might be listening to this conversation, of just how public and complete his girlfriend’s humiliation would be if he gave her the wrong answer.
Unfortunately, where he and Georgia were concerned, the wrong answer was the right answer.
He didn’t love her. He wasn’t sure he ever would, and she deserved better than that. Gently, he balanced his phone on his shoulder again and carefully put the now-satisfied Venus flytrap plant back down in its pot.
He should have known their relationship wouldn’t stay in wonderful, comfortable stasis they’d created. In this world, things moved on, grew, or they decayed.
He’d first met Georgia when Kelly had been halfway through her chemo. She’d been easy to be around. She’d helped him forget that his little sister might not see another Christmas, to forget that his rat of a brother-in-law had run off with his personal trainer and left his shell-shocked wife to deal with a cancer diagnosis—and two under-fives—all on her own. Without Georgia, he’d have hunted Tim down and fed him, bit by bit, to the largest and ugliest Nepenthes in his collection.
Daniel shook his head. The Venus flytap was completely closed now; he couldn’t even see the squirming fly inside.
He should have known that, eventually, Georgia would get ideas. The awful situation they were in now was as much his fault as it was hers. She wasn’t really asking anything horrendous of him, was she? But she was asking for something he wasn’t capable of. Not any more. And he’d been very clear about that.
‘I’m sorry …’ he said, more for not paying attention to what had been growing right under his nose than for what he was about to say. ‘We weren’t heading for marriage, I thought you knew that … That’s what made our thing so perfect …’
Our thing … Subtle, Daniel.
He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line, and he wished he could see her face to face, explain, without listening ears hanging on every syllable.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, and he could hear the artificial brightness in her tone, could almost see the sheen in her eyes. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest by a horse.
He shook his head. No, it wasn’t okay. He was hurting her horribly, but that didn’t mean he could say yes and condemn them to a lie that would ultimately make them both unhappy. He had to do what was best for Georgia, for both of them. He had to set her free for someone who could give her what she wanted.
‘I can’t, Georgia. You know why I can’t say yes.’
There was a moment of ghastly silence and then the DJ began talking again, laughing nervously, trying to smooth things over. Daniel didn’t hear any of his words. He didn’t even notice when music started to play in his ear.
He felt like a worm.
No, worse than that, because worms were useful, at least, and they didn’t harm anything.
He picked up the unearthed flytrap, plastic pot and all, and flung it against the wall of the carnivorous plants nursery. It hit the glass with a resounding bang that echoed over half the gardens. The cracked pot fell away, and the frail plant followed, landing with an almost soundless thump on the floor. Compost that had smeared against the glass began to crumble away and rain down on top of it.
That was when the disadvantages of working in a greenhouse made themselves apparent. Half a dozen curious pairs of eyes stared at him from various parts of the nursery. They must have thought the Head of Tropical Plants had lost his mind.
Or worse. They might have been listening to the radio.
Daniel closed his eyes, ran his hand through his hair, then swore loudly when he realised his fingers had still been covered in peat and perlite.
He opened his lids to find no one had moved. He glared at each and every pair of staring eyes in turn. ‘What?’ he yelled and, as one mass, the underlings scurried away back into their holes.
All he wanted was for this awful, consumer-fuelled excuse of a day to be over, so he could get back to normal, live his life without anyone listening to what he was saying or spying on what he was doing.
God, he hated Valentine’s Day.
Daniel froze as he was crouched down, his hand on the papery flute of a Sarracenia. Sunlight streamed through the glass roof, warming his back, and around him visitors milled, casually inspecting the exotic plants of the Princess of Wales Conservatory, one of Kew’s modern glasshouses. All in all, it seemed like a normal March day.
Except that, as he worked, the fine hairs on his arms and the back of his neck lifted.
He stood up and glanced around. He was in a vast greenhouse with ten climate-controlled zones, so it would be stupid not to expect people to see him, but it was more than that. It felt as if someone was watching him.
Georgia’s flopped Valentine’s proposal had produced a flurry of unexpected media attention. More than once in the last month he’d found himself staring at the business end of a paparazzo’s lens as he was trying to work. But that hadn’t been the only unwanted side-effect of publicly humiliating his ex-girlfriend. Now there seemed to be eyes on him everywhere, watching him, judging him.
Until his sister’s illness had forced him to come back to England, he’d loved his job working from Kew’s base in Madagascar. He’d loved being a seed hunter—searching out rare plants to collect their treasure, tracking down nearly extinct species. But this bizarre media interest made him feel much more like the prey than a hunter, and he didn’t like that one bit. No, not a role reversal he was comfortable with.
He finished checking the fine white and green patterned flutes of the pitcher plant and pushed open the door of the small Temperate Carnivorous Plants area and entered the much larger Wet Tropics zone. Here the heat-and-moisture-loving tropical varieties grew, including a large draping display of green and warm purple hanging pitchers. He worked methodically through the twisting tendrils, looking for dried out pitchers that needed to be dead-headed, checking for disease and parasites.
That was when he heard them.
‘Do you think he looks like Harrison Ford?’ a feminine voice said in a not-so-quiet whisper. ‘I’m not sure. He’s more like that one from the spy series on BBC.’
Daniel froze and imagined a horrible, jungle-related death for the reporter who’d jokingly compared him to the film legend. While the journalist had obviously been quite pleased with his ‘Indiana Jones with secateurs’ crack, Daniel hadn’t heard the end of it from his mates.
‘Not sure,’ a second voice said thoughtfully, and just as loudly. ‘But he’s definitely got that brooding, intelligent-but-dangerous thing going on. Have you seen those arm muscles …?’
There was a muffled snort from the first speaker. ‘Arms? I was too busy checking out his nice, tight little—’
Right. That was it.
He was fed up of being treated like a piece of meat, something to be stalked and discussed and ogled. Perhaps he should just jump up on one of the earthy beds and sit there with the plants, because as far as he could see he’d stopped being one of the staff and had morphed into a prime attraction.
When would this end? It was
