The Language of Flowers, page 1
THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS
FROM THIS DAY FORWARD
BOOK 1
DARA GIRARD
CONTENTS
About the Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Also Available
About the Author
ABOUT THE BOOK
Dara Girard
Published by ILORI PRESS BOOKS LLC
www.iloripressbooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Author.
About the book
Maya Kayode, the black sheep of the Kayode daughters, hates flowers.
So when her sister tosses her the wedding bouquet, Maya does her best to avoid catching it.
And ends up nearly killing Keeden Adesina.
The one man she hates more than flowers.
Enjoy this enemies-to-lovers romantic women’s fiction.
1
A pity toss.
Everyone standing outside the church door knew what was about to happen.
Only the bride’s wedding gown, as she stood at the top of the concrete steps, distinguished the event from looking like a fashion show with fifty or so guests dressed in custom tailored, form fitted outfits that could have sprung from the pages of Ovation magazine or the latest Nollywood movie.
Gold, pink, green and silver geles and hats rising high to blue sky like a sea of flowers and butterflies with outstretched wings as they anxiously waited for the bride’s next move.
Someone coughed but the roar of a motorcycle making its way through the large, crowded parking lot behind them, muffled the sound. The smell of exhaust mingled with the heavy scent of newly cut grass.
The moment the bouquet flew in the air, the humidity of the Maryland spring day seeming to hold it still as if to give everyone time to part, they all knew their role.
Only one person was meant to catch it. They needed to make room for her. Heaven forbid anyone else accidentally did so. The bouquet was meant for one person only.
The bride’s unmarried, thirty-seven year old sister.
The unemployed one.
The “other daughter” who Mr. Kayode had kindly given his name.
The short, chubby one who had the audacity to show up in—not the richly laced, golden and red colored aso-ebi to distinguish the bride’s family—but a similar colored ankhara styled dress she’d worn before (!!) at a naming ceremony.
She’d told anyone who’d listen that the expensive fabric the bride had chosen was out of her budget and she wasn’t going to spend money she didn’t have or charge it, which was also heresy because half the guests had done exactly that. Every sane person with good taste and breeding knew it was much better to go into debt and keep up appearances than to shame your family or yourself.
But Maya Kayode lacked those two crucial traits, which was not Mr. Kayode’s fault since he’d generously married a woman with a child and raised her as his own.
Nor was it Mrs. Kayode’s fault since everyone knew Maya was nothing like her other three daughters.
Few worried about Gwen, the eldest of the Kayode children, the bride, who’d gone to a top university and worked in finance.
The distinction became important in the case of the other two. No one wanted to make the mistake and confuse Maya with the two other unmarried Kayode sisters.
There was obedient Ava, as sweet as her caramel colored skin, who was thankfully (Praise God!) engaged, and then dear Catherine, who was so rail thin and homely, with skin as lackluster as dried leaves. The family had designated her to care for the parents until their deaths, in which case she’d be expected to live with one of the sisters and help look after their children (heaven forbid she would foolishly think to have a single life of her own).
But there was a minor hope for Maya.
She was pretty enough, with rich chocolate brown skin, full lips, great breeding hips (what else were hips that size for?) and whose expiration date was a couple years off, although her smooth complexion could fool a man to think it may be closer to a decade.
Marriage must be on her horizon.
The bouquet was meant for her. She wouldn’t have to fight for the assortment of red garden roses, blush pink mums and purple spray roses. It would sail in her direction. All she had to do was catch it.
The only problem was Maya didn’t want it.
Aside from not understanding such a silly and superstitious ritual, Maya had warned her sister, Gwen, not to toss it at her. She didn’t want the attention. It was bad enough that she knew her outfit would stand out and make her the black sheep of the family. But on top of that, to be singled out with pity on her sister’s special day was too much.
She’d told her—pleaded, begged, warned—numerous times, each time with more force.
“I mean it. Don’t even look in my direction. I don’t want it,” Maya told Gwen only two weeks ago in Gwen’s apartment while helping her pack her living room items to donate to a relative since she’d no longer need many of the things now that she was moving into her new house.
“Sure, sure,” Gwen’d said with a long sigh and rolling her eyes.
But clearly her sister hadn’t listened to a single word. Which wasn’t unusual since Gwen didn’t hear what she didn’t want to.
Briefly, Maya thought of rushing up the stairs and tackling her. But then she might end up tearing her sister’s glass-beaded twenty thousand dollar dress and then she’d need to escape and enter the witness protection program.
Maya then considered catching the bouquet, holding it high above her head with a big smile while everyone cheered, before she dropped the offending flowers to the ground and proceeded to stomp on them. Not once but ten times (deep breaths, count to ten one school counselor had told her after she’d been labeled a child with “anger issues”) mashing each petal with cruel delight under the sole of her heels. She’d take her fury out on the sleek petals, crushing them.
She could imagine people staring, gaping in horror. Most would likely say, “This is why you’re not married! Do you think any man would want you?”
And such comments—told to her ad nauseam—would only make her want to smash the bouquet more. Why was she seen as deficient just because she didn’t have a man? She didn’t want one, at least not yet. She’d had one and he hadn’t improved her life much. No matter how much people had congratulated her on a good catch (he’d been a college dean from a good family who thought her art was “cute”) she’d felt lonely.
It felt better to be alone than with someone who didn’t understand her. Who thought she needed to be fixed somehow. She didn’t feel as if her life was missing something. Especially not a husband. But the sight of the bouquet also offended her for another reason that had nothing to do with matrimony.
The bouquet twisted her stomach in knots because she hated flowers.
With a passion.
Every important turning point in her life that had brought disaster, sadness or both had started with flowers.
She remembered the scent of the peonies when she’d been left in a hotel lobby when her mother forgot her. She remembered the kindly clerk and the police officer who’d smelled like sweat and coffee but was also very patient.
She remembered red rose petals littering the foyer of their cramped apartment when her mother dashed off into the evening with the man who’d brought them, instead of staying home with Maya, even though she’d told her mother she was scared.
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” her mother had told her with an impatient sigh as she put on her earrings. “Go to sleep.”
“But I’m not tired.”
“Keep the TV on for company or go online.” She glanced at the man then said in a low voice, “I’m doing this for both of us.”
Maya didn’t know what she meant and her mother never cared to explain. But all she knew was her mother preferred getting flowers over being with her.
But Maya’s hatred of flowers didn’t solidify until her grandmother’s passing. Her grandmother had been the one person who loved her. A Nigerian immigrant who’d arrived in the US as a woman in her late forties with a broken heart over the death of her beloved husband, nursing skills, and a rebellious sixteen-year-old daughter. She had a son who’d left Nigeria before his father’s passing to study engineering in Canada and had decided to settle there.
Through working odd jobs and taking courses to allow her to practice nursing in her new country, she’d managed to make a life for herself and her daughter, proudly buying a small pillbox home to settle in during retirement.
Maya had gone to live with the dark skinned, white haired woman at five years old when her mother was struggling with life (no one got more specific than that). She only knew that nine years later she was living with her mother again and three new half-sisters.
And all because her grandmother had collapsed in her garden—splayed out in the flower bed—after weeding her gardenias.
Maya remembered keeping her hands in a tight fist during the entire funeral as she glared at the abundant flowers surrounding the casket, hating their scent, their bright colors, inwardly thinking: The flowers killed her. If she hadn’t been in that damn garden tending to the roses, looking after the tulips and those stupid gardenias, she would still be alive. Flowers were selfish, taking up so much of her time and energy Maya never knew why her grandmother enjoyed toiling so much.
That day flowers not only signaled disaster and sadness but also loss. Loss of a family she’d known, loss of the familiar, loss of a love that had felt safe and comforting.
The final event that fueled her flower hatred had been a bouquet she had received for her graduation from university. That bouquet came with the scent of betrayal: A sickeningly sweet scent with the sting of a withering slow death. Maya didn’t know if the flowers had been picked too soon or too late but some of the buds never opened while those that managed to, barely pried open before they sagged and died.
They were a gift from her best friend.
The best friend who would later steal her dissertation and then accuse her of theft.
The best friend who would go out with the guy Maya had a crush on just because she could (Maya had asked her why). The best—or rather former best—friend who was now happily tenured at a prestigious university and hadn’t caught a sexually transmitted infection (or several) and fallen through a manhole and disappeared as Maya had often wished.
No, she hated flowers. Detested them and she had every right to.
Her sister knew that.
And Maya had warned her.
But Gwen, like everyone else, thought her distain for flowers was silly. Infantile. Perhaps it was, but it wouldn’t change the fact that she wasn’t going to catch the bouquet.
Perhaps if she had, the toss of the bouquet wouldn’t have turned into a fiasco spoken about for generations.
Perhaps if she had gritted her teeth and just taken the humiliation, as she’d grown accustomed to doing, she wouldn’t have nearly killed a man.
And not just any man.
The one person she despised more than flowers.
2
To be fair she hadn’t been aiming for him (as some people later suggested). She hadn’t been aiming for anyone. Her only goal had been to avoid the bouquet.
So she’d quickly ducked and ran like a woman who took pride in the self-defense class she’d completed. Self-preservation at all cost. Don’t be afraid to look silly. That’s all she thought as she pushed people out of the way. She didn’t even realize she’d hit him hard enough that he’d lost his balance and stumbled back into the parking lot (she’d told her sister it had been dangerous to do the toss there) and gotten hit by an SUV.
He actually bounced.
She never knew a body could bounce like that. But he had bounced off the SUV that had abruptly halted—too late, leaving the screech of tires and scent of burning rubber hanging in the air—and hit the parked limo ready to take the newlyweds to the reception—before his lanky, lean frame slid to the ground like a deflating balloon.
For the longest moment it felt as if no one moved. As if it hadn’t really happened. Maya remembered the buzzing of a bee that had been attracted to the now forgotten bouquet left on the ground like a disregarded football.
She heard a car door slam close, heels on the asphalt then a scream. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Maya shifted her gaze to the young driver-a woman barely twenty-who’d emerged from the SUV. Her cry of distress forced everyone out of their shared paralysis.
There was no need to ask if there was a doctor. The event was a Nigerian-American wedding so there were at least three to call on (plus a resident, two LPNs and three RNs).
Maya was still trying to process what had just happened when she felt a big whack on the back of her head. “What have you done?” her mother said, her accent thick with anger.
Maya briefly saw stars before she glared at the handbag in her mother’s hand. She pointed at it. “Admit it! You keep rocks in there, don’t you?”
Her mother’s eyes widened. “You want to make fun?” She hit Maya on the side of the head this time with just her hand, which wasn’t much better. Maya swore her mother’s hands were large enough to palm a bowling ball. She rubbed the side of her head. “No.”
Her mother raised her hands and gazed to the sky as if in praise. “Thank All Mighty God his parents left early so they don’t have to see this disaster.” Her hands fell to her side and she glared at Maya. “I can’t believe you did this.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Maya said offended by the accusation. “At least not on purpose.”
“You have ruined your sister’s wedding.” Whack! “You have shamed us.” Whack!
Maya held up her hands to block the next blow. “Enough.”
“I’ll decide when it’s enough.”
Her mother lifted her hand to strike another well placed blow but Maya grabbed her wrist. “No, you won’t.”
Her mother snatched her hand away. “Eh eh look at those eyes. The dark eyes of your father. Will you assault me too? Will I be your next victim?”
Maya hated when her mother compared her to a man she’d never met. There were only two pictures of him at a party a friend of her mother had hosted but they were a little blurry. However, from what little she could gather from her mother’s description he had cold eyes, a cruel mouth and big build. She’d once asked her mother if he was so awful why she’d slept with him and that had gotten Maya enough whacks that she’d never asked again.
“That’s not fair,” Maya said, taking a step back to keep proper distance between them. “I didn’t hit him.”
“You pushed him into the road.”
“It was an accident.”
Her mother shoved her forward. “Go.”
“Where?”
“Go and help.”
Maya looked at the crowd surrounding the fallen man. She couldn’t even see him. “They don’t need my help.”
“At least show that you’re worried,” her mother said with another shove. “Cry if you need to.”
“I don’t feel like crying.”
Her mother’s voice turned so cold Maya shivered half expecting snow to start falling. “I can make you cry.”
It wasn’t an empty threat. Maya held up her hands in surrender. “I’m going. I’m going.” She hurried over to the crowd. But there hadn’t been much progress. Her nemesis, Keeden Adesina, remained on the ground while a number of people recorded the incident on their cell phones, others took pictures (some of the fallen man but mostly of themselves in front of him) and the three doctors argued over the best approach.
