The ride back from the botanical gardens was a silent, humming torture chamber.
The sterile quiet of the production van felt like a vacuum, sucking all the air and magic from the night, leaving only the buzzing of the engine and the frantic thrum of Rev’s own pulse in her ears.
She sat pressed against the cold window, watching the city lights smear into neon streaks, a galaxy away from the moon-drenched glass and emerald leaves of the greenhouse.
Beside her, Julian was a statue carved from tension.
He didn’t look at her. He didn’t move, save for the rhythmic clench and release of his hand on his knee.
The space between them, a mere foot of black upholstery, might as well have been a chasm.
Rev could still feel the ghost of his kiss on her lips—the surprising softness, the firm pressure, the scent of damp earth and night-blooming jasmine that clung to his skin.
It was a brand, a memory so vivid it felt more real than the vibrating floor beneath her boots.
What had they done? What had he done? And more terrifyingly, what had she let him do?
She, Rev, the florist who used rusty barbed wire as a design element and saw beauty in the defiant weeds that broke through concrete.
She had melted under the touch of Julian Croft, the “Floral Prince,” a man whose arrangements were so flawlessly classical they belonged in a museum behind velvet ropes.
The kiss hadn’t been flawless. It had been messy and desperate and breathtakingly real. It had been a collision.
And now, the fallout was a silence so heavy it felt like a physical weight, pressing down on her chest.
When the van finally pulled into the studio’s sterile underground garage, the spell of the night was irrevocably broken. The fluorescent lights were harsh and unforgiving.
The other contestants, bleary-eyed and exhausted, shuffled out, their quiet chatter about the challenge feeling like noise from another planet.
Rev scrambled out of the van, muttering a non-committal “‘Night” to the group, her eyes deliberately avoiding Julian’s.
She heard him murmur something in response, his voice a low timbre that vibrated right through her, but she didn’t dare turn around.
She practically fled to the elevator, jamming the button for her floor as if the hounds of hell were on her heels. The hounds, it turned out, were her own thoughts.
Back in the soulless sanctuary of her private room, she stripped off her jacket, which still carried the faint, sweet scent of orchids. She threw it on a chair as if it were contaminated.
Pacing the small space, she ran a hand through her choppy, undercut hair, the metal of her rings cold against her scalp.
It was a sell-out. A total, complete, heart-thumping sell-out.
Her entire career, her entire identity, was built on being the antithesis of everything Julian Croft represented.
He was tradition; she was rebellion.
He was symmetry and pastel perfection; she was asymmetry and the bruised, deep purples of a dying rose.
He was the establishment, the darling of the floral world. She was the punk-rock upstart spray-painting baby’s breath black.
Falling for him—and god, her stomach twisted at the thought, the terrifying, exhilarating thought—wasn’t just a personal complication.
It felt like a betrayal of her art. Of herself. It was like trading her ripped band t-shirt for a cashmere twinset.
It was admitting that the polished, perfect world she’d fought so hard to disrupt actually held some allure.
The kiss had been an earthquake, cracking the foundations of the fortress she’d built around her heart.
And through those cracks, a terrifying vulnerability was seeping in. She sank onto the edge of her bed, burying her face in her hands.
The problem was, under all the panic and the principles, one traitorous thought echoed relentlessly: it had been the best kiss of her life.
***
In his own room, two doors down, Julian stood under the spray of the shower, the water scalding hot, hoping it could somehow wash away the chaos churning inside him.
It didn’t work.
The phantom sensation of Rev’s lips, the way she’d tentatively kissed him back before leaning into it, the feel of her short, soft hair under his fingertips—it was all seared into his memory.
He was a man of order. His life was a series of carefully planned, precisely executed actions.
His designs were based on the golden ratio, on color theory, on centuries of botanical science. He pruned his thoughts as meticulously as he pruned his award-winning bonsai trees.
There was no room for impulse, no tolerance for wild, untamed variables.
Rev was a wild, untamed variable.
The kiss had been pure, unadulterated impulse.
In that moonlit greenhouse, surrounded by the primal, heady scent of orchids, he had looked at her—at the fierce intelligence in her dark eyes, the smudge of dirt on her cheek, the genuine passion she had for a strangely beautiful, carnivorous pitcher plant—and his entire, structured world had tilted on its axis.
He hadn’t thought. He had simply acted, driven by a force he didn’t recognize and couldn’t control.
And that loss of control was utterly terrifying.
He’d spent his entire life living up to the Croft name, a legacy of floral artistry stretching back three generations. Everything was about precision, perfection, and polish.
He was a topiary, carefully shaped over a lifetime by expectation and duty.
Rev was a bolt of lightning, a wildflower cracking through pavement. She was everything he wasn’t supposed to want.
And yet, the thrill of it was undeniable. That single, chaotic moment in the greenhouse had felt more authentic, more vibrantly alive, than anything in his curated existence.
It was the dizzying feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff, a terrifying drop on one side and a vast, unknown sky on the other.
He wanted to step back to safety, but some reckless part of him, a part he never knew he possessed, wanted to jump.
He shut off the water, the sudden silence of the room deafening.
Leaning his forehead against the cool, tiled wall, he let out a slow, shaky breath. He had broken his own rules.
And now, he had no idea what the consequences would be.
***
The next morning, the workroom was a minefield of unspoken words.
The air, usually thick with the scent of fresh-cut stems and competitive energy, was now charged with a new, personal tension that felt exclusive to the space around workstations seven and eight.
Rev arrived first, her eyes shadowed from a restless night.
She was dressed in all black, a form of armor, and she immediately threw herself into prepping her station for the day’s mini-challenge, her movements sharp and jerky.
She decapitated sunflowers with brutal efficiency, stripped thorns from rose stems with a vengeance.
She would focus on the work. The work was safe.
When Julian walked in, a hush fell over her corner of the room.
He looked as immaculate as ever in a crisp, pale blue shirt, but there was a rigidity in his posture she hadn’t seen before, a tightness around his eyes that mirrored her own sleeplessness.
He gave a polite, general “Good morning” to the room, his gaze sweeping right past her as if she were just another piece of equipment.
The sting was sharp and unwelcome.
So that’s how it was going to be. They were going to pretend it never happened.
Good. Fine. That was for the best. It was exactly what she wanted.
It was a lie, and her traitorous heart knew it.
They worked in near silence, the only sounds the snip of shears and the rustle of floral paper. The other contestants threw curious glances their way.
Giselle, in particular, watched them from her station, her perfectly plucked brows furrowed in shrewd observation.
“You two seem quiet today,” she commented breezily, her voice carrying across the space. “Big day at the botanical gardens must have taken it out of you.”
Rev didn’t look up, just gave a noncommittal grunt. Across from her, Julian’s hands stilled for a fraction of a second over a delicate spray of freesia.
“It was an intensive challenge,” he said, his voice smooth and controlled, betraying nothing.
But Rev felt it. A flicker of shared panic, a silent acknowledgment that they were now a “you two” with a secret to keep.
The tension finally broke in the most mundane way possible. Rev needed the floral wire, and she reached for the spool on the shared supply cart at the exact same moment Julian did.
Their hands brushed.
A jolt, sharp and electric, shot up Rev’s arm.
It was nothing, a fleeting touch of skin on skin, but it brought the entire memory of the night before crashing back in full, sensory detail: the heat, the scent, the taste of him.
She snatched her hand back as if she’d been burned.
“Sorry,” she muttered, her eyes glued to the concrete floor.
“My fault,” Julian said, his voice low and close. He hadn’t moved away.
She chanced a glance up at him. He was looking right at her, and for the first time since they’d left the greenhouse, the mask was gone.
His carefully constructed composure had cracked, and in his eyes, she saw the same chaotic mix of confusion, terror, and undeniable longing that was churning in her own gut.
The air crackled, shrinking the bustling workroom until it was just the two of them, suspended in that fraught, silent space between their workstations.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked like he wanted to say a thousand things, and nothing at all.
“Rev,” he finally managed to say, his voice barely a whisper. Her name on his lips was a soft, questioning thing.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the silence.
She couldn’t sell out. She couldn’t do this. But she couldn’t forget it, either.
“Julian,” she breathed back, and the name was an admission, a confession, a question all its own.