It was a kiss thick with hello and desperate with goodbye. It was a long and languid meeting of two people who would never be, a tasting determined to mark every sensation, to commit it to memory. We were a twist, his hands roaming my back, my face, my hair. My hands learned the shape of his jaw, as hard and sure as it appeared. They memorized the feeling of his hair, thick and lush, ruffling under my fingertips.
For that brief and fluttering span of time, nothing mattered in the whole world except for his lips and mine.
Though the kiss held no power over us, it was no match for the truth of our circumstance. And as that truth made itself known, our fever broke. Lips slowed, then stopped. Heavy breaths were the only sound in the room.
Our foreheads met in the dark.
I was only to feel the brush of his lips once more when he pressed a kiss to my furrowed brow.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as he stepped away.
“Me too,” I whispered back.
He opened the door and stepped into the slash of light, the visage of him so striking, so right, I took a step toward him. Toward Marcus, tall and lean and beautiful, his face etched with regret.
And then he was gone.
With a painful exhale, I leaned against the table at my back, found in the dark in my desperation to stay upright.
And it wouldn’t be the first time or the last that I wished I wasn’t who I was.
3
Harbinger of Bloom
MARCUS
My hands weren’t the only thing shaking as I rushed out of the building.
A trembling in my knees accompanied a rattle in my lungs, a tremor in my heart, a shuddering of my mind.
I shouldn’t have kissed her. But I couldn’t help myself, not with her asking me so painfully, so gently, a plea echoed in the chambers of my heart. If we were only to have one kiss, it had been one for the books. That kiss had cracked my rib cage open, exposing me in a bald honesty I couldn’t have hidden, not from her.
I’d only just realized my general disinterest in relationships had nothing to do with my inability to care and everything to do with the girls I’d considered for the job. I’d been waiting my whole life for a thunderbolt.
When I met Maisie, I saw lightning.
But it was the kiss that struck me down to the ground.
Never once had I been consumed by a kiss. Never once had I lost a part of myself, a piece I wouldn’t get back, in the span of a hundred heartbeats. Never, not in a thousand years, did I believe desire could burn so deep that it could make a mark I’d never erase.
I’d be crazy to let her go. For a moment, there in my arms, I didn’t know if I could.
But I didn’t have a choice.
I stepped to the curb, held up a hand, confused and disoriented and filled with regret. Not for the kiss. But for the knowledge I’d never kiss her again.
Blindly, I slipped into a cab and gave the driver my address, uncertain I could have made my way home on the subway. My luck, I’d have ended up in Queens. So I sat in the back of the cab as it carried me home, trying to collect myself, which was as sporadic and tedious as picking up spilled marbles on a busy sidewalk.
Margaret Bower.
Margaret fucking Bower was Maisie, and nothing in my universe made any sense.
I hadn’t seen a photograph of her in years. She’d tucked herself away in college on the West Coast somewhere and afterward, she left for England to work in their British division with her aunt. I only knew because my mother knew, and my mother’s favorite topic of gossip was the Bower family. I knew Evelyn wanted to pass Bower on to her daughter, and we all assumed she was ready and willing to take over, if Evelyn ever let go of the reins.
Although I figured it would be more of a cold, dead hands situation than a willing turnover.
Either way, the Margaret I’d created in my mind had been groomed for this. She had studied and trained and was back in New York to take her place at her mother’s side. But the cruel, evil duplicate of Evelyn I’d expected Margaret to be wasn’t even in the same neighborhood as Maisie.
She wasn’t even in the same solar system.
But that fact didn’t change our circumstance. She was the heiress to Bower Bouquets. And I owned Longbourne, which her mother had set out to destroy. In fact, there was a very high likelihood she would.
Heavy dread settled me, steadied me, anchored me to the ground like a stake. The future of the flower shop and my family hung in the balance. And it all landed on me.
I’d known when I put all my savings into taking over Longbourne, its debts and its waning business, that it was a risk. And I was risk averse. Not in the sense that I didn’t like a good gamble—years on Wall Street and day trading couldn’t be stomached without a desire for a thrill—but my gambling came only after ensuring my security with heavily padded investments. Never would I have bet the farm. Until this. Until now.
My family needed me—their livelihood depended on it. So I did what I could by taking the wheel. We’d turned the shop around, finally climbing toward the black after years of empty pockets and bad accounting.
But I should have known things were going too smoothly.
If only she’d told me, all of this could have been avoided. If she’d come to me when the shop fell into decline, I could have stepped in. I could have managed the business better, fired her accountant, invested their money. I could have patched the holes to keep the ship afloat.
I could have stopped Mom from signing that contract with Evelyn Bower.
Now it was my responsibility to set things right, and I didn’t take that lightly. I was the only one equipped with the tools to save them, so I rolled up my sleeves and dove in headfirst.
I’d be goddamned if I saw my family laid to waste when there was a chance I could stop it.
Even if Evelyn Bower had made it her mission to ensure we wouldn’t succeed.
And at her right elbow was her daughter.
Her daughter who I’d just kissed.
Her daughter who I’d only see in boardrooms and, if Evelyn had her way, in courtrooms.
Her daughter who I wanted to take on a date. And another date. And more. So much more.
It was beyond reason, and I struggled to accept it.
When the cab pulled to a stop in front of my family’s home, I had no answers. But I’d pulled myself together, and that was saying something.
As I climbed the steps to our old Victorian brownstone, a wave of worry washed over me. This house—which we just might lose—had been in my family for a hundred eighty years when my independently wealthy ancestors migrated from England to try their hand at American capitalism. They bought a handful of properties in Greenwich Village, all in a row on Bleecker, built a greenhouse in back, and turned one into Longbourne. Through the generations, the shop had been passed down to the women of the family, finally landing on my mother.
But Mom had no head for business, as she was accustomed to saying, and somehow, I hadn’t known how bad things were. I counted it as one of the failures of my adult life, not picking up on the trouble she was in.
The first hole in the boat had been the internet, and the second had been Bower Bouquets.
The rise of e-commerce and online flower orders flummoxed my mother, and either out of denial or fear, she pretended like it wasn’t a thing, like it didn’t exist. Slowly, business waned, and she’d thought it would work out, that it was a fad. So she flat-out refused to participate, probably because the thought of figuring it out was all just a bit too much.