Present Day (Unfortunately)

“Ma’am, that shit is not meant to be sniffed,” Luke barked from behind the register, his walking cane propped up against his good leg.

The customer in question was pulling a balancing act as she groped a jar filled with god-knows-what-herbs and shoved her nose in it. She didn’t appear to have heard him, or maybe she just didn’t care about store policy.

Either way, this was the most action his mother’s store, Herbal Heaven, had seen all day. And Luke would be lying through his teeth if he said he wasn’t already feeling the thread of anticipation.

“Ma’am,” he said again, using the tip of his cane against the original wood floors for a good, satisfying thump. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to put the jar down before you fall and crack your head open and I’m obligated to resuscitate you.”

The woman lowered the jar and cast him a disbelieving glance. “Don’t you have a cane?” she asked, pure snark dripping from her voice.

His day had just inched up a notch from Boringly Dull to Boringly Acceptable. A worthy adversary of trash talk—a rarity these days.

Luke retrieved his cane and brandished it like a fine weapon, before popping it on the countertop. “That I do,” he said, because it wasn’t like he could hide the cane when it was metal and glinted under the florescent light. “It’s also equipped with a secret blade.”

Not true at all, but it was totally worth it when the woman’s brows drew together. “Is this your plan to prove you have the ability to revive me?”

He pointed the cane at her. “Follow the store rules and you won’t have to find out.”

The chiming of the front door coincided with Luke’s mother bustling into the main area of the shop. Hugging an armful of small jars to her chest, Moira O’Connor drew to a sudden stop as she caught sight of the customer’s fleeing back.

Exasperated blue eyes turned to her only son. “Another one, Luke?”

“She was sniffing the herbs like she was looking to get high,” he said, bristling at the censure in his mother’s voice. Moira was the sweetest woman to ever grace the earth, but man did she know how to effectively pile on the guilt.

He figured it was the Irish blood in her.

Still, she didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure she wasn’t checking out the tea blends?” she asked, carefully unloading the jars onto the counter.

Luke wouldn’t know the difference between tea and honeysuckle and weed if he were held up at gunpoint and told to take a guess. Feeling more like a reprimanded eleven-year-old than his actual thirty-one years, he admitted, “Guess it could have been tea. I didn’t get a close look.”

Not the right thing to say.

Moira gripped one of the empty jars and mimed hauling it at his head. She’d catch him, too—his hip surgery had axed most of his mobility, and three months of physical therapy hadn’t done much in the way of boosting overall flexibility and strength.

“Luke,” reprimanded his mother, “we’ve talked about this.”

There was the guilt again. Luke shoved his free hand through his brown hair and sighed. “Sorry, Ma,” he said, the duly chagrined only son, “I’ll do better.”

“It’s not a matter of doing better,” she said softly, reaching out to put a warm hand to his cheek, “you’re desperate for human interaction.”

Luke tugged back from her motherly caress, making sure to briefly touch her hand so she didn’t take his aversion personally. He’d been that way since his first deployment and she didn’t seem to take his withdrawal to her heart.

Shifting on the chair to relieve the pressure from his aching left hip, he said, “Ma, I’m good. Promise.”

Disbelief was written all over her face. “When I asked you to help me look over the shop, I was hoping it might give you something to do. Something to occupy your time.”

Luke ground his teeth. His mom meant well—she always did—but he hated the way she made it sound like he was just biding his time until something momentous happened. Thanks to Trinket the Asshole, Luke was now sidelined and out of commission for the foreseeable future.

His physical therapy sessions weren’t progressing as they should.

His left hip was a cacophony of excruciating pain, numbness, and nuts and bolts.

And Luke had apparently left whatever social graces he’d once owned back on the base in Iraq.

Working at Herbal Heaven was his sole excursion from the small shotgun house he’d rented a month ago after the doc had given him the thumbs up.

Maybe his mom was right. He needed social interaction with people other than his mother, Amy, and the rare visit with his childhood best friend, Brady Taylor.

Luke leaned forward, lifting his butt off the chair, and wished that he’d brought some of his pain relievers to work. He’d always been an active person, playing football, baseball, and rugby throughout the years. He’d broken his nose, twice, and solidly fractured his arm during his senior year of high school.

But a splintered hip was on a different level.

“Are you okay, honey?” Moira asked, concern lining her brow.

“I’m good.” Luke was anything but good, but he’d developed the fake it till you make it mindset over a decade ago. He was too old to change his habits now. “You mind if I take off, Ma? Head home?”

The thought of sinking onto his couch with a beer, Dr. Phil on TV, and a hot towel on his hip was his current version of heaven.

Life had become a monotonous decision between Dr. Phil and Judge Judy reruns, or at least it had been since he’d returned to New Orleans to find that not a single bit of it felt like home.

Home was his platoon and his soldiers.

New Orleans was . . . the place he’d grown up, as much a stranger to him as his life post-the US Army.

Gathering his cane, Luke carefully straightened from the chair. He bussed a kiss over the top of his mom’s blonde head. “I’ll be in tomorrow morning at 0700.”

“No.”

Luke froze. “Don’t tell me I’m getting fired.”

“You won’t be so lucky as that,” Moira quipped, her blonde ringlets bouncing on either side of her face. “I need you to stay.”

“Today?”

“Yes, today. At least for one more customer.”

Luke knew better than to fight the O’Connor matriarch. As a single parent who’d raised two children on her own, Moira ruled with an iron thumb. A green thumb, if you considered her profession, but iron nonetheless.

Fact was: he didn’t need another broken hip.

And he didn’t trust his mother with those empty jars on the counter.

Leveraging his weight on the cane, Luke had nearly sat back down on the stool when Moira stilled him with a hand to his bicep.

“No more sitting,” she told him, a bright smile blooming on her face. “I want you to mingle.”

Luke mutely scanned the shop’s wooden bookcases filled with everything from tea blends to weed-impersonators to something his mom called “frankincense” but looked like a root on steroids.

Reading his doubtful expression, Moira rolled her eyes to the heavens. “Honey, don’t be a man.”

“I am a man.”

Thank God. Living with two women until the age of eighteen had shown Luke that there was no part of being a woman that enticed him.

Now being with a woman, preferably in bed—he could get down with that.

Only recently, the whole human interaction thing was proving to be Luke’s downfall. Maybe it was some form of self-pity seeping through, or maybe he’d turned a new, non-man-whore leaf, but whatever the case was . . . his interactions with women were few and far between.

Actually, they were nonexistent.

Luke grimaced.

“What I’m saying,” Moira stressed with motherly patience, “is that you need to stop being stubborn.” She waved a hand toward the narrow aisles of the shop. “Go, wander. Stop moping.”

“I’m not moping.”

“You haven’t smiled once today.”

Luke cranked a smile on his face. It felt painful, like his throbbing hip. Again, he was faced with the reality that maybe he needed to get out more.

He hated it when Moira O’Connor was right.

The door announced a new customer with a squeak of the hinges and the chime of the overhead bell.

Moira turned to him, excitement brimming in her blue eyes. “Go,” she whispered.

“Right now?”

“Yes, right now. What do I pay you for?”

“You don’t pay me,” Luke felt compelled to point out.

Moira brushed right over his answer as if it hadn’t even been voiced at all. “Why are you here then, if not to help the customers?”

“Security. Family Obligation. Take your pick.”

His mother’s blatant glance at his bum hip spoke volumes. “Go,” she urged him again, pushing at his shoulders. “Remember the training manual!”

Luke stayed silent.

He felt the full weight of his mother’s disappointment like a shovel to the face. “You didn’t read it, did you?”

“Bedside reading, Ma. I’m working through it.”

Moira didn’t take too kindly to that because all she did was lift her hand and point to the back corner of the shop. No words were said.

Like any good soldier, Luke knew his place.

Once more he gathered his cane, gripping the handle tight in his right hand as he braced himself for the onslaught of inevitable pain.

“Have fun,” his mother whispered to his back.

Luke didn’t know at what point he’d become an old scrooge, but fact of the matter was ... at this exact moment? Human interaction was the very last thing he wanted.