Only in Your Dreams (The Mountains are Calling #2)

3. Finley

Unlikely Places is my happy place. A little spot I carved out for myself and my flowers. I’ve spent the last four years turning this tiny rental space into my oasis. I painted the walls four times on various Sundays, the day the shop is closed, before finally settling on a warm, muted green for the walls. It smells like soil and the wildflower fields at Misty Grove, the orchard on the edge of town, in spring. It feels like being out in nature, like the flowers are growing up out of the ground, surrounded by hills and trees, instead of clipped and waiting in vases.

Last year, I invested in a graphic designer to update my logos and had Wren’s cousin, Hazel, paint a wildflower mural on the wall behind the counter when she was in town visiting from Nashville.

One day, I pulled out a calculator and a calendar figured out that I’ve spent more time in this shop than I have at my apartment upstairs over the last four years. I’ve given it my everything, knowing it’s the only thing I will always be enough for. Boyfriends, even friends, will come and go, but I’ve poured my sweat, tears, and, on several occasions, blood into this shop, making it mine . It’s my safe place, where I rode out all my overwhelming feelings after the breakup. It’s where I always want to be, no matter how I’m feeling, because I know it will make me feel better.

I can’t imagine finding a more lovely place to spend my days. It always smells good, and there’s always color, even when the weather is gloomy. And on days like today, when the sun is shining through the windows, illuminating the entire space, it makes everything feel even brighter. Incandescent and sparkling.

I should have known that a day as perfect as today, a moment as lovely as this one, would have to be broken up by something.

Or rather, someone.

I’m reading a deliciously romantic scene in my book club pick when the bell above the door to the shop chimes. I look up, expecting to see a customer, but my heart stops dead in my chest when I look into the eyes of none other than Gus Zimmerman. My ex.

The smile he gives me is strained, like he’s trying to appear casual, but even he can’t pretend we left things on a good note. Actually, from his perspective, we probably did. When we sat down in Smokey the Beans seven months ago, he delivered our breakup speech in an entirely logical way. Like we hadn’t been together for almost two years. He laid everything out. How he knew I wanted more from him than he was willing to give and it wasn’t fair to either of us to keep going. I swear he thought he was doing me a favor . He was so rational, almost analytical about the entire relationship, that I wondered if I’d made up everything in my head. Maybe I had. Maybe I’d been so delusionally in love, had romanticized everything as I tend to do, that I hadn’t noticed I was so much more emotionally invested than he was. Maybe I wanted it so much that I saw things that weren’t there, and I didn’t see things that were .

I don’t think he knew my heart was shattered when he left me at that table in Smokey the Beans. That all my dreams of white picket fences and Saturday morning pancakes with little hands covered in batter had evaporated like morning dew when he told me we were over.

I don’t think he knew at all, because he was fine. It was like we’d never even happened, or like we’d been casual, nonexclusive. I’d wondered that too, when he started dating Eloise Walker, June’s kindergarten teacher, a month later. But Myra and Melissa told me they hadn’t even met until after the breakup. That they’d seen her drop her bags coming out of the grocery store and watched as Gus rushed to help her, like a scene in a rom-com movie that, under normal circumstances, I would have devoured.

Except that this wasn’t a rom-com movie, and it was my ex-boyfriend moving on with someone else while I was still in the Ben and Jerry’s and sweatpants stage of our breakup.

So I’ve done my best to avoid both of them since then, which is a feat, considering the size of our town, but somehow, I’ve managed.

I can’t avoid him now, though. Not while he’s standing here in the middle of my shop, staring at me with those soft brown eyes of his, the ones that always made me melt, and his blond hair slicked back to perfection. If he’s here to buy flowers for Eloise, I’m going to lose my mind.

“Hey, Finley,” he says, that dazzling smile lifting the corners of his lips. He’s always been just shy of too pretty, a category most of the men in our sleepy mountain town don’t fit into. Maybe that’s what drew me to him, that he isn’t a rugged country boy like everyone else. That he’s polished and stylish and different. That he wears cologne with names I can’t pronounce and used to order bottles of expensive red wine at dinner that I thought tasted like the boxed wine Nora and I occasionally buy from the grocery store. Gus Zimmerman is everything I’ve never been, and that caught my attention.

Now I sometimes wonder if, in time, that would have driven a wedge between us. If he would have been okay with little handprint ornaments on the Christmas tree and mismatched sheets on the bed. If all the ways my life is full of chaos and color and family would have clashed with his.

I wonder if he’s willing to compromise with Eloise, if it was just me that wasn’t enough to inspire change.

I wonder if he loves her in a way he couldn’t love me.

“Hi, Gus,” I say, pleased that my voice comes out stronger than I feel, which is to say, like a little girl cowering in a storm shelter during a tornado while everything is spinning and being torn apart around her.

He palms the back of his neck, moving from foot to foot, and for the first time I notice that he’s not completely put together. That he forgot to button the top button on his shirt, and he hasn’t stopped moving since coming into the shop, tapping his fingers on his thigh and his foot on the hardwoods.

He seems nervous, and for one second, I think he’s here to apologize, to tell me he made a mistake seven months ago.

Until he says, “I’m engaged.”

The tornado in my head stops, skids right to a halt, as if it, too, is as surprised as I am.

“You—what?” I manage to choke out. My hands grip the counter, tight enough to cramp under the pressure, my knuckles turning white.

Gus stands straighter, holding my gaze. “I proposed to Eloise last night.” His eyes seem to soften then, the corners of his lips tugging up as if by some invisible force called love and happiness . I, on the other hand, feel like my insides are burning. “And she said yes.”

I blink, unsure of how to respond. Unsure of why in the actual hell he felt the need to come here and rub this in my face. I know I was wrong about us, but I didn’t think he was cruel .

“Congrats,” I finally choke out, and he seems to remember himself, dragging his mind out of whatever sappy place it had drifted off to.

He moves closer to the counter. I want to ask him not to, to tell him to just leave, but I can’t make myself. “I just wanted to be the one to tell you,” he says. “I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else and be blindsided.”

My jaw pops from the force of grinding my teeth together. I know he thinks what he’s doing is kind, but I’d rather suffer through having my bikini line tweezed than listen to my ex-boyfriend talk about the love of his life—his new fiancée , after telling me seven months ago that he’s just not the settling down kind.

What he really meant is that he’s not the settling down kind with me .

“Thank you,” I say, trying not to gag on the words. I want to cause a scene. I want to yell and scream and ask him why I wasn’t enough. But I know that won’t get me anywhere. That I’ll still be the one who’s single and alone, and the scab that’s healed over my breakup wound will be ripped open again.

Relief coasts across his features. His shoulders slump, and the tightness around his mouth disappears into that soft smile again. I am dying inside.

“I’m so glad you’re not upset,” Gus says. “I know the breakup was…emotional.”

It’s that comment that makes me feel desperate, that makes me say, without thinking, “No, I’ve moved on.”

What stabs me in the chest is that he looks happy for me, like when you’re so in love that you just want everyone around you to feel the same way. There’s not an ounce of jealousy or a quick flash of hurt. He just looks so damn relieved and excited, and now I feel like my heart is crumbling to dust inside me.

The bell above the door jangles again, giving me a welcome distraction from the pain Gus unknowingly just caused. When I look from his excited face to the door, surprise filters through me.

Grey, of all people, stands there. He looks concerned, his brow pinched and his shoulders tense. Worry surges up inside me. Something is wrong.

Grey’s eyes snap from me to Gus, and I can see the moment his concern switches to cold anger. It radiates off him in startling waves.

“Is it him?” Gus asks, drawing my attention away from the force of nature that just stepped into my shop.

It takes a moment for his question to register, and when it does, I still don’t understand. “What?”

Gus looks between Grey and me, somehow unaware of the tense way Grey is watching him, jaw tight enough to crush a molar.

“Is it Grey?” he clarifies. “The person you’re with?”

The question leaves me even more confused. I have to rack my brain to understand it. And then it clicks. I said I’d moved on. I meant emotionally. That I’m no longer affected by him, which was obviously a lie. But he thought I meant I’d moved on with someone new. Or rather, someone old. Like my old friend Grey, who has been an honorary part of our family since my brother brought him home for dinner over fifteen years ago.

Grey is watching me, seeming to puzzle things out alongside me. Searing blue eyes hold my own, and I see the second he understands Gus’ question, even if he doesn’t know the full context. I wait for him to deny it, but he stays quiet, his gaze settled on me as if waiting to see what I will do.

I can’t believe Grey Sutton, the playboy of Fontana Ridge, isn’t jumping to correct Gus about his relationship status. To say there’s no way in hell he would be dating his best friend’s little sister. But despite everything, all the time we spend bickering and being snarky with each other, I know Grey always has my back.

He’s also the only one who knows exactly how wrecked I was after the breakup, the one who held my hair and told me everything was going to be okay while I drunkenly cried about the way all my dreams were scattering like shrapnel.

Which is why I know he’ll go along with this if I go through with it.

Still holding Grey’s gaze, I slowly, giving him all the time in the world to contradict me, say, “Yes, I’m with Grey.”

I’m startled away from the way he’s looking at me when Gus clears his throat, the sound echoing through the shop. When I look at him, his grin has been replaced with something unreadable.

“Well, good,” he says, although it sounds stilted. His hand finds the back of his neck, and he seems to shake off whatever came over him, the smile returning to his face. “You’ll have to come to the wedding.”

Everything inside me comes to a screeching halt. Grey’s gaze finally releases mine, swinging to focus on Gus.

“The wedding?” Grey asks, his voice sounding even more husky and deep in contrast with Gus’s low timbre. Pale blue eyes narrow, a line forming between his brows as he watches Gus with an unnerving intensity.

Gus, always oblivious, smiles once more, not sensing the tension rolling off Grey. “In a month. Eloise wants to move closer to her family in California. She was offered a kindergarten position in her hometown, and I can work from anywhere.” He shrugs, as if he never considered another option but following her, as if uprooting his life wasn’t even a question. “We wanted to have a wedding here, and then we will have a reception in a few months with her family and friends.”

Grey raises an eyebrow. “Two weddings, huh?”

Gus is so blissfully in love that he doesn’t even notice Grey’s snark, but I can’t miss it. I’ve been on the receiving end of it too many times to count. But this seems colder, more pointed, than anything he’s ever directed at me.

“Two weddings,” Gus confirms. Then he looks to me, face open and inviting, no trace of whatever weirdness was there when Grey walked in. “So you’ll come to the wedding here? August fifteenth.”

Just a little over a month away. Everything inside me screams no , that I won’t be okay watching my ex marry the love of his life five weeks from now. I open my mouth to say it, but Grey cuts me off. He walks across the shop, his long legs eating up the distance between us in four steps.

His clean scent envelops me the second he slings his arm over my shoulder and tugs into him in a way that feels effortlessly intimate. His lips are in my hair, pressing to my temple a second before he says to Gus, “We’ll be there.”