Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

their wedding day, down to the lace hemming the bell of the bride’s tea-length skirt.
    Fifty years together, she thought as she studied the photos. All those days and nights, birthdays and Christmases. The births, the deaths, the arguments, the laughter.
    It was, to her, more romantic than windswept moors and fairy castles.
    She’d give them their garden. A world of gardens.
    She started with daffodils, potting them in long, moss-lined troughs, mixing in tulips and hyacinths, narcissus. Here and there she added trails of periwinkle. A half dozen times she filled a rolling cart, wheeled it back to her cooler.
    She mixed gallons of flower food and water, filling tall glass cylinders. She stripped stems, cut them under running water and began arranging larkspur, stock, snapdragons, airy clouds of baby’s breath, lacy asparagus fern. Soft colors and bold, she’d mass them at various heights to create the illusion of a spring garden.
    Time ticked away.
    She paused long enough to roll her shoulders, circle her neck, flex her fingers.
    Using the foam holder she’d soaked, she circled it with lemon leaf to create a base she glossed with leaf shine.
    She gathered roses for her holding bucket, stripped stems, barely bothered to curse when she nicked herself, cutting the stems to length to make the first of fifty reproductions of the bouquet the bride had carried a half century before.
    She worked from the center out, painstakingly locking each stem in the form with adhesive. Stripping, cutting, adding—and appreciating the bride’s choice of multicolored roses.
    Pretty, Emma thought, happy. And when she tucked the holder in the squat glass vase, she thought: lovely.
    “Only forty-nine to go.”
    She decided she’d start on that forty-nine after she took a break.
    After carting bags of floral debris out to her composters, she scrubbed the green off her fingers and from under her nails at her work sink.
    To reward herself for the morning’s work, she took a Diet Coke and a plate of pasta salad out on her side patio. Her gardens couldn’t compete—yet—with the one she was creating. But her happy couple had been married in southern Virginia. Give me a few weeks, she mused, pleased to see the green spears of spring bulbs, the freshening foliage of perennials.
    Last night’s snow was just a memory under blue skies and almost balmy temperatures.
    She spotted Parker with a group of people—one of the day’s potential clients doing the tour—crossing one of the terraces at the main house. Parker gestured toward the pergola, the rose arbor. The clients would have to imagine the abundance of white roses, the lushness of wisteria, but Emma knew the urns she’d planted with pansies and trailing vinca showed off very well. At the pond dotted with lily pads, the willows were just beginning to green.
    She wondered if the prospective bride and groom would one day have a busy florist creating fifty bouquets to commemorate their marriage. Would they have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren who loved them enough to want to give them that celebration?
    With a small groan for muscles aching from the morning’s exercise and the morning’s work, she propped her feet on the chair across from her, lifted her face to the sun, and shut her eyes.
    She smelled earth, the tang of mulch, heard a bird chittering its pleasure in the day.
    “You’ve got to stop slaving away like this.”
    She jerked up—had she fallen asleep?—and blinked at Jack. Mind blank, she watched him pluck a curl of pasta from her plate, pop it into his mouth. “Good. Got any more?”
    “What? Oh God!” Panicked, she looked at her watch, then breathed a sigh of relief. “I must’ve dozed off, but only for a couple minutes. I have forty nine bouquets left to make.”
    His brows drew together over smoky eyes. “You’re having a wedding with forty-nine brides?”
    “Hmm. No.” She shook her head to clear the cobwebs. “Fiftieth anniversary, and a