“Go ahead,” Celine encouraged, nodding towards the flowers. “It took me a long time to get them to bloom.”
This was Celine’s conservatory?
“You planted all these?” Valerie asked, wide-eyed, seeming to see the woman for the first time.
“Yes,” she whispered, looking around her endless little garden, silvered in the moonlight. “I did.”
Valerie stepped forward and leaned down to inhale the soft blooms. Her lips parted at their beautiful scent and the first genuine smile of the night crossed her features when she turned back to Celine.
“They’re lovely.”
Celine nodded, brushing her fingers over the delicate white petals. She stared at them in silence for a long time.
“They are,” Celine agreed. “Though I imagine their scent is only a fraction of what it was on Old Earth. I’ve often dreamed of what they smelled like there. These are hybrids, crossed with other flowers to survive within our colony. Pieces of what they once were.”
There was a sadness in her voice.
“Celine,” Valerie said softly, lowering her voice when she glanced at the open door, into the darkened hallway beyond. “I—”
Celine stepped towards her until Valerie could smell the wine on her breath. With a steady gaze, the older woman said, “I don’t want you to marry my son.”
Valerie’s lips pressed together.
She’d pieced that together herself.
“I don’t want you…or yourfamily,” Celine continued, sneering out that last word, “anywhere near mine.”
Of course, she meant her aunt.
“You think I want to?” Valerie asked, keeping her voice quiet. “You think I asked for this?”
Surprise went through Celine’s eyes.
After what she’d witnessed tonight, Valerie wanted nothing to do with Gabriel Larchmont or his family. But she didn’t have a choice.
Celine went quiet and looked back at her night garden.
“Our marriage was arranged,” she said softly. “Derek’s and mine.”
Valerie figured as much.
“It works,” Celine said. “But only with a lot of understanding and forgiveness. And lies.”
Valerie’s lips pressed together. She understood what she was saying.
“So he doesn’t know?”
About Celine going to the Krave brothel.
“He’d kill me if he found out,” Celine whispered, not even bothering to hide her response. She said it so easily, as if mentioning the weather. “And she knows that.”
Madame Allegria.
“I do love him,” Celine said, “in my own way.”
Valerie nodded hesitantly.
“But this whole ordeal has spooked me,” she confessed and Valerie wondered if her tongue would be so loose without all the wine. “I want my son to marry. But not like this. I don’t want him to livethislife.”
