oh, anna- h.s

1. flowers

Liliana

Ever since I was a child I loved the smell of flowers. Maybe it was meant to be since I was named after a mixture of my mother's favourite flower and her own name. Not that she wanted me to be like her or anything.

Either way, it worked. Now I'm a florist in Covent Garden that has a cafe attached to it. My whole life is flowers. It could be worse, my world smells beautiful and thankfully I don't suffer from hay fever.

My day normally consists of watching soppy love infested people buying roses for their loved ones, children wanting to please their mothers and gloomy husbands looking for an apology for working late or getting caught that one time with their secretary.

Valentines Day was one of my busiest days for obvious reasons. Roses were one of my favourite flowers and the amount of red roses surrounding me on that day released unprecedented amounts of serotonin into my brain.

All customers that came in were buying for loved ones and even though I was single and deeply alone, I always enjoyed handing out bouquets to make other people happy.

"Hello, love." A voice snapped me out of my trance with its deep voice. I looked up to see a familiar face, a man with bright green eyes and shoulder length curly brown hair. He looked rather princely.

"Hi, how can I help?" I shot him my best retail smile but it faded as soon as he flashed me his. It was probably the most beautiful smile I'd ever seen.

"How many roses do you have in your shop?" He asked, one hand rummaging around in his back pocket. I wasn't quite sure what he meant.

"Well how many would you like?" I stretched out my hands across the table, ready for this man to make me put together a ridiculous amount of roses. His eyes fell to my hands briefly before flicking back to my eyes.

"All of them." He smirked. There was a brief moment where we were just stood staring at each other, I was trying to figure out whether he was joking or not and he was waiting for me to answer.

"You're not gonna even give any other man a chance?" I pushed backwards from my hands, looking around to see how many roses I could muster. He smiled, running one hand through his curls, sending them into disarray.

"Dont put it like that, I'm trying to be romantic." He couldn't stop looking at my hands, his eyes watched them flick through my clipboard to see how many roses we had left.

"You want them all?" My voice snapped, realising what he was asking me to do. He gave me a crooked smile as if he was trying to contain himself.

"Every single one."

Taking in a deep breath, I nodded. This man was a madman and whoever was receiving these flowers were going to have a lot of cleaning up to do later on.

"Okay, do you want them delivered?" I asked, assuming he would say yes because there were hundreds of roses. My hand itched the table, scraping my nails nervously for the amount of paperwork I was about to do.

"Hmm, no thanks. I think I can fit them all in my car." My head snapped back to him, he must be insane. Is he ordering all the roses and can't even afford delivery.

"Yeah if you want pollen all over your car." I pointed out. He shrugged as if it was light work. I wondered whether he had ever worried about anything in his life at any time.