A steamy firefighter romance featuring a quiet, methodical mountain man who fights fires with the same precision he uses to order birthday flowers, a florist who tends living things because people keep leaving, and a fire station bay where turnout gear hits the floor and everything she thought she knew about being careful goes with it.
She was tending a customer. He was tending something he’d never been allowed to need.
LAURELLE A man I’d seen a hundred times through my shop window walked in on a Tuesday with a printed order form and handwriting so neat it looked like a blueprint.
He needed birthday flowers for his mother. He wrote “nice” under arrangement style.
He didn’t know a single flower name, and when I asked what his mom liked, he told me everything she touches grows, and said it like it was nothing. He told me nobody else was sending flowers.
His sisters would call. But Dean was the one standing in my shop because love without action isn’t enough for him. He walked out.
Ten minutes later he was putting out an electrical fire on Prospect Street with a fire extinguisher, calm as a man checking valves, and I was standing on the sidewalk holding garden shears I didn’t remember grabbing.
He came back the next morning with two coffees. One black, one with honey. He’d asked Lea how I take mine before he ever crossed the courtyard to my door. He kept coming back.
Follow-up questions about the arrangement. Whether zinnias and stock could go together. Every question had an answer he could have gotten in a text, and he showed up in person every time.
I taught him flower names and he repeated them under his breath. I told him about my grandmother’s shop in Raleigh and he said “She knows” twice and meant it both times.
He moved my delivery boxes inside without being asked. He brought me a lemon scone. He checked the courtyard drain before a rainstorm I didn’t know was coming.
Saturday morning I brought wildflowers to the fire station kitchen table. He was running a ladder drill alone in the bay. Turnout pants, station tee, suspenders.
He came down the ladder one rung at a time and looked at me like I’d walked into his life holding the one thing nobody had ever thought to offer him.
Nobody takes care of the man who takes care of everyone. I didn’t know that when I walked in with purple wildflowers. I knew it by the time the bay doors were coming down.
Click Read Now or Buy Now to fall for the quiet mountain man firefighter who showed up at a florist’s door with nothing in his hands because devotion doesn’t need a task.
One flower order, one fire, and one station kitchen table turn a Tuesday afternoon into the steadiest love story Copper Peak has ever seen.
