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Privacy and cookie detailsShe has spent eighteen years preserving light. He makes light that refuses to stay still.
Blythe wants the man whose moving light cannot mingle with her glass garden. Keeping him outside is becoming harder.
Completed · 18 chapters · 1h 51m
SteamyIntense chemistry. Sensual intimacy.Heat guideYearning · Tender · Witty
Loss of personally meaningful artwork, Interpersonal deception, Artistic exclusion and disappointment
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Dear Maeve,
I stopped Keir Aveling at my garden gate with a hand on his coat. I have been thinking about all the reasons I might have left it there.
Blythe Lowick catches Keir Aveling by his coat before he can cross her garden's copper threshold. She means to protect eighteen years of work. Instead, she finds herself wondering how his coat would feel if she pulled him closer. At thirty-seven, Blythe has made a life from keeping beautiful things unchanged. Her glass flowers hold moments of light, and the city's high conservatory may finally give her garden the place she has wanted for years. Keir, forty-one, carries eleven years of moving light inside a copper coil. His craft cannot mingle with hers without altering what each has made. Their fellow artists have opinions about people who try. An invitation to supper leads to a stolen mustard pot, a badly behaved golden moth and a kiss Blythe asks for herself. Keir notices the crooked flower she hides on inspection days. She begins to wonder what he is like when nobody is waiting to be dazzled. There are safe places to meet, ordinary rooms where neither has to risk a masterpiece. But desire has made the carefully arranged edges of Blythe's life feel very small. She wants this particular man close, and both of them have beautiful reasons to keep their distance.
The sensible reason was his open coil. I keep moments of light inside glass flowers; he makes light that moves. Let the two loose together and something beautiful will fail. I have spent eighteen years making sure it isn’t mine.
He apologised. Then he found the crooked amber flower I hide when my old teacher visits. He did not ask how long it had taken, or whether the colour was difficult. He noticed that I liked it, which was much more inconvenient.
I asked him to supper. Apparently I wanted another opportunity to be looked at like that.
There was a small incident with a mustard pot. I would prefer you to believe it was entirely his fault, though the eating-house woman would offer a different account. His golden moth landed on it. I laughed until I forgot to be impressive.
Then I asked him to put the light away and kiss me.
He did both. In that order, which seems worth mentioning when a man is very good at making things beautiful.
I have invited him back. His coil will be capped. My garden will be safe.
I am beginning to suspect those are the least complicated parts.
Blythe
From The Garden After Dark
Read this if you want a magical boundary and a heroine who has built something she fears changing.
Read this if you want sensual fantasy where wanting him could change her most treasured creation.
Enemies, rivals and forbidden love
First five chapters free. No card needed.
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