Elly in Love (The Elly Series) (15 page)

“Hello, Elly Jordan, Gemma Reynolds here, I’m the producer from
BlissBride
. I’m sure you remember me.”
Of course I do, you daft wit
, thought Elly. Then she frowned.
Was that a British thing? A daft wit?
She thought so. Elly generally prided herself on being very worldly. “Well, we met with the other two florists today, and even though I preferred both of them, my executive producer, Mr. Jackson, insisted that I show the pictures of your work to the client first.” There was a long pause and Gemma sounded equal parts pissed and incredulous. “I’m surprised to tell you that our celebrity has chosen you to be her florist for the twentieth episode of
BlissBride
. She was a big fan of the pink petals.” The Brit gave an exaggerated moan. “If you would like to accept the job, please give me a call back at….” The number was purposefully mumbled, and Elly was grateful that her cell phone had recorded it. “You have twelve hours to accept the job. If you do not, the position will be given to Sisters Flowers in Kirkwood. They did a beautiful orchid spread, with tropicals and greenery. Anyway, give me a call by tomorrow morning and let me know your decision. Thank you. And I just want you to know, that if it was up to me….”

Elly hung up the phone and stared at it in her hand. She was going to be on
BlissBride
. She was going to have enough money to open up another store. And she had a brother, one who she had thought was trying to kill her. Elly turned and looked at Cadbury, lying belly up on the couch, his one shaggy eye focused on her. “Holy crap,” she said out loud. Then she headed to the kitchen to pour a large glass of Riesling.

Elly shielded her eyes from the glare of the towering metal buildings. “I’m not sure about being
so
close to downtown. I mean, shouldn’t we look for something on a side street? Does it have to be quite so … corporate?”

Snarky Teenager snorted and raised her eyebrow at Elly. “Why, are you worried we’ll get too much business?”

Elly gave her a look. “Oh, I forgot, you’re eighteen. You must know everything about business.” It had been a week since she had met Dennis, a week since she found out she would be on
BlissBride
, and one day since she had woken up with a headache and a half-empty bottle of wine. Since then, things had moved rather quickly. Elly would be meeting with her celebrity client on Monday. She received her virtually limitless account for the wedding flowers and, after feeling both elated and faint, Elly took Snarky Teenager out to dinner and told her the good news: They could try opening another shop, but they would have to move quickly. The publicity they would get from
BlissBride
would be enough to sustain the new shop for its first year
. Which meant the store had to be open by the time the BlissBride wedding aired.
The idea was equal parts brilliant and insanity. They would officially open a few days after the
BlissBride
wedding and ride out the publicity wave. Together, they had framed a concept and a business plan. “Store B,” as they were calling it now, would be a contemporary shop in the Clayton business district, but it would be on a one-year trial. If it didn’t make money, she wouldn’t be able to keep it open. Snarky Teenager was pushing to be co-manager, alongside Elly, who she thought could rotate in to manage the store, occasionally. Elly laughed at this idea.
There was no way that would work.
Elly would manage both. Somehow. It was a lot to take in, and just talking about it had left Elly feeling nervous.

Today, they were out looking for a building that would work for them, and so far were having no luck. Rent in downtown Clayton wasn’t cheap, and each place they looked at was more expensive than the last. The first building reeked of cat pee and was little more than a glorified apartment. Elly had walked in and walked right out, knocking over a bag of beer cans with her shin. As she bent over to rub her leg, Snarky Teenager had bent over behind her and whispered against Elly’s ear, “I think I saw a sleeping bag in the corner. This building has squatters.” Without warning, a huge raccoon waddled out from the bathroom and rose up on its hind legs to hiss at them. It began moving toward them, and they both screamed and ran for the door. Once outside, Elly told the real estate agent that they weren’t interested and upped their budget significantly. They looked at three more buildings—all too small or too large or too next door to a Chinese restaurant, which Snarky Teenager pointed out would be stinky but also really bad for Elly.
She wasn’t wrong.
Finally, she had kindly dismissed the real estate agent, frustrated with her lack of options. Snarky Teenager then made some calls and implored Elly to look at “just one more.”

Elly’s fuchsia and lace shirt blew in the spring wind and she curled her lip as she took in the tall buildings around her. She felt slightly intimidated, standing here in the middle of the business district, bewildered by the millions of dollars changing hands on the street every day. She focused back on her worker, who was soaking up the spring sun in bright-coral cigarette jeans and a thin black tank top. “You need to listen to me. I’m just saying that a side street might be cheaper. We do not have to be on actual
Main Street
to make a profit.”

Snarky Teenager unfolded her long legs and jumped down from the low planter she had been straddling as she sipped her chai tea. “Yeah, but this place is going to be all about our status and the
idea
of it. The store won’t just be a store. It’s the attitude that we have to present, a sort of commercial prestige. The store itself has to be a place that is so hip that when someone gets a bouquet from us, they say it all snotty, like, ‘I
only
buy flowers from Red Zen.’”

“‘Red Zen’?” Elly wrinkled her nose. “I hate that. With a passion.”

“Yeah, that’s going to be the name of our store.”

“I don’t think so.” She looked down at her paper and then back up at the polished skyscraper. “Okay, well, the last one on the list is just inside the building.”

Snarky Teenager’s voice rose happily. “It’s i
nside
the office building?”

“Yeah. That’s weird. Don’t we want a store front that looks onto the street?”

“Are you kidding me? Elly, that’s supercool. That is a guaranteed market! Who else are all these workers going to call when they need flowers? Probably Red Zen, just down the elevator.”

“The store is one hundred percent not going to be called Red Zen.”

Snarky Teenager gave a huff as she winged her tea into the nearest trash can. “Whatever.”

Elly sighed. “You need to quit saying ‘whatever.’ It’s very juvenile and you can’t say stuff like that to clients and expect them to take you seriously.”

Snarky Teenager gestured to Elly like she was a queen. “I can sound respectable if I so desire. I just don’t really care about what I sound like in front of you. I mean, your pants have a tea stain on them, how seriously will they take
you?
” With an eye roll, she moved her gigantic aviator sunglasses to the top of her head.

Where do you even get sunglasses like that?
Elly wondered as she tried in vain to get the stain off her khaki Bermuda shorts. Snarky Teenager walked toward the office building, her long blond ponytail swaying wildly with each step, heels clicking loudly on the gray granite. She looked chic and confident, someone totally at ease in the business district.
She looked like money
. Elly tucked a blond curl into her bobby pin, knowing that she did not look like money. She looked like someone who ate pastries. Well, looking like money and being able to make money were two different things and she was pretty sure that Snarky Teenager didn’t know the difference.

Elly looked down at her clipboard, suddenly aware of just how frumpy it was to be holding a clipboard. “The landlord’s name is Zachary—he should be here any minute.” They headed inside the steel and glass building through a complicated revolving door. The center of the lobby was taken up by a vast, two-story rock waterfall. Rising out of the water were bronze sculptures of men emerging from suitcases holding lotus flowers. Water poured out from their hands, mingling with the low plants and white rocks that piled lazily around their ankles.

“Wow,” breathed Snarky Teenager, without a hint of irony. “I love this.”

“Pretty impressive,” mumbled Elly, “if you’re into that fountain thing.”

They sat down at a tiny table across from a Starbucks. “I could get used to this.” Snarky Teenager smiled.

The trickling sound of the fountain lulled Elly into peaceful nothingness.

“So, how’s your brother?”

She opened her eyes and saw Snarky Teenager peering down at her, her thick lashes split wide in honest curiosity. “Um … he’s, you know, new.” Elly had talked to Dennis twice since that horrible night in the shop. Both times on the phone had been clipped and awkward. Keith had checked on him daily at the Holiday Inn Express, and both times, Dennis had cracked the door open, mumbled that he was fine but wanted to sleep, taken the food from Keith, and slammed the door in his face. At the end of her patience, Elly had the front desk deliver him a handwritten note saying that she wanted to see him as soon as she could. Finally, Dennis had called and agreed to meet Elly for dinner tonight. She had woken up full of anxiety, her heart hammering in her chest.

“I can’t wait to meet him.” Snarky Teenager gave a dazzling smile. “I have always dreamed of meeting a male version of you.” Elly rolled her eyes.

“Are you Elly?” A male voice boomed through the lobby. Zachary, it turned out, was a much better salesperson than the previous agent had been. Considerably more attractive, with a chiseled face and a disarming boyish grin, he greeted them with bottles of water and a tape measure—“just in case.”

Elly gave a rhino-like snort.
How convenient
.
How old was this kid?
His teeth were so white that Elly suspected that they had been whitened within the last hour. Snarky Teenager was smitten, and a flirty waltz began, much to Elly’s misery. He led them down the hall from the fountain and through the twisted maze of the lobby. “As you can see here, you will have some impressive neighbors: Johnson Investors, Adama and Lee Insurance, Diggory International Shipping, Tacchi Financial, Bears and Bazookas, and about a hundred other companies all have their corporate headquarters here.”

Elly nodded, barely listening, her mind on Dennis.

“Well, here we are.” He gestured to a wide open space framed by glass in between the office doors. “It once was a wrap shop, but they went out of business pretty quickly.”

Elly raised her eyebrows at Snarky Teenager. Zachary saw it and jumped in with alarming charm. “Oh, it would be totally different for you guys. Their wraps were total crap. I heard some guy who works here almost died from their crab rolls.”

Snarky Teenager batted her eyes at the leasing agent. “That’s a shame. I, like, totally love seafood.”

Zachary reached out and took her arm. “I know a great place down in Ladue….”

Elly was grateful for their hormone-fueled conversation—it gave her time to look around the place. It was about a third of the size of Posies, and yet, she didn’t feel that it mattered. This would be a different kind of shop—the kind of shop where a delicately placed protea would replace mass tulips, a place where orchids would sell out over roses, and where tiny potted succulents crowded the counter, instead of fall mums. It was big enough to fit one, maybe two large coolers. They would have to build a desk and a design table. Other than that, there would be a tiny space for an elegant display in the middle of the store. The main displays would be in the huge windows, crisscrossed with metal beams. The long, thin room was small but useful. She turned to the chatty pair, who were both pretending to look at the walls, but were very focused on each other. “Excuse me, sorry, wow, holding hands already, okay … Zachary where would our deliveries come out?”

Zachary pulled himself away from Snarky Teenager’s smoldering eyes. “Ah, what? Oh, sorry, deliveries. Well, if you look back here….” He walked to the back and pulled a door out from the wall. “This door goes straight out to the delivery dock. No stairs, no elevators, nothing. You’re lucky this is on the first floor.”

Elly nodded. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, saying a small prayer for guidance. It felt as though there was a tiny finger pressing against her chest, a fluttering. She had known when she saw Posies that it was perfectly right. The world moved under her feet in that moment, a righting of her future. She was having that feeling again. This tiny store was exactly right in every unexpected way. This location would be everything: petite, contemporary, and hip. It wasn’t big enough to design weddings, but Posies would be their home base for weddings—she had anticipated that. This would be purely commercial flowers—flowers delivered to high-end bankers, accountants, and successful artists. Elly knew she should ask more questions, seek more answers, and act like she was not that interested. But that would be a waste of her time, and at this moment, between
BlissBride
, Keith, and Dennis, she didn’t have a lot of time to waste. Besides, Zachary looked like he had a manicure to get to.

She felt a soft, small hand on her elbow. Snarky Teenager nestled against her, her perfect little mouth in a hopeful question mark. “Can you give us a second?” her young worker asked Zachary, giving him a small smile that was sure to break his heart someday.

He nodded. “Absolutely, ladies.” He strolled out to the sterile hallway.

“I think this is perfect,” she hissed at Elly.

Elly, amused, smiled smugly.
She agreed, but why not let her sweat it out for a few minutes?
“Really? Why do you think so?”

Snarky Teenager began pacing in circles around Elly. “The location is ideal, right in the center of downtown Clayton. I mean, you couldn’t get any closer to the businesses if you tried. It’s in an office building that probably employs thousands and thousands of people, so that’s business you don’t have to advertise to get, they’ll walk by it every day. We can put sample arrangements in the Starbucks for free and get that connection, like Ada’s Coffee by Posies. The deliveries would be convenient—maybe even more convenient than Posies!” She spun on her heel to face Elly. “I know I can do this. I can make this store
amazing
. And we can price things really high here, just because of where we are.” Her tone rose dramatically. “I’m not sure we will find a better place than this. Zachary says he will cut us a deal if we go with him today, and I have a little bit saved up and maybe if I give that to you, you could do the first month’s rent….”