The Flower Box out on #kindleunlimited
Oliver only meant to give her flowers but he gave his heart.
Valentine's Day story sizzle and sweetness
https://www.amazon.com/Flower-Box-Elodie-Parkes-ebook/dp/B00IA7OUWO/
All other Amazon sites http://mybook.to/TheFlowerBox
Alice longs for love, and as Valentine’s Day looms, she
looks around at couples hand in hand and feels alone. One day as she walks in
the park, she catches Oliver’s eye.
He sees her loneliness and decides to be kind to her. Oliver
wants to give her flowers and candy until he thinks she has another lover. Will
his jealousy drive him away from Alice or straight into her arms?
Chapter One
As usual, the shop started to get busier on Thursday
lunchtime. Alice finished hand tying a bunch of Ranunculus. The flower heads
varied in size and tone of pink, but all were sumptuous. She’d mixed in an
occasional, looped, bright green broad leaf, and tied the distinctive, bleached
hessian string the shop used on all its hand tied bouquets. She sighed. It was less
than two weeks to Valentine’s Day. All the shops displayed advertisements for
perfume, candy and other gifts for a sweetheart.
Alice didn’t have one. Her sweetheart had left her
three years ago and since then she’d remained alarmingly single. That morning
she’d received her own posters to advertise flowers and gifts. She intended to
put them up and change the display in the windows when the shop closed.
Alice took payment for the flowers and watched as
the man left with them. She wondered who they might be for—girlfriend, wife, lover? Although she sold flowers and candies, she
never received them. Her small circle of friends gave her odd little presents
for Christmas and her birthday—a strange gorilla key chain, a mug labeled ‘Do
not disturb’. It was as if they didn’t know her at all, and maybe they didn’t.
They didn’t know she perused the dating sites online. They didn’t know she’d
recently bought a vibrator. She had it delivered from the store advertised as
the best sex-toy shop for women on the web. The package was anonymously brown
on the outside, but the next layer of wrapping delighted in a shocking pink.
The shop emptied for a few moments. Alice walked to
the window and switched on the extra fairy lights. This year winter brought darkness
much earlier in the day. There seemed to be less daylight than other years.
Maybe it was the rain, but it was time the weather cheered up a little in
Alice’s opinion.
The fairy lights Alice added each October, and then
left there until March joined the window display, habitually lit with a string
of white rose-shaped lights. The standard trees on either side of the door
outside were decorated with silver-white fairy lights too, and customers often
commented on how inviting the shop looked. Alice served another two people
before her assistant came back from lunch, and then as one o’clock hit, the
shop became busy.
One side of the shop sold boxed and bars of candy.
Alice sourced it from all over the world. She spent more on airfreight
sometimes than she might recoup from the sale of the candy, but she liked to
have this array. Customers would come in especially from all over the city for
their favorite treat. On holidays like Christmas, Easter, and Valentine’s Day,
they would buy both flowers and candy. Alice loved her shop and her work. The
hours were long, but worth it. She travelled to the flower markets before dawn
once a week and had some flowers delivered by local growers.
When there was a short lull in business at
two-thirty, before the afternoon became busy again, Alice took her own lunch
break. She always did the same thing. She’d walk to the park at the end of the
street and eat some of her sandwich, but feed lots of the sliced bread or roll
to the ducks on the pond there. All year round, in any weather, Alice did it.
Then she walked around the park to travel to her shop via the back street. There,
at the rear of the park, was another pond. At this far end of the park, there were
statues. They lined the last part of the path around the pond in a mock Italian
garden style.
Since Christmas, Alice stopped and fed a swan
there. It never ventured from the thick reedy pond to the well-populated duck
pond, and Alice thought it could be lonely. She’d read that swans mated for
life. This swan was solitary and had an air of sadness as it glided to Alice
for her offering of bread. Alice brought an extra piece of bread especially for
this swan.
As she fed it, she talked to it, about their shared
solitary status, their lack of a partner in life to love, and who loved them.
The swan got up onto the path that day as Alice talked to it and fed it the
slice of super-seeded bread. Alice told it about Valentine’s Day approaching,
and how as usual she’d sell flowers for other girls, knowing she’d not be receiving
any. I wonder why you’re alone, Swan?
She left the swan eating the last piece of the bread and went back to work.
Talking to the bird helped her deal with the
loneliness that was becoming acute. She looked back at the swan as she exited
the huge wrought-iron park gates. It was hopping into the pond. Alice hurried
back to the shop feeling refreshed.
Copyright Elodie Parkes, Hot Ink Press
(Erotic romance, explicit love scenes)
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