Radiant Desire (A Handmaids Seduction, #1)

by Inara Scott

When her husband died a few years later in a tragic boating accident, Portia took over the single hotel and managed to turn it into an empire. Portia was now a fixture in Miami, a grande dame who was always shown in pictures impeccably dressed and smiling while someone thanked her for donating money to their charity.

  Garrett also seemed to be something of a local celebrity, appearing in numerous pictures in the society pages, each time with a different, perfectly groomed and highly pedigreed woman on his arm. Kaia stared at those pictures for a long time, a frown cutting lines into the sides of her mouth. (Wrinkles, she had learned, were the next thing she’d have to worry about. But hopefully not in the next month.)

  Finally, Kaia found her most intriguing bit of information. Garrett was fascinated by green building techniques—ways of minimizing the impact of a building on the environment—and had outfitted his exclusive condominium development and his own penthouse suite with solar panels, a green roof, and low-impact products such as bamboo flooring and natural fiber carpets. Kaia could only hope she’d be able to use her knowledge of plants to somehow connect to his interest in the earth somewhere down the road.

  Unfortunately, if she hoped to ever put this information to use, she’d actually have to see and talk to him. Considering his status—and hers—that was going to be a problem.

  Kaia spent the rest of the day developing the plan she had begun formulating when she first arrived at Good Sam. Jenny unknowingly furthered the idea.

  “Didn’t you say you knew someone in town who ran a flower store?” Jenny asked.

  She had invited Kaia to her cubicle over her lunch hour. She said it was for career development, but Kaia liked to believe Jenny just enjoyed her company.

  Or perhaps it was simply that she wasn’t an infatuated sixteen-year-old boy.

  At any rate, they sat at the conference table and talked about strategies to get Kaia on her feet. Which translated into Jenny giving Kaia a healthy dose of advice about everything from jobs to men. Kaia discovered that Jenny believed in contacts. She also believed in calling in favors and asking for help.

  “You said you knew someone in Miami—Ted something or other.” Jenny made notes with one hand while holding a forkful of salad in the other. “He had a fiancée with a flower shop. If you’re ready to find a job, why not call him, or better yet, her?”

  Kaia picked at the faded, ill-fitting T-shirt someone had pulled from a stack of donated clothing for her. Even though she knew Ted and Rachel represented her only real connection to Garrett, it was still hard to imagine meeting him looking so—as the imp had put it—ordinary. “I hardly look the same as I did then. Ted might not even recognize me.”

  “Oh, that’s a load of crap. You were gorgeous before, you’re gorgeous now. He’ll remember you. Not that it matters, because you’re looking for a job in a flower shop, not as a cover girl.” Jenny glared at her. “You aren’t getting soft on me now, are you? Because your nails aren’t done right? Or your hair isn’t perfect?”

  Jenny didn’t believe in letting pride get in the way of getting on your feet.

  “No, no,” Kaia shook her head. “It’s just that I don’t know what I’d say, exactly, if I were to call her.”

  “First off, you don’t call. It’s too easy to say no to a phone call. You show up.” Jenny grabbed a phone book off the shelf by the conference table, her biceps flexing as she did. Jenny liked to wear tight, sleeveless dresses that showed off her muscles. As she put it, if she was going to run four miles every morning and lift weights three times a week, she was damned if she was going to cover up the results. “Now, what’s her name? The fiancée?”

  “Rachel. The flower shop is Rachel’s Roses,” Kaia said.

  Granted, the plan was a tenuous one. Step one: get to know Rachel by working in her flower shop. Step two: get to know Ted by knowing Rachel. Step three: get back together with Garrett through his connection to Ted.

  Weak, but her next option seemed to be throwing herself in front of Garrett’s car, and she hadn’t yet resigned herself to the pain that would entail.

  Jenny flipped through the book and slid one dark red nail across the yellow page. She stopped at a tiny box with a cartoon of a bouquet of flowers and the logo Rachel’s Roses in cursive script across the top. She wrote down the address and took it over to her computer.

  “Here’s what you do. You find something decent to wear from the ‘Back to Work’ box and get yourself over there tomorrow morning. You introduce yourself as an old friend of Ted’s. If she asks him and he does forget where he met you, he’ll be too embarrassed to say so. You tell her everything you know about plants. You tell her you’re willing to work on a trial basis to prove to her that you have the skills needed to do the job. And you have her call me if she needs a reference.”

  Jenny scribbled down a few more notes on a page and printed out the bus lines Kaia needed to take to get to the shop. She handed the paper to Kaia as Officer Ramirez appeared at the door, a woman beside him. She held a baby against her chest, while a boy of three or four clutched her leg. The woman held her head at a proud, defiant angle, but Kaia couldn’t help but notice that a bruise was starting to form around her eye.

  “You got a second, Jenny?” Officer Ramirez said gravely.

  “Of course,” Jenny said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  §

  Rachel’s Roses was a small shop in Northeast Miami a few blocks off Biscayne Boulevard, in an area known as the design district that was bustling with boutique clothing stores, restaurants, and art galleries. Kaia got off the bus a few blocks before the store and walked the rest of the way, marveling at the sheer diversity of life in Miami, where her white skin stood out among the Cuban, Haitian, and other Latino ethnicities.

  In Miami it seemed anything was acceptable. People walked by in all manner of clothing—from tiny bikinis to formal business attire, with more of the former than the latter. The only universal seemed to be the healthy tan it was impossible to avoid. Even Kaia’s formerly creamy skin had turned a light gold, and she’d developed a sprinkle of darker brown freckles across her nose and along the tops of her shoulders from her first significant sunburn.

  A hand-painted, wooden sign on the sidewalk in front of the store directed traffic inside with a large red arrow. A brightly colored painting of a man handing a rose to a woman hung in the front window. Kaia took a deep breath, pulled the door open, and cautiously stepped inside.

  The store was about the size of her bedroom at the Avalon, but unlike the staid, neutral hotel room, this tiny space was overflowing with flowers and colors. A tall cooler stood against one wall filled with roses, lilies, carnations, sunflowers, marigolds, and at least ten other varieties of loose stems in tall black buckets. Teddy bears and other stuffed animals clung to boxes of chocolates and stood beside arrangements of dried flowers in another display case.

  A woman with reddish-brown hair falling from a haphazard bun on top of her head stood behind the glass-topped counter by the register. She wore cat-eyed glasses and a spaghetti-strap dress that flowed over her narrow shoulders and blended into a mass of greenery behind her. She held a phone against one ear and tried to smile at a customer in front of the register while barking at the unfortunate soul on the other end of the line. Kaia approached cautiously, pretending to examine an arrangement of Stargazer lilies while she eavesdropped on the conversation.

  “No, Ted, I already told you I don’t have time tonight. I have Dana’s wedding to plan, I need to run by the site in Coral Gables to get some new ideas for the Petersons, and there’s the Shelly funeral tomorrow.” She interrupted herself to smile at the customer and hand him a bouquet of exotic tropical blooms. “Thanks very much, please come again.” She turned back to the phone and picked up where she’d left off. “And that means there is absolutely no way I can have dinner with your mother.”

  As Rachel launched into a new list of reasons she couldn’t see Ted or his mother, Kaia brushed her finger across the velvety petal of
a lily. She tried to tune out their voices and ignore the whisper of dread they engendered. The plan, such as it was, depended on Rachel and Ted being engaged and bringing her in contact with Garrett. What if they broke up? What if she was left with no tie to Garrett at all?

  As the panic threatened to overwhelm her and an image of the Black Ladies swam in front of her eyes, Kaia deliberately pictured herself diving into the flower. She imagined losing herself in the essence of it, the fragrance wrapping itself around her, the color seeping into her skin. Flowers soothed her as nothing else ever could.

  “Hi, I’m Rachel. Can I help you?”

  Kaia jumped and pulled her hand back from the plant. “Oh, I’m sorry, they’re just so beautiful, I was only… ” she trailed off in embarrassment.

  Rachel brushed aside her discomfort with a wave of her hand. From this angle, it was apparent that Rachel’s haphazard bun was held in place by a pencil, jabbed into the hair on top of her head, and the dress that cloaked her thin frame was at least two sizes too big. “I know, I adore Stargazers. My favorite wedding flower. You have to be careful of the pollen, though, it stains like the devil. Are you a bride, by any chance?”

  Kaia remembered Ted saying that Rachel was in high demand for weddings, and guessed it was a point of pride. “No, I’m afraid not, though I’ve heard you’re incredible. I can only hope someday I’ll be able to get you to do my wedding.”

  Rachel pushed back a lock of hair that fell across her cheek and grinned. “I don’t know about that, but I do love to help make the happiest day of a woman’s life as beautiful as possible.”

  Kaia glanced around the store. “I haven’t been in before. Your store is lovely. How long have you been doing flowers?”

  “I’ve been doing arrangements for about ten years, but I was just doing it on the side for most of that time. I didn’t open the store and start doing it full time until about a year and a half ago.”

  Kaia nodded with approval. “Well, it looks fantastic. Congratulations.”

  They fell into an easy rapport, and chatted for a while about the city, flowers, and Rachel’s favorite Bridezilla stories.

  Kaia had almost screwed up her courage to ask Rachel about a job when the bell over the door tinkled, and a young woman walked in, flanked on either side by an older woman and a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties. Each of the three held clipboards. The woman in the middle wore a lime-green pantsuit with a silk blouse underneath, and despite the heat, her perfect chignon showed no signs of wilt. The older woman wore a yellow dress with matching yellow heels and hat, and the man wore a seersucker suit. All three looked like they had marched out of the pages of one of the magazines Kaia had been studying the day before at Good Sam.

  The color fading from her cheeks, Rachel pulled a notepad from her pocket and checked a scrawled list of items. “Oh shit,” she whispered to Kaia. “This is a total disaster.”

  “What?”

  Rachel swung her back to the door and pretended to be fixing an arrangement of flowers. “That woman in green is the original Bridezilla.”

  Kaia gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Anything I can do?”

  “I wish! She’s here to talk about her ideas for her wedding. That’s her mom and her wedding planner with her. It’s a huge wedding—big bucks—and if I don’t impress her now, I’ll lose her. But they aren’t supposed to be here yet. I have to do five bouquets for another client’s dinner party. He’s coming by in an hour to pick them up so I have to do it now.”

  “Could you ask them to come back later?”

  Rachel snorted. “Those three? Never. They consider themselves far too important.”

  “Maybe I can distract them,” Kaia offered.

  “Sure—any chance you can you talk flowers with them for twenty minutes?” Rachel was joking as she said it, but Kaia heard desperation in her voice and she leaped on it.

  “Listen, Rachel, I’ll be honest with you. I came here to see about a job. I know flowers and I know plants. Consider this the best job interview you could ever give me. I’ll keep them occupied. I won’t make any promises and I won’t try to show off. I’ll just listen and if they ask, I’ll make some suggestions. I’ll tell them that I’m your assistant and I’m helping out while you’re with another customer. They’ll like that. It will make them think you’re more in demand if you keep them waiting.”

  Kaia looked at the trio out of the corner of her eye. The mother was peering down her nose at a collection of sickly houseplants, while the wedding planner was chatting into a cell phone as he pulled the petals off a daisy. Bridezilla had crossed her arms over her chest and was glaring at them, tapping one pointy-toed shoe on the ground.

  “Please?” Kaia asked again. It had seemed like the perfect moment to come clean and ask for a job. She only hoped she hadn’t pushed her luck too far, too fast.

  Rachel pulled the pencil from her hair and stuck it in her mouth. She shook her head back and twirled her hair around into a long rope, knotted it on itself, and stuck the pencil back into place. “I can’t pay you anything.”

  “I understand. All I need is a chance. You won’t regret it.”

  Rachel nibbled the edge of her lip. “Lord, I must be crazy. I guess the worst that could happen is I lose their business, which I’m going to do anyway.” She pinned Kaia with a serious look and began to tick a series of instructions on her fingers. “You make sure they know you aren’t promising anything. And you only take down their ideas. This is just the brainstorming stage. We aren’t getting anything in writing yet. I need to do a budget and give them some sketches before we go any further.”

  Kaia suppressed the giant grin that threatened to break across her face. She replayed in her mind all the things she had heard Jenny say about professionalism. Be calm. Don’t be too emotional. Act confident. Make people believe you have everything under control.

  “Don’t worry, Rachel,” she said, shooing her new boss into the back room. “It’s all under control.”

  §

  Kaia returned to Good Sam that afternoon with a grin splitting her face. Even the nasty, sarcastic comments from the imp—“teddy bears? balloons? pink ribbons? are you serious?”—couldn’t diminish her mood. When she arrived, Jenny was locking the front door of the administrative offices. The resident clients, like Kaia, had a separate door they used to get to the dormitory area.

  Jenny raised a hand in greeting and smiled weakly. “Hey, girl, where you been all day?”

  Kaia didn’t try to hide her glee. “Working.”

  “Really?” Jenny stopped mid-step. “It worked? You showed up at the flower shop and she gave you a job?”

  “You shouldn’t sound so surprised. It was your idea, after all.”

  “Well, I didn’t think it would actually work. I’m always willing to give things a try, but that doesn’t mean I think they’ll be successful.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t know that before,” Kaia said with a laugh. She described Bridezilla and her entourage, and how Rachel had been motivated to bring her on as an instant assistant. “I talked to them for almost a half an hour before Rachel came back out. Bridezilla—whose name is Cynthia, by the way—is absolutely set on gardenias and red roses, by the thousands if necessary. She doesn’t care about the cost. Her mother, on the other hand, may actually have a budget in mind. Oliver, the wedding planner, has no idea what’s going on. As far as I can tell, his only job is to write things down and talk on his cell phone.”

  “Did you stay around after Bridezilla left?”

  “I did. I helped out all day. Rachel said I have a real knack for the job. She really liked the bouquets I did, and I helped her strip a few hundred roses for a funeral for tomorrow and then we got the whole shop cleaned up early so she could get out to Coral Gables to visit a site for a wedding. She’s decided to take me on for a week and see how I do. She’s going to pay me ten dollars an hour. If it works out, we’ll talk about making it permanent. She’s even got a spare room over
the flower shop that I might be able to rent from her, if it all works out.”

  “That’s wonderful, Kaia. Absolutely wonderful.” Jenny’s smile looked strained.

  When Kaia looked more closely, she realized Jenny’s eyes were puffy and streaked with red. “What’s wrong?”

  “An old client of mine got beat up,” Jenny replied. “They called from the hospital because she had my card in her wallet.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. It’s just hard to hear.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kaia said. “I wish there was something I could do.”

  In her short time at Good Sam, Kaia had learned that many of the women there were homeless because of abusive spouses or boyfriends. Fear of attack and reprisal kept them from getting jobs, from moving, and from starting new lives. She’d also learned that Jenny seemed to take each woman into her heart and hold herself responsible, in some way, for helping her get back on her feet, in a life without violence.

  Jenny sighed and smoothed back her hair. She tried to smile, but couldn’t hide her trembling chin. “You got a job,” she said. “You’re starting over. You already have.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the following Wednesday, Kaia was becoming very good at her job as Rachel’s assistant, but had made no progress toward her real goal of getting reintroduced to Garrett. Rachel had no problem talking about her work, her house, or her family, but shied away from conversations about Ted. Kaia recalled the fight she had overheard between Ted and Rachel when she was at the Blue Hour, and wondered if her plan might be fatally flawed.

  She did not have the luxury of failure any more than she had the luxury of time. Twice, she woke up sweaty and terrified from nightmares about the Black Ladies, and with every day that passed she found herself checking nervously over her shoulder, in case one of them should appear. Two weeks had passed since she’d slept with Garrett, and the summer solstice was only twenty-six days away.

  The queen’s imp found her abject failure almost as funny as her newly flawed humanity. His favorite spot to mock her was in Rachel’s supply closet, which also functioned as the staff bathroom. That afternoon, the imp appeared behind her in the mirror as she fixed her hair in a long ponytail.