A Bargain of Thorns

Grow the impossible flower. Keep the one rule. Never ask what it's for.Posy Lane can hear what a garden wants - the last gift her dead mother left her, and the only thing standing between the Lane flower shop and the men who hold its debts. So when the cursed estate of Briarwood offers a contract that clears everything, she signs it, even though its terms have broken three generations of gardeners: grow the Veilbloom, a flower that grows in no catalogue, by midwinter. One rule stands apart from all the rest - never ask what the flower is for. At Briarwood the corridors rearrange when the house is pleased, the housekeeper has kept her post for forty years and will not say why, and the lord is seen only at dusk: gloved, courteous to the edge of cold, and hiding what the briars keep trying to tell her. Everand Thorne is becoming his own garden - bark at the wrist, sap where blood should be - and the bloom Posy is coaxing from dead soil feeds on exactly what she is not allowed to feel for him. Every gardener before her fed the flower something forced: skill, ambition, fear. Each one failed. The coin the curse has waited forty years for is love, freely given and named aloud - the one thing her contract forbids. A cozy-dark Beauty-and-the-Beast romantasy. Steamy; for readers 18+. Standalone, HEA.