Oleander by Scarlett Drake EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Scarlett Drake
- Language: English
- Genre: contemporary romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2.9 MB
- Price: Free
It was a bright, burning Tuesday in August when Caspien Deveraux
broke my heart for the first time.
The news said it was the hottest day on record, though there have
been hotter ones since. The weather map on TV showed red warnings,
and there were reports of melting train tracks and things spontaneously
combusting. My parents had been dead for seven years, and I could barely
remember their faces.
It was hard to imagine there even was a time before. Before the
Deveraux mansion and the two wraiths that haunted it. Before that summer,
when everything was on fire, and I knew what it was to be consumed by
flames.
But there was.
I had existed before.
I’d once dreamt dreams that were not about him – dreams that were not
about his skin, his hands, or his lips which were always twisted with
mockery and malice but which would, later, part with want and desire –
though I could not now tell you what they were.
Dreams of my parents most likely. Of a life outside of the small island
I’d called home since my parents’ deaths. Oxford, probably. Then London.
On other, bolder days, Italy, New York.
The year I first met him, I was fifteen. School was done for the term, and
the summer break stretched out before me like a cat in the sun.
It was a Tuesday. Life-changing things rarely happened on Tuesdays – or
so I had thought. On weekdays, Beth left for work even before I got up; she
had to drive to her sales job on the opposite side of the island, and since
Luke made his own hours and I clearly couldn’t be allowed to stay home
reading all day, I was told I was going to work with him.
He’d tried to make it sound like an adventure; uncaring that my
adventures were inside the pages of the book I’d stayed up until 3 a.m.
reading. They didn’t involve crumbling old houses and annual delphiniums.
Luke had been born with green fingers, he said. Once, when I was five,
he’d said he’d been born with ‘green fingers,’ and I hadn’t known for a
long time that he didn’t mean this literally. He knew more about plants and
gardens than I knew about Terry Pratchett books.
He knew more about
plants than most of the garden experts on TV. He talked to plants. Covered
them with blankets in the winter. Left the radio on in our greenhouse
sometimes for the seedlings he was sprouting. Radio Four: because they
liked voices more than music.
That morning, at the sound of him bellowing cheerily up the stairs (Luke
never raised his voice in anger), I’d come downstairs, my eyes gritty and
my bones still asleep. Yawning, I sat at the kitchen table while he set down
a cup containing two boiled eggs, butter, salt and pepper. Buttery toast
landed next to it a few moments later.
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