“Jason listens way more to my father, anyway,” Petunia went on, though Arabella was barely listening. “The two of them are thick as thieves. And my dad’s been all for Jason working at the hotel.” She glanced at Arabella over the rims of her glasses. “You’re doing a good job. Going to have to give you a raise.”
She was clearly joking and Arabella smiled obediently as she reached for the next bouquet. “All of this stuff is for the 10:00 a.m. delivery?” There were so many left to do and the clock was ticking along.
“It is. Don’t look so worried,” Petunia assured. “Everything will be ready in time. What kind of career do you want to have?”
Arabella let out a laugh that was a little short on humor. “I don’t think in terms of a career,” she admitted not quite truthfully.
“College?”
“Some.” She focused hard on starting the ribbon off at the right spot, even though the task didn’t take all that much focus. “It wasn’t really for me.” More to the point, her average grades hadn’t been good enough to garner scholarships and there’d never been any hope of her parents footing the expense for college. She’d quickly learned that spending her paycheck on classes that she wasn’t really interested in anyway was a lot less palatable than spending her paycheck on things that did interest her.
“Me, either. My father was less than pleased at the time. He’s a military vet. He figured either you went to college or you went into the service. No middle ground. Oh, my Lord, the battles that went on between my mom and him. I think that was the last straw in their marriage.” Petunia selected another small bit of leaves that would have looked like trimmings to be swept up had it been on the floor instead of the work surface and added it to the corsage taking shape between her fingers. “But I was straight out of high school and wasn’t going to listen to anyone, least of all my dad. It wasn’t until I was quite a bit older and realized I needed to learn how to run this business I loved that I went back for classes that seemed a lot more relevant.”
The bell over the front door jangled then and Petunia went out to deal with the customer.
After giving up on her community college experience, Arabella had taken classes that seemed a lot more relevant to her, too. The only problem was that nobody else appreciated that relevance at all.
And she had no successful business, like Petunia’s Posies, to show for herself.
As far as her folks were concerned, creative writing classes were pointless unless you planned to make a living teaching it. Thinking that she might be able to make a career out of it otherwise was just a pipe dream.
And so she continued spending her days in one deadly dull office after another, simply because she could type fast and follow instructions reasonably well, and spent her nights falling asleep over the unfinished stories in her notebooks.
She’d finished three more bouquets by the time Petunia finished with the customer, and by the time Arabella needed to load up her vehicle for the day’s deliveries, Petunia’s confidence that the wedding flowers would be ready was rewarded.
With the clipboard of delivery addresses sitting beside Arabella on her front seat, she set off.
The church was locked up tight when she arrived and she had to hunt around to find someone possessing keys to open up so she could place all the flowers in the sanctuary per her instructions. After that, she was off to the other side of town to deliver a dozen roses to a woman who took one look at the card included and dropped the long-stemmed beauties to the doorstep, where she ground her heel on them until they were pulp.
Then, taking in Arabella’s horrified fascination, smiled and tipped her a twenty.
Arabella returned to her car and the potted plant that was her final delivery for the day. She didn’t recognize the street at all, so she plugged the address into her phone’s GPS and set off.
Twenty minutes later, she’d left the outskirts of Rambling Rose behind and was beginning to wonder why the GPS-lady was sending her down a dirt road. There was nothing on either side of the road. No cows grazed in the green fields. In fact, whatever was growing in the fields looked more like weeds to her than actual crops.
She was almost ready to stop and call the number on the order slip for better directions when a white two-story farmhouse surrounded by rosebushes came into view. Unlike the unkempt fields, the rosebushes were entirely orderly and filled with roses just as red as the ones that had ended up beneath the woman’s heel.
The message on this card said “For my favorite granny” and the potted plant accompanying it would surely have a happier fate.
Arabella parked in front of the house, carried the plant up to the front door and used the eagle-shaped door knocker since there didn’t seem to be a doorbell. She soon heard footsteps and was already smiling when the door pulled open.
But instead of a delighted granny named Louella standing on the other side of the door, it was Jay Cross.
And Arabella was pretty sure she was the one who looked delighted.
Chapter Four
“I wondered when you were going to get here.”
“You did?” Arabella felt breathless looking up into Jay’s smiling green gaze. “Why?”
“I was hoping the plant would be here before my grandmother got done at Mariana’s Market.”
Arabella rather stupidly remembered the fern in her arms. “You ordered this?”
He leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb. His dimple deepened. “I did.”
“Special occasion?”
“Definitely.”
He didn’t elaborate and she handed him the plant. “Well, I hope she enjoys it. Tell her that Petunia says it wants filtered light and moist soil so...” She
