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behind it, but people wrote to her for advice from around the world. Her hand-grown seedlings were in high demand from professional gardeners, all of whom paid a premium for the exquisite Lily Hybrids, her name synonymous with the unique and the precious. The most recent one had incited a furious bidding war that had been major news in horticultural circles.
     Thea was so proud of her mom. She was also slightly scared of her. “I promise I’m not working,” she said, half closing the lid of the laptop. “I’m writing a letter to… a friend.”
    “What’s so important you have to spend days telling your friend about it?” Lily’s eyes grew bright on the final words, the delicate beauty of her face wreathed in a dazzling smile that lit up the golden brown of her skin from within. “A man!” Clapping her hands, she slid onto the wooden seat opposite Thea. “Tell me everything, Thea Alice.”
    Thea could bluff with the best of them, manipulate the media like an expert, but the one person she could never fool was her mother. “It’s not a man,” she began, then groaned when Lily pointed a finger at her. “Okay, okay, it’s a man. But I’m not sure I want to get involved with him.”
    “Why not? Is he like that one?”
    “That one” was Lily’s way of referring to Eric. “No,” Thea said at once. “No, he’s not like Eric.” Well, she hoped he wasn’t, but the simple fact was David was a rock star who had women buzzing around him like flies. Thea was too pragmatic not to understand what that might mean; fidelity wasn’t exactly a priority when there were a thousand women waiting in the wings should the current one prove too much of a hassle.
    “Thea.” Her mother reached across the table to take her hand, her eyes holding such a depth of love that it filled Thea to overflowing and made her own eyes burn. “What’s wrong, baby? You like this boy, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” Thea said, and it was a scary thing to admit. “But I’m not ready yet.”
    Expression gentle and steely at the same time, Lily shook her head. “When you suffer such a big hurt, the longer you permit it to live in you, the bigger it grows, until it seeks to devour your soul.”
    Thea felt tears roll down her cheeks, plop wetly onto the edge of the laptop lid. “Mama,” she whispered, painfully aware Lily was speaking from personal experience.
    Her mother had been a naïve girl of nineteen who barely spoke English when she’d gone to New Zealand on a work visa. Hired as a maid by Patrick and Karen Buchanan, she’d been proud and happy to be in a position to send money back to her parents and siblings in Indonesia. Except two weeks later, Patrick fired her for stealing when Lily hadn’t so much as taken a sliver of soap.
    Seven days after that, the charming, intelligent, and good-looking Patrick Buchanan had tracked Lily down. He’d spun a story about how Karen had forced him to fire Lily out of jealousy. He’d fought for her, he’d said, but his wife was a difficult woman and their marriage on the verge of divorce. That had been the first visit of many. He’d preyed on Lily’s loneliness, isolation, and innocence to seduce her, make her fall in love with him while convincing her his status as a politician meant they couldn’t be seen in public together—not until the divorce was final.
    Only the cheating bastard had never had any intention of leaving his wife; he’d arranged to have Lily deported when he was tired of her. She’d been four months pregnant with Thea at the time, and the only reason Thea knew the entire story was because she’d badgered it out of her mother at eighteen.
    Now Lily squeezed her hand, smiled. “Ah, baby, I got over my hurt a long time ago. Your papa had a great deal to do with it.” A storm of love in her eyes, of joy. “He taught me that there are good men in the world, loyal, loving men who understand the meaning of honor. I hope you remember that and not just what that one