Heidi Rice - Call Me Cupid - The Guy to Be Seen With / The First Crush Is the Deepest / Too Close for Comfort

He wanted to close his eyes, as if doing so could block out the sound of her voice, but he was transfixed by the sight of the fly settling on the fleshy pad of one of the plant’s open traps. He shook his head, warning the insect off.

Fly away. Escape while you still can.

‘So, what I’m doing, Daniel...’ She paused, gave a little nervous laugh. ‘What I’m saying is...is that I’d like you to marry me.’

In one swift, smooth motion the flytrap closed over the fly. Not so much a snapping as an elegant but relentless squeezing. Daniel could hear the creature’s frantic buzzing, see it struggling in the trap as the teeth-like cilia closed tighter and tighter over its head.

Don’t. Struggling only makes it worse.

A terrible silence settled around him. All sound disappeared. Even the visitors to the botanical gardens, who could often still be heard from the private nurseries, had hushed. It seemed the whole of London was holding its breath, waiting for his answer.

‘Is this a joke, George?’ he croaked, a horrible pleading tone in his voice.

This wasn’t the Georgia he knew. The nice, uncomplicated, undemanding woman he’d been seeing for almost a year. His Georgia knew he didn’t have the emotional space for a proper relationship right now, let alone a marriage. His Georgia understood that and accepted that. So who was this, borrowing her voice and asking him out-of-the-blue questions—on the radio, for heaven’s sake? Not even person to person, face to face.

Who proposed in public, anyway? It should be done privately and quietly. Preferably to someone other than him.

He squeezed his teeth together to stop himself from demanding an explanation, right here, right now. He was suddenly furious with her for springing this on him, for changing the rules and moving the goalposts of their relationship while he hadn’t been looking. This wasn’t what they were about and she knew that.

At least, he’d thought she’d known that.

Silky Smooth chuckled again. ‘Well, Georgia, you seem to have rendered the poor man speechless! What do you say, Daniel? Are you going to put this gorgeous girl out of her misery or what?’

That doused his billowing temper quick smart.

What was he going to say?

He could imagine Georgia sitting there at the radio station, a fixed smile on her face and fear in her eyes, bravely trying to pretend it was all right, when really her heart was pounding and her eyes filling.

It wasn’t that Georgia wasn’t a lovely woman. She was determined and intelligent and sensible. Any man would be lucky to have her. He should want to say yes.

But he didn’t.

He really didn’t.

He wasn’t ever going to go down that road again, no matter how lovely the woman in question.

There was a crackle on the line and noise started filtering through again—the hiss of the automatic misting system in the nursery next door, the squeak of a door farther down the corridor, a plane flying low overhead on its way to Heathrow. And Daniel was suddenly very aware that more than a hundred thousand pairs of ears 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.