Kylo (Golden Glades Henchmen MC #11)

Chapter One

Rue

“You’ve been a real pain in the butt this week,” I grumbled, ducking low to push with my legs, not my back.

I’d already tweaked it earlier this week moving the absolutely massive monstera in its heavy clay pot out of the greenhouse since it decided on a random Wednesday that the spot that had been its home for the past four years was suddenly horribly insufficient and threatened to die on me.

Now I was moving it back into said greenhouse since it decided that the outside was even less up to its standards.

I was hoping it wasn’t time for another repotting.

The plant (with its ceramic pot, dirt, and support pole) easily weighed close to a hundred pounds. Even on a little rolling cart, it was difficult to work with. I was dreading the idea of having to take it apart to give it fresh dirt.

“Maybe I’ll make my life easier and take a sledgehammer to this stupid pot and put you in something lighter,” I told the plant with leaves larger than my head as I pushed it to the small greenhouse door. Even if, objectively, I knew the pot had to be big and heavy if I wanted it not to topple over.

I moved over to open and prop the door open.

The greenhouse was a living thing—warm, damp, and sweet with the scent of dirt.

Morning light filtered through the dusty glass room, golden rays gliding across the rows of hanging baskets.

There were soft clouds of mist drifting down from the automatic sprayers, and the low hum of the fans mingled with the chirp of a random cricket that had gotten trapped inside the day before.

This was what I affectionately referred to as my office. I spent the early mornings here before the shop opened, checking on the progress of transplants and the root growth of clippings from the larger mother plants that were in the store.

They were my little babies, proof of hours spent carefully tending to their needs.

Once they were strong enough, they would undergo a process I called “boot camp,” in which they would be abused in various ways (overwatering, underwatering, giving them too much or too little light), in the hopes that they would then be sturdy enough to go home with new plant moms and dads who were likely not going to meet their needs perfectly at first.

Sure, killing plants was an unfortunate part of being a plant collector. It took some work to figure out what kind of care different plants required. It just broke my heart a little at the idea of some of these very rare, incredibly expensive, plants not making it.

I had another smaller greenhouse called Plant Prison, where I kept the plants that came in on shipments once a month.

The ones from garden centers or even imported from South and Central America.

I couldn’t have possible infestations of spider mites or mealybug infestations ruining all of my other plants.

So they went right into quarantine and usually got a preventative few weeks of treatments before they finally made it to the shelves in the store.

Going back behind the monstera that I couldn’t be too mad at since it had provided dozens of babies since I’d started cultivating her, I pushed her back into the greenhouse and set her back in her usual corner.

A long pothos vine tickled my face as I passed.

Just the week before, it had been nearly touching the floor before I gave it a big haircut and made a solid three starter plants out of the clippings.

Pothos, a basically unkillable houseplant, was always the first plant I offered to people new to keeping plants.

I once had one in a dark, windowless bathroom for nearly a year, and the dang thing was still going strong.

I walked along the rows of plants in various states of growth, sucking in a deep breath, letting everything else drift away.

There was something holy about these mornings—the gentle drip of condensation, the whisper of life growing all around me. It made all the noise and ugliness of the world fall away.

“Whoops,” I said, spying the glass cup with a top and straw sitting next to the spider plant I’d potted the afternoon before. The coffee was watery from the melted ice cubes.

The craving was instantaneous after a night of broken sleep. I snatched the cup up and walked back out of the greenhouse.

I entered the back door of the shop, going into the postage stamp-sized kitchen that served as the employee break room.

Even though the only other employee I had was a nineteen-year-old named Traeger who, to his parents, was taking his second gap year after high school while he “narrowed down what he wanted to do with his life.” Everyone but his parents seemed to know and embrace his dreams of opening his own pottery studio one day.

Nearly all of the planters I now sold in the studio were his creations.

Hell, I’d even let him use an old shed on the property as his studio, paying a heart-stopping amount of money to an electrician to put a 240v line out there to accommodate the medium-sized kiln he’d purchased with the money from his first few paychecks from working for me.

We had a deal in which he gave me a break on the cost of the pots in exchange for the electricity he used.

Though with the way he was currently scaling up—opening several online storefronts and setting up a booth at every farmer’s market he could—I had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before he outgrew this setup and would need to move on to his own actual studio.

I hated the idea of having to find a replacement.

It wasn’t that the job was all that difficult or that I was hard to get along with; I just really loved the easy-going dynamic I had with Traeger.

He was light, breezy, fun, and always up for a random singalong to some silly pop song or musical soundtrack between customers.

Plus, he made the best iced coffee in the world. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t seem to replicate it. I tried to convince him that a pottery studio slash coffee shop wasn’t that crazy an idea. Preferably opened up right next to my plant store.

I made my way to the espresso machine, narrowing my eyes at it and its refusal to give me the same quality coffee Traeg got out of it, and filled the portafilter.

“Stop,” a voice called, making my lips automatically curl up, “right there,” he finished as I turned to look at him.

Traeger was a—let’s call it—“eccentric” dresser.

He wore a white camp shirt with a pattern featuring little black cats rearing up to swat at the crescent moon.

He paired that with a pair of rainbow board shorts because, as he put it, he was ‘never more than five minutes away from heading to the beach.’

That was evidenced by his golden skin that set off his bright blue eyes and sandy blond hair all the more.

Traeger might not be what someone would call ‘classically handsome,’ but he was still undeniably attractive with his wide forehead, generous mouth that was always prone to smiling, and a lightly cleft chin.

“You know better than to try to romance that machine,” he told me as he reached to remove the crossbody bag (that was really just a fanny pack worn across the chest for some reason). “You know it only has love for me.”

I threw up my hands and backed away from the machine as he moved forward with a wave of cologne.

Okay. That was possibly the only thing I didn’t absolutely adore about my coworker.

His cologne had that too-clean scent to it, where I preferred earthy, natural, spicy scents.

Since it had been his signature scent since his fifteenth birthday when his mom first took him to a store and bought him his first (very expensive) bottle, there was no way I could ask him not to wear it.

Traeg made a clucking sound as he removed the portafilter. I had no idea what I could have messed up by putting grounds into a little circle, but I somehow managed to do it. He dumped them out, scooped them in again, tamping them down, then repeating the process.

Meanwhile, I washed out the glasses from the day before, added ice, and handed them over to the coffee master.

“Make anything fun last night?” I asked, knowing that after I’d locked up, he’d gone off to his shed.

“Made you a few six-inch pots,” he said, knowing they were the most frequently sold ones. “And did a lot of coffee mugs. I posted a video that went a little viral, so now I have orders coming out my ears.”

“That’s a good problem to have.”

“It is. But it’s cutting into my socializing time.”

“You’re young. You have plenty of time to socialize. And you can have a lot more fun socializing if you have some money in your pocket.”

“True. I hear mixed drinks are like twenty-something bucks in the good clubs in Miami.”

“You’ve got another two years before you need to worry about that.”

Don’t rush it, I urged him silently. As someone who was in such a rush to grow up, I’d missed out on so much along the way.

“Um, a year and four months, actually.”

“Just the fact that you’re counting months still means you don’t need to worry about the cost of mixed drinks,” I said, getting a little laugh out of him.

He finished his coffee magic, and I let out a whimper at the first taste.

“Maybe if you got yourself a boyfriend, I could teach them to make your coffee right for you.” At my curled lip, he smiled. “Or girlfriend.”

“Boys, unfortunately,” I grumbled, maybe a little bitter still from the last date I’d had.

He’d seemed like a perfectly nice guy when he’d chatted me up in the line at the sandwich shop.

And then on the date, he’d gone off on a tangent about how he didn’t only think women shouldn’t own their own businesses, but that we shouldn’t be ‘allowed’ to live alone or vote.

“Just because some have their brains rotted from alpha-bro podcasters doesn’t mean they’re all bad,” Traeger reminded me. It was a very optimistic mindset considering his last boyfriend had cheated on him mercilessly and then convinced him he was crazy for suspecting as much.