siblings.

I hadn’t done much, just designed the new logo and materials, kick-started social media, gotten a few campaigns running. It was the rest of them who did the work. Luke and Tess handled the store aesthetic, imagining and building and constantly rearranging things to make use of things he’d built. Kash managed the greenhouse with Dad, as he always had, but he’d developed a few new strains of flowers that became a sought-after element in our bouquets. Plus, most of our event business came from Lila, his wife, who threw parties for the richest and most famous names in Manhattan. Marcus untangled the mess that was the store’s finances and put us on a track to recover from the debt Mom had inadvertently racked up over the years. And Jett had run the day-to-day of the store itself, his experience in retail helping him in streamlining the whole operation.

We’d even all moved back home, and as annoying as it was to have my brothers teasing me and my mother with her nose firmly in my business—that business, she excelled at—I now longed for those days. Those months were the last time we had all been there together, just us, before significant others and the subsequent scattering of our locations. That fleeting time brought with it the safety that I’d felt as a child, the house and the noise and the mess the most comforting place I’d ever known.

I’d been so eager to leave, I didn’t enjoy it when I had it.

I wished desperately that I had.

Ivy, who had worked here since she was in high school, waved at me from behind the register, and when I passed the counter, I saw her little girl, Olive, riding a plastic bug on wheels back and forth in the space behind the counter. Olive’s face lit up when she saw me, and her chubby hand shot into the air. It opened and closed into a fist—her current method of waving.

I waved back.

“Want me to take her to the greenhouse?” I asked Ivy, hoping she’d say yes.

“She’s all right for now, but ask me again in five minutes. I might even let you keep her,” she joked.

“Bring her to the back if you change your mind and we’ll pick some flowers, won’t we, Olive?”

She nodded emphatically. “Fow-ers!”

“She’ll just eat them all, you know,” Ivy said as I headed back.

“That’s the best part,” I called over my shoulder. I had at least ten photos of Olive with petals hanging out