By: Linda Kage
Releasing
July 25, 2017
Self-Published
Tour Host: Tasty Book Tours
“Do you know how to
get to the rose garden?”
“No, you can’t go
there. A monster lives there.”
Shaw
Hollander is desperate.
Broke,
unemployed, and determined to help his ailing mother, he falls on the good
graces of a wealthy benefactor who is willing to give Shaw a job at his mansion
in order to pay off his mother’s debts. Suddenly finding himself surrounded by
lavish riches, he has no idea what his duties truly entail until he’s sent to
the rose garden and meets the tragically mutilated Isobel.
This Beauty
and the Beast story holds true to the core of the fable while shaking off the
element of fantasy and dragging it into present day reality. Shaw and Isobel
are ready to let you climb into their four-wheel-drive pickup and take a ride
with them into their version of happily ever after, but only if you first dare
to gaze upon the monster among the roses.
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Great. I was lost. Shading my hand
over my eyes, I decided the far right should take me in the general direction I
wanted to go. So I went that way, only to end up at the edge of the house, but
not where I’d started, and not close enough to the rose garden to get me
inside.
Strangely enough, however, a boy
played outside, using sidewalk chalk to color a picture of…what the hell was he
drawing? Maybe some kind of dying animal with blood gushing from its side and
an arrow sticking out of its back.
It didn’t look right, whatever it
was.
I shook my head and jerked my gaze
from the disturbingly morbid sketch. “Hey, kid.”
The boy jumped and looked up,
hopping to his feet and backing away from me as I were the scary one.
No idea who he was; he looked too
young to be Mr. Nash’s son from the photos I’d seen, plus he had white blond
hair, the complete opposite shade of the young man in all the pictures in Mr.
Nash’s office. But he was here, so he’d have to do.
Wanting to appear as non-threatening
as possible, I smile and waved. “Hey. Sorry for bothering you, but do you know
how to get to the rose garden?”
That must’ve been the wrong question
to ask. His face drained of color. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t
go there.”
What? “Why not?”
“A monster lives in there. Half her
face is melted off. She eats the thorns from the roses so she can spit them at
people, stabbing them in the neck to slice their throat open until they bleed
out and die.”
O…kay.
Somehow, I’d stumbled across one of
the children of the corn. Nice.
Lifting my eyebrows, I drew my own
step in reverse. Time to retreat. “Dude, that’s gruesome.”
Please don’t kill me.
Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.
He gave a serious nod. “It’s true.
My mom’ll tell you she’s real too.”
“Oh yeah?” Relieved he wasn’t
claiming he’d sprouted from Satan’s cabbage patch but actually had a mother, I
glanced around for this wise, all-knowing parent of his. Maybe she could tell me how to get to the
conservatory. “Who’s your mom?”
“The cook,” he said, puffing up his
chest as if that were the most important title in the house. “She’s worked here
for fifteen years. She knows everything about this place there is to know.
So…don’t go into the roses. You won’t come out alive. Lewis, the groundskeeper,
doesn’t even go in there.”
Aha! So this place did have a gardener. I knew it.
I took a second to ponder why I was
being sent to garden then, when Mr. Nash already paid someone to maintain the
place. But if Lewis refused to go into the roses, as the kid had said, maybe it
was rumored to be haunted or something, and that was where I came in. Then
again, why wouldn’t Mr. Nash just hire a new groundskeeper who wasn’t so scared
and superstitious? Then I stopped pondering the whys. It wasn’t my place to
question strange, rich people and their strange, oddball orders. I was just
here to do what I was told and save my mom.
Nodding gravely to the boy, I said,
“Thanks for the warning, kid. But I think I’ll take my chances. Which way?”
He looked at me as if he’d never see
me again because I was headed forth to my death, then he lifted his hand and
quietly pointed toward another opening in the path of bushes.
“Thanks.” I nodded and got out of
there before some of his creepiness started rubbing off.
Fortunately, he’d steered me in the
right direction. I landed right at the outdoor entrance into the glass gazebo.
Propping the door open, I carted my supplies inside and then paused to breathe
deeply.
But fuck me, it smelled good in
here. You didn’t have to be a flower enthusiast for this garden to amaze you.
It was like the holy shrine of roses. A hallowed kind of reverence filled my
chest. Haunted or not, I liked it. It felt peaceful and yet revitalizing.
Suddenly intimidated because I
didn’t want to mess anything up in such a perfect place, my hands shook as I
flipped back to the pages about rose care. The more I skimmed, however, the
more confused I became.
These roses didn’t need a lick of my
attention. They were all in excellent condition as if someone already tended to
them. Maybe creepy kid had been wrong, and Lewis the groundskeeper came in here
hourly to care for them.
Still…What the hell?
I frowned and slid my finger along
the silken petals of a blood red rose. Perfectly pruned, weeded, and watered.
It was as flawless as a thing could get.
But I couldn’t go tell Mr. Nash they
didn’t need anything, could I? What if he fired me for lack of work to do, or
because he thought I was lazy and lying about the roses not needing care?
I looked around again, searching for
anything to water, or clip, or re-soil. It was crazy how thriving every single
flower looked.
Maybe this was some kind of test,
and Mr. Nash wanted me to fail. What if he’d never intended for me to work for
him and the contract I’d signed to save my mom was being burned in the
fireplace in this office as I stood here like a dumbass with nothing to weed.
Confused and worried, and growing a
little angry, I scowled at a wall full of pink vine roses growing to my right.
But they were honestly too pretty to be glared at, so my mood settled.
I bet Mom would love them. She was a
fan of pink. And flowers. Plus, these were the good-smelling kind. I’d be a
good son if I brought home such a flower to her. And it seemed as if they grew
in abundance, not as if they were one of the rare breeds Mr. Nash had spoken
of. So I reached for a bloom to pluck it from the vine without even thinking
beyond how much it’d make my mother smile.
Behind me, a voice growled, “What
the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Jumping half out of my skin because
I’d been certain no one had been in here with me, I whirled around only to
gasp, “Shit!”
The creepy cook’s son hadn’t been
lying.
In
front of me stood an irate woman with half her face melted off.
I grew upon a dairy farm in the Midwest as the youngest of eight children. Now I live in
Kansas with my husband, two daughters, nine cuckoo clocks, and a cat named
Holly. My life's been blessed with lots of people to learn from and love.
Writing's always been a major part my world, and I'm so happy to finally share
some of my stories with other romance lovers.
I'm a member of Romance Writers of America, and I've been through a writing
correspondence class in children's literature from The Institute of Children's
Literarture, and then I continued my writing lessons by majoring in English
with an emphasis in creative fiction writing from Pittsburg State
University.
