WILDFLOWER MUSE

  BY

  PANDORA PINE

  Wildflower Muse

  Copyright © Pandora Pine 2023

  All Rights Reserved

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, events, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Digital Edition: January 2023

  PROLOGUE

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  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Austen

  Thunder crackled in the night sky. Austen Simms knew it was only a matter of time until the storm hit and the power went out. Her husband, well, soon to be ex-husband, Chris, was an hour late coming home from the office. After nearly two months of trying to work up the nerve, tonight was the night she would ask for a divorce.

  Bursts of lightning briefly illuminated the darkened living room. Austen sat at the dining room table, a cup of chamomile tea growing cold at her elbow. Her cat, Mr. Darcy, sat in her lap, purring until Austen stopped stroking his head.

  Married for five years, Austen had met Chris at a friend’s wedding. He’d been a groomsman, while she’d spent far too much money on yet another butt-ugly bridesmaid’s dress. She’d just heard “always a bridesmaid, never the bride,” for the tenth time that day, when out of the blue, like a hero on a white horse, Chris swooped in and saved her, not only from the well-meaning and happily married maid of honor, but from the humiliation of the bouquet toss, which never failed to turn her stomach. Grown women battling for a ratty symbol that they’ll be the next lucky lady in love. It was all bullshit as far as Austen was concerned.

  She and Chris had sat at the bar, downing Cosmopolitans and snacking on tapas plates, which had been served while the wedding party shot endless photos. Austen had been too out of sorts to have done more than poke at her overdone chicken when the meal was served, but sitting with Chris, who’d instantly calmed her shredded nerves, her appetite roared back.

  When the last song of the night was played, Endless Love, by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, Austen’s nerves started jangling again. She liked Chris a lot, but wasn’t the kind of girl who went to bed with someone on a first date.

  Austen needn’t have worried. When the final strains of the song died out and the DJ wished the new mister and missus a lifetime of love and bone-melting sex, Chris had whisked her away on his white horse, in the form of a souped-up Ford Mustang, back to the hotel, kissing the back of her hand like a knight of yore, before making sure she shut and locked the door behind her.

  Six months later, they were engaged and married three months after that. Austen had been happy during those first two years. Who wouldn’t love being married to their best friend? Her only complaint was that their first time together was okay. She’d been reading romance novels her whole life with heroines who saw stars when their heroes touched their hand, never mind their private bits. Austen had never seen stars, with the exception for that time Chris accidently knocked her skull against the headboard. The sex was okay, she guessed. Chris made her come, but compared to what she was able to do for herself, those orgasms were only meh too.

  Their first married fight had been when Chris accused her of lying there like a dead fish when they had sex. He wasn’t being untruthful, per se, but there had to have been a better way of telling her their sex life needed spicing up. Problem was, she’d thought it was spicy enough as it was. The fight had ended with Chris sleeping in the guest bedroom, which in happier times had been marked as a future nursery.

  One night in the spare room had turned into two, and before she’d known it, her husband had been sleeping there for three years. Their friendship died a slow, painful death over those years, with neither one of them all that interested in performing CPR.

  Thunder rolled, shaking the house. Austen wrapped her cardigan more tightly around her shoulders. She tucked her long blond hair behind her ears and listened as shouting came from the front door, followed by the sound of metal scraping against metal. Seconds later, a soaking wet Chris burst into the house.

  Austen listened as Chris loudly cursed out the rain, and everything else that had gone wrong in his life, stopping before he got to her. “We need to talk!” he thundered as he strode into the kitchen on his way to the laundry room, leaving puddles of rainwater in his wake.

  She took a few deep breaths, willing herself to stay calm. Obviously, they’d both reached the same decision about ending their marriage, so this conversation would be a piece of cake. Austen had a book and a box of chocolates waiting for her upstairs.

  “Listen to me, you frigid bitch!” Chris shouted as he walked out of the laundry room, toweling his hair dry. He skidded in a puddle of his own making, but managed to somehow keep his balance. God always protected kids and drunks. Wasn’t that the old saying?

  Okay, maybe not a piece of cake, but rather a bitter pill. Austen might be mild mannered, but she wasn’t going to sit here and listen to her husband hurl insults. “I want a divorce,” she said quickly, when Christ paused for a breath to reload.

  Her words only served to ratchet up his temper. “Oh, you want a divorce? Find someone else who’ll let you spend their money, did you?”

  Chris was drunker than she’d ever seen him. In all the years they’d been married, she’d never heard him shout like this and certainly not with venom dripping from every word. “Your money?” Austen had worked as a legal secretary for the past ten years. While they had a joint checking account for an equitable 50-50 split of the household bills, each kept their own checking account, something Austen’s mother always found odd. She was thankful now, in the light of Chris’s tantrum, that she had money socked away he couldn’t touch. “I’m not seeing anyone else and you know it,” she deadpanned, hoping that keeping her voice level would take some of the fight out of Chris. It didn’t.

  “Yeah! Well, I am seeing someone else! Lots of someones, as a matter of fact!” Chris pulled out the chair in front of Austen, tried to sit and skidded off the seat, landing in a heap on the floor.

  It crossed Austen’s mind to film this tirade. Her husband just admitted to adultery, not that it mattered with California being a no-fault divorce state. Instead, she picked up Mr. Darcy and headed for her bedroom. She had plans to make, the first of which being finding a divorce lawyer and filing papers.

  “The fuck is the matter with you?” Chris hollered after her. “I’m fucking everything in heels and you don’t shed a tear or tell me to get the fuck out?”

  Chris’s words stopped Austen in her tracks, but not for the reason she thought they would. Her soon-to-be ex-husband had a point. She wasn’t the least bit upset that he was tomcatting around. What she felt, instead, was free.

  Funny, that.

  1

  Austen

  June, one year later…

  It was a clear, cool morning in Summit Springs, Colorado. Austen breathed in a lungful of fresh air as she stepped out the door, locking it behind her. Today was a big day. She had a meeting with her bosses, Cindy and Barb Whelan, owners of Rocky Mountain Books, with an idea that could potentially save the business and her own job.

  In the twelve months since Chris’s drunken confession, everything in Austen’s life had changed. She’d filed for divorce the very next day, which Chris hadn’t contested. He’d bought her out of her half of the house and with the ink still wet on the divorce decree, she’d headed west in her fifteen-year-old Chevy, which had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  The car had bucked and wheezed into Summit Springs one dark and stormy night. Why the hell did it seem like the biggest moments of her life were heralded by cataclysmic weather? At least the car had broken down in the middle of a June thunderstorm, rather than a January blizzard.

  Of course, at the time, she hadn’t realized the quaint town was the beginning of her fresh start. It had been Barb who’d noticed her car on the side of the road and offered her a ride into town. They’d chatted like they were old friends during the ten-minute drive, and by the time Barb dropped her off at a sweet bed and breakfast, Austen knew she was home. Barb’s job offer had been the icing on the cake.

  Grabbing her umbrella, Austen dashed off the front porch of the cute bungalow she’d bought and started her walk to work. The temperature was in the sixties, but with the rain, it felt much cooler. Off to her right, what she’d come to think of as her mountains, were bathed in fog, their summits hidden. The peaks, which sometimes generated their own weather, were a constant reminder of how quickly life could change.

  As she hustled down the street, Austen caught a whiff of the most heavenly scent on the planet. Coffee. She stood in the crosswalk, having to jump back when a car with Wyoming plates sped past, soaking her pants and shoes. “Asshole!” she shouted. California Austen never would have bellowed like that in the middle of the street. There were a lot of things her old self never did that Colorado Austen relished.

  Sighing over her drenched pants, she dashed across the street and into Caffeine Ivy’s, her favorite local shop. S he loved the friendly service and assortment of handmade pastries. “Hey, Em!” Austen greeted as she walked into the shop.

  “Here’s your usual.” Emily Lewiston pushed a coffee and a pastry bag toward her. “I saw what happened out there and figured I’d save time.”

  “Thank you. It’s been a bit of a rough start.” Austen loved living in a place where someone knew her usual. She could practically taste the sweet and creamy brew. The croissant, part of Em’s “Twofer Tuesday” promotion, was just what she needed to put her soggy morning behind her. “Can I also get a turkey sandwich and chips? It’s going to be an eat at my desk kind of a day.” Austen usually went out for lunch. Downtown Summit Springs had a bustling square filled with cafes and shops. Not that she overly minded a working lunch when she had the best job in town, at Rocky Mountain Reads, the local bookshop.

  “Here you go,” Emily said, bagging her lunch. “That’ll be $11.50.”

  Austen handed her fifteen. “See you later, alligator.”

  Emily laughed. “After a while, bibliophile!”

  Cackling, Austen grabbed her bags and headed out the door. It was raining even harder now than when she’d entered the shop. Thankfully, her office, her Nirvana, actually, was only a few doors down.

  The bell over the shop door tinkled as she entered. The second best scent in the world, after her coffee, was the smell of fresh books. The shop was a bright and airy space with hardwood floors and row after row of delicious paperback and hardcover books ranging from tawdry, bodice-ripping romance novels, to textbooks on calculus and animal husbandry. “Good morning!” Austen called out.

  “We’re in here, girl! Ready and waiting for your presentation.” Cindy called out from the break room, sounding very chipper for a Monday morning.

  Austen’s stomach tightened. She’d spent all weekend working on this idea and knew her words by heart. The problem was Cindy and Barb’s hesitancy to evolve with the times. “Here I am!” Austen announced, walking into the lunch room that doubled as a meeting space, storage, and arts and crafts room for Friday Frolics, the afterschool program for kids.

  Barb and Cindy sat side by side at the rectangular table. Where Barb was blond and petite, Cindy with her dark hair and eyes, stood closer to six feet tall and had gone to college on a basketball scholarship.

  Working quickly, Austen plugged in her laptop and turned it on. While it booted up, she went over her speech in her head one final time. “We’ve all heard the expression time marches on,” she began, her nerves instantly vanishing. “Think of a company like Blockbuster Video. An organization that boomed during its heyday with nine thousand individual stores and about six billion dollars in profits. They refused to evolve with streaming technology, and Netflix swooped in and capitalized on their reticence. Where is Blockbuster now? Down to one last storefront in Bend, Oregon.” Austen paused to let her words sink in. “Thanks to the advent of e-books and the ability to stream audiobooks, we find ourselves in the same leaky boat. The question is, are we going down like the Titanic? Or are we going to evolve with the times?”

  Barb and Cindy exchanged a wordless glance.

  A flare of jealousy spread through Austen’s body. She remembered when she and Chris had been able to communicate without a single word being said. She didn’t necessarily miss her husband, but she did miss the closeness they’d shared, once upon a time.

  “We’ve been over this before, Austen.,” Barb began. “We refuse to let the e-book trade affect the way we do business. People need a place they can go to browse for a birthday gift or to pick up the latest Stephen King bestseller. We’re just fine as we are.”

  Austen knew this was the kind of pushback she’d get from the older women. Both in their fifties, Cindy and Barb had been married since 2014, when Colorado legalized gay marriage, but they’d been together since the late eighties when they met in college. Judging by the flirty looks passing back and forth between them during the course of the day, they were just as much in love today as they had been when crimped hair and leg warmers were in style.

  “You went along with my plan to add an occult section with crystals, tarot cards and books about psychic powers, and look what happened. Sales are through the roof.” Austen beamed with pride. Unfortunately, those sales weren’t going to be enough to save the business.

  Cindy nodded. “We’ve already given you permission to add on to the occult collection in the store.”

  “Yes, you have, and I not only want to expand the selection, but to add a different kind of media to the shop.” This was where the rubber met the road. It was one thing to expand the store for the local witch and psychic population. What she was about to propose was a different story.

  “What do you mean?” Cindy’s bright eyes narrowed on Austen, as if she thought Austen was about to suggest the shop start holding seances. Which, in truth, wasn’t the worst idea.

  “Social media is the most powerful marketing tool at our disposal,” Austen said.

  “You know we hate the idea of sharing our lives on FaceGram, or whatever the hell it’s called.” Barb rolled her eyes.

  Austen laughed. She knew her bosses’ distrust of social media ran deep. Both women had been harassed online for their relationship and political beliefs, causing them to shut down their accounts years ago. “You wouldn’t be sharing anything. I would, and not in the way you might think.” She paused, waiting for some sort of response from her bosses. Cindy leaned forward as if to hear better. Austen took that as a sign to continue. Hitting a button on her computer, a single PowerPoint slide projected onto the wall in front of them.

  “Blog. Podcast. Classes. Insta. Facebook Live Book Reading,” Barb read. “I don’t understand what this is.”

  Cindy nodded in agreement.

  “People love books. There’s no doubt about that. There’s also no doubt that we can’t compete with Amazon or Audible.” Austen knew the women needed a little dose of reality. Large brick and mortar stores like Barnes and Noble couldn’t compete with Amazon. How the hell could they?

  “Thank you, Mary Sunshine. What’s your point?” Barb looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but in this meeting. A dangerous sign for Austen’s proposal.

  “My point is that we need to capitalize on commodities that are book adjacent. Blog entries and podcasts will bring in advertising revenue, if we have the right hook for readers. We could hold nighttime classes with guest teachers to show patrons how to read tarot or how to create charcuterie boards. We’d record those sessions and put them online. I could take photographs of the shop and our books and make stories for Instagram. The local kids love when you read stories to them on Friday Frolics. Let’s capitalize on that for adults. Bring authors into the shop to do book readings and signings.” It was this last point Austen was hoping would be the hook she needed to bring Rocky Mountain Reads back to life or at least into the twenty-first century.

  “We’re not Barnes and Noble. How on earth would we get big name authors here?” Barb asked, sounding dispirited.

  Austen grinned. Her boss had taken the bait. “Summit Springs is the Key West of the Rockies. This town is a mecca for gay and lesbian tourists.”

  “And your point is?” Cindy frowned, looking as if she were about finished with this conversation.

  “We don’t need Stephen King to come here, although it would be nice. What we need are gay and lesbian authors,” Austen suggested. Sometimes the simplest answers were the best ones.

  “Are there such a thing?” Barb asked, sounding as if she may have misjudged Austen’s plan.

  Austen tapped the keyboard and pulled up her Amazon wish list. She scrolled through the bright colored covers. “All of these books are written by lesbian authors. Francesca Bianco is the queen of lesbian romance.” Tapping the author’s name, Austen scrolled through Francesca’s long backlist.

  “She must have over fifty titles. Why have we never heard of this woman?” Barb asked.

  Austen sighed. She worried how her bosses would take what came next. “Because the two of you have been like ostriches with your heads in the sand. Francesca is self-published through Amazon. She doesn’t have the backing of a traditional publishing house. She’s an indie author.”

 

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