One
FOR THE PAST EIGHT years, Ria Phillips had been the object of her hometown’s tragic love story, a tale told over and over again with increasingly dramatic (and inaccurate) detail.
She knew people in Azalea, Virginia, still gossiped about it. They mentioned the story as requisite background when referencing either the Phillips family or the Worths. She saw kind sympathy behind the smiles of her parents’ friends when they asked about her continued single status, as if they assumed her heart hadn’t yet healed, eight whole years after it had been broken. Acquaintances were always trying to set her up with any available male they encountered in a hundred-mile radius.
And Ria was over it.
Over it.
Jacob Worth had broken her heart eight years ago, packing up and leaving town the morning after the first time they’d had sex. She’d been eighteen, and they’d been dating for two years. It had been her first time. She’d thought it was love. She’d believed he’d felt the way she had.
She’d been wrong. She’d been stupid. She’d been utterly crushed, and it had taken a long time before she’d gotten over it.
But she wasn’t so spineless that she’d still be broken so many years later. Jacob hadn’t been back to Azalea since. Not even once. Not even when his grandfather and only living relative had a heart attack six months ago and almost died.
Jacob had left her behind, just like he’d left everything else. He’d given her a flimsy explanation, but it wasn’t good enough. All she’d believed was sweet and gentle inside him had clearly been a cover for selfishness. She didn’t want him anymore. She didn’t want anything to do with him.
And she really wished her town would believe her when she said so.
On a Thursday morning in May, she was stewing over yet another conversation about Jacob. One of the old ladies who hung out at the laundromat—not to actually do their laundry, since most of them had machines at home, but to use it as the best vantage point for the three blocks of downtown Azalea—had called Ria over as she was walking home for lunch from the flower shop yesterday. The lady Ria had known all her life as Mrs. Mildred had asked her how she was doing and then sympathetically told her she’d find someone eventually. To not give up hope.
Ria had been hard-pressed not to growl in response.
She was fine. Better than fine. She was really good. Twenty-six. Healthy. Relatively attractive. She had a tight circle of friends and a thriving business that was starting to earn her good money. She went out with guys as regularly as was possible in a town as small as Azalea.
She didn’t need a man right now.
She didn’t need to recover from a heartbreak she’d already recovered from.
And she didn’t need anyone to still believe she was hung up on Jacob Worth.
“Hey, Ria, can you— What’s the matter?” Madeline had been talking as she walked into the back room of the shop, but she jerked to a stop in obvious concern.
“Nothing.” Ria smiled at Madeline, who’d been one of her best friends since Madeline had moved to town in the eighth grade. “I’m good.”
“You don’t look good. You look like you’re beating those flowers into submission.” Madeline was pretty in a quiet, curvy way with ash-blond hair and gray eyes. She projected a very serious presence that Ria knew from long experience wasn’t entirely true to her dry, clever character. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“It’s nothing. Just stewing about Mrs. Mildred yesterday. I know it shouldn’t bother me so much, but it does.”
“Of course it does. No one likes to be pitied—particularly when they have nothing to be pitied about. Unfortunately, King Asshole has been irretrievably branded into your identity for a lot of people in town. Even if you fall in love and get married, they’ll still probably talk about how you bravely overcame your heartbreak to make a new life with someone else.”
Ria groaned and slumped onto a nearby stool. “Maybe I should do something wild and crazy just so they’ll have something else to talk about.”
“Wouldn’t work. They’d just blame it on your tragic history. Jacob Worth demons still flagging your steps and all that. It sucks. It really does. But you can live with it or you can move somewhere else.”
“I’m not going to move.”
“I know that.” Madeline quirked her lips briefly in a quick flash of ironic amusement. “So try to live with it. At least they think about you as an individual unit and not only as Josh Cantor’s girlfriend.”
Josh Cantor had been the star football player in high school, and people in town still looked at him as some sort of hero. Madeline had been dating him for years.
“That’s true. I guess we all get pigeonholed one way or another.” Ria sighed and shook off her annoyance as she straightened to her feet. “Did you need something when you came back here?”
“Yeah. I wanted to know if you’d gotten a start on the Nashville order. I’m blocked and need some inspiration.”
“Oh. Yeah. I’ve pretty much got it done. I’ll show you.”
Three years ago, Ria’s parents had died in a car accident and left her the family business, a struggling, small-town floral shop. She had an older sister, but Belinda had never shown any interest in flowers. It was Ria who’d been hanging out at the shop after school every afternoon since third grade. So Ria got what had then been called Phillips Flowers.
For the first year, she’d tried to keep it going the way her parents had, but small-town businesses of all kinds were struggling, and the local weddings and funerals weren’t enough to sustain a profitable business. She’d been afraid she’d have to close up shop, but then she and her two best friends had miraculously turned it around.
One of their high school classmates had come into the store one Saturday afternoon and asked for a custom arrangement as a way to apologize to his wife after getting into a big fight. When Ria had asked for the message on the card, he’d told her to just think of something good.
Ria was good with flowers. She was naturally creative and artistic, and she loved designing unique arrangements. She’d put together something really special for the guy’s wife. As she did, Madeline (who’d been hanging out with her that afternoon) kept making up funny possible messages for the card. She worked at the public library, but she’d been writing all her life, and she’d ended up composing a little poem that was funny and touching both. Skye, their other best friend, had been so thrilled with the arrangement that she’d taken pictures. After getting permission from the recipient, she’d started posting the photos on social media.
Skye had been unemployed and spent a lot of time online. One of her posts on the arrangement got the attention of an influencer with a large platform and went viral.
Suddenly Ria had orders coming in for custom arrangements from all over the world, asking for personalized poems to go with them. At first, she could only handle the orders within a couple of hours of Azalea—in Hampton Roads or the accessible parts of northern Virginia. But Ria had gotten busy and connected with florists around the country, so eventually she could serve orders all over. Skye took over the marketing and social media and was genuinely brilliant at it.