Page 1 of Forbidden Love Still Blooms

Prologue

Beautiful gardens need rot to grow.

But what of the human heart?

May 12th

I'm going to kill my future husband today. It must be today because tomorrow will be too late.

When he walks into his bathroom to find me in the tub, my legs spread wider than my fake smile, he'll feel like a king. He knows nothing of substance about me. Not a thing, except that I've got a pussy, and everyone who knows Dezmond Hartford knows he likes pussy. It's the only attribute he cares about in women—can he fuck them? Yes?

Then he's happy as a pig in shit.

So, I sit in my tub of scalding hot water, wishing it would somehow start boiling but keep me safe, that it will harm onlyhim.If that fails, if I have to die here, let my ghost remain to haunt Dezmond into a shallow grave.

I'm sure that sounds cruel. If I said it out loud to anyone, they'd gawk at me, insist I was a monster disguising herself as someone with a heart. I could tell them I'm not, but what's the point? I don't believe it myself. It's been a long time since I thought of myself as innocent.

When I was a child, I believed in mermaids. My dreams were full of green brine and floating fingers of seaweed, magical voices, sapphire crowns. I swore I saw one, but it was just a fish, and then the under-tow tried to drown me. That event cleared away my childish dreams. But I never lost my love of the ocean that licks at the coast of my home here in Crestwind.

I can't be a mermaid, but I can collect sea glass, pretend it's their tears. I have a gift for spotting treasure on the shore. For making sandcastles that don't topple despite their height.

I want art and adventure.

Not marriage to a sick creature like Dezmond.

Closing my eyes in the darkened bathroom, I remember the things that led me here. There's a sin in my heart so strong it deflected my path in life. Like a magnet to a compass, it led me astray. Not everyone knows the moment they fell over the edge into Hell.

I do.

I know what my sin is, and I don't regret it.

When I wrap my arms around Dezmond Hartford, guiding him to my breast, holding him tight as he thrashes and drowns in his tub the way sailors did in old tales about mermaids …

I won't regret that either.

Chapter 1

May 10th

Two Days Earlier

The air smells like a funeral, but I can't stop smiling. I've got a bushel of lilacs in one arm, a bouquet of white roses in the other. I missed a few thorns on the latter; they dig through my light blue shirt, just at my armpit where the thick, brown apron doesn't cover. It's hard to care about small bites of pain when I'm busy feeding off my mother's ear-splitting joyful singing. She can't carry a tune, but she gets points for effort.

Also, I'm worse than her, so I'm not throwing stones.

"Just three days until the Triumph Parade!" she crows, swaying towards the window display we're working on together. The sunlight streams through the freshly cleaned glass—I got up at dawn to do it—and turns her pixie-cut gold as molten metal. She went entirely gray by age fifty.

When I was a child she kept her hair long, down to her hips, and after a shower she'd let me sit on her bed and brush it. I didn't know she hated long hair back then. That it wasn't her choice to let it grow like an endless vine. Cutting her hair was one of the first things she did after my father was out of the picture.

"Lorikeet," she scolds, "stop spacing out and pass me the roses."

I smile and offer her the whole armful. "Watch the thorns."

"You didn't shave them off?" She sighs, giving me alook. “You know better than that, Lori.”

“Knowing better and making mistakes are different.”

She clicks her tongue, starting to arrange the roses in the window display. “I'll remember that the next time Mr. Pomaran sticks his wife with a last-minute rose bouquet you assembled.”

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