“Private consultations are available on Sundays.” She flipped the shop’s sign from open to closed, then locked the door. She cut past him in a fluid movement and peered out at the street to make sure he wasn’t followed. “I want to buy a bouquet!” This he shouted, as if announcing a coup to Parliament.īriar, ever the professional, blinked hard once and reapplied her smile. Brash and loud, he was reported to be a natural shot, the envy of every marksman in the army, using a special gunpowder that produced a red smoke when fired.īreath held, Briar found her hands wanting to reflexively reach for her silver hair sticks. He oozed a confidence that had as much to do with the twin pistols peeking out from under his coat on either side as it did with being born a Lord. He stood there being ridiculously dashing, a head taller than her with nice shoulders, chestnut curls falling over his brow and a dimple that looked like it had been cleaved with a knife. The Crimson Hawk: second-best assassin in all of Victoria’s London. Briar tugged her hair back into a semblance of order and reset her expression with a fresh if slightly pained smile-that slid off her face when she recognized who was framed in the doorway. Her husband might be delighted with it, but still. She’d be lopsided for the next customer, now! Briar longed to cut it all off, but polite society required otherwise, so for ten years her hair had grown. She started to reposition the two weighty silver hair sticks-her faithful Thorns, she called them-that kept the bulk of her long, disagreeable hair tightly bound to her head when the bronze shop bell rang like an alarm. Head aching from hair pinned halfway to heaven, hours yet until she might loosen it, go home, and find her young husband back from his rounds. Well, until someone brought a bouquet to Briar’s own grave after she’d had the temerity to die of old age, she supposed. The silence always temporary, the wait always too brief no matter how much time might pass. Was it happiness? When a door closed, it must surely open again. The client at last left happy, and Briar was at last blessedly alone. Days like this made Briar regret her choices post-retirement, until she remembered her prior profession wasn’t qualitatively so different-only with a better success rate. So finicky, clients, and so often acting against their own interests. The Viscount was also a client and one passingly familiar with the fine art of floriography. Wordlessly she tucked in a single tall sunflower for pride and a scarlet geranium for stupidity when the client wasn’t paying attention. Briar explained her choices as she worked: the long stalk of buttery acacia flowers for secret love, the dwarf sunflowers for admiration. With the client’s begrudging assent, Briar set about assembling an appropriate bouquet for the would-be lover with a few pertinent yellows. “I suppose with a name like yours, you would know your business.”Īh, that familiar ache of disappointment: There would be no stabbing today. The ostrich on the client’s hat returned to a state of rest. But this ingénue? Too young to even have heard a whisper of it. She’d opened the shop on the heels of a romance that scandalized many back in the day and at just over forty still cut a dashing figure. “I am myself blissfully ten years wed thanks to just such a careful arrangement.” She’d used that line countless times since retiring, and it was true. Briar kept a practiced smile on her face and wished the woman would let Briar do her job. You do not, Madame, strike me as a woman who would scream for anything.” And a yellow carnation all but screams no to an admirer. “When the abstract is made manifest in a flower, the meaning changes. Yellow is a beautiful color-sincere, bright, hopeful.” The client might be hopeful, but in Briar’s opinion was neither bright nor sincere. “Madame,” Briar replied as demurely as she could manage, “you came for my expertise in the delicate art of communicating delicate matters. How else will the Viscount know that the flowers are from me?” The crown of ostrich feathers on her wide-brimmed hat convulsed as though the bird that died for fashion’s sake was near resurrection. “But I wish it to be yellow, and vibrant,” the client insisted with a shake of her head. If there was one thing Briar Redgrave hated most about her current profession, it was the clients.
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