Lemon Blooms

Post - Apocalyptic Horror | Action | Yuri Harem | 18+ | Rated R | Mature Content | Slow Pace It started with a kiss I don’t remember giving. A rooftop. A moan. Someone’s fingers buried in my hair like they belonged there. A mouth on my throat that said I tasted like something they lost in another life. I wasn’t dreaming. The city was already cracking beneath me. Power grids flickering like dying stars. Tech failing. Screens static. The sky bruising in strange new colors. Everyone said it was coincidence. Collapse. Noise. But I knew better. The moment I felt her breath on my skin — even if I couldn’t see her — I knew the end had already arrived. And I had something to do with it. Ten butterflies followed me after that. Not literal ones. Not always. They shimmered in my periphery. Each the wrong color. Each too vivid. Each drawn to me like heat to blood. They touched me in dreams. They watched me when I undressed. They whispered without words. I could taste their want. Some called me cursed. Broken. Unstable. But the truth is simpler. I’m blooming again — and they all feel it. They don’t love me. They remember me. They remember what I used to be — what I still am, underneath the silence. One of them burned me with just a kiss. One broke my spine with kindness. One slid her hand under my shirt like it was always hers. One cries when she touches me. One never speaks, but her eyes dig. One wants to keep me. One wants to ruin me. And one just wants to finish what we started. They think I’m choosing. I’m not. My body already did. And now the bloom inside me is turning darker.

One day, I was bringing lunch for Joshua Warren when I noticed a new flower shop that had just opened downstairs from his office. On a whim, I decided to stop by and buy a bouquet. However, when I stepped inside and asked, I learned that every flower in the shop had already been reserved. The owner gave me an apologetic smile. "I am sorry. My boyfriend hates seeing me work too hard. Every day after noon, he buys out all the flowers in my shop. He says it is a little perk for his employees." I smiled and told her, "I am jealous." However, my thoughts immediately went to Joshua. He had never been the kind of man to notice the things I did for him. He only complained that my cooking was too salty or too bland, that my plans were not thorough enough, or even that the color of our curtains needed to be changed for some carefully reasoned explanation. It was as if everything I did could only earn one response from him: criticism. I was about to leave when I happened to glance at the screensaver on the owner's phone. It was a picture of her and her boyfriend, smiling together. I knew that man's profile so well that I could have drawn the curve of his jaw with my eyes closed. It was the same man who slept beside me every night. Suddenly, I remembered how he had come home every day for the past three months with the faint scent of flowers lingering around his collar. I had always assumed the jasmine bushes outside his office were in bloom. I was wrong. It was not the flowers that had bloomed. It was his heart. I had always thought that Joshua simply did not know how to be gentle. Now I understood that his tenderness had never disappeared. He had simply given it all to someone else, leaving me with nothing but the shell of a man who always found something to criticize.

I stood on the pavement outside the townhouse that had been my sanctuary for ten years, watching the removal men haul out my life. Beside me, Lyle didn't even have the decency to look guilty. "It’s just business, Lolly," he’d said an hour ago, dropping the divorce papers onto the marble kitchen island. "You were a beautiful asset. But assets fucking depreciate." Now, I was a 'no one'. No money, no keys, and my reputation dragged through the mud. I stared up at the window of my bedroom. Krista – my ex best friend – was up there right now.. I turned. A man leaned against the frame of a waiting black saloon car. He didn't look like a bloody saviour. He looked like the devil, and right now, the devil was exactly what I needed. "I'm Franco," he murmured. "And I think Lyle just made the biggest mistake of his pathetic life. He thinks he broke you. I think he just let you off the leash." The heat radiating off his body was a phenomenal. I had just lost my husband, but standing this close to Franco, the only thing I felt was a sudden, violent ache. He held out an invitation. The Apex Bloom. A survival game for the elite. The prize is a billion pounds. But it doesn't reward beauty. It rewards the hunger of a woman who has nothing left to lose." A sharp shock shot through me, and I let out a soft gasp. He stepped half an inch closer, his thigh brushing against mine. He knew what that touch did to me. He wanted it just as much as I did. "Rule one," Franco whispered. "In my arena, the only way to bloom is to bleed. Are you ready?"

Maya Reyes is twenty-six, quietly resilient, and out of options. When she takes a live-in nanny position for a Manhattan billionaire, she expects a difficult employer and a lonely child. She gets both, but she also gets Ethan Cole. Ethan lost his wife eighteen months ago and has been managing the grief the only way he knows how: by controlling everything around him. His apartment is spotless, his rules are laminated, his daughter Lily is the only crack in the armour he has built around his life, and it is through Lily that Maya begins to see the man underneath. What follows is not a dramatic love story, it is a quiet one. He carries her to her room when she falls asleep on the floor, he heats her soup when she hasn't eaten. He holds her hand in a dark car and lets go like it never happened. She cooks for him, confronts him, tells him truths no one else will, and slowly without either of them naming it, they become the most important person in each other's lives. But grief doesn't move in straight lines. When Ethan's fear gets the better of him, he tries to restore the distance, and nearly loses the one thing that has made him want to come back to life. It will take a four-year-old's unfiltered honesty, a letter Maya writes from the floor of her room, and a man finally choosing to stop running, for both of them to find their way to the other side of it. When Winter Blooms is a story about what love looks like before anyone admits it exists, and what it costs to let it.

"It's really hard to see the person who you love with another. Especially when he has more of them. All-day I watch him connect with these others. He does not even spare me a glance. Well, why would he? I am just a subject in his eyes."Lui Xian for years has been in love with the Emperor the man who owns every flower. Can he ever be enough for him? Or will he find someone who sees him?

Flora Amor thought she had found her fairytale in Dixal Amorillo, the man who made her heart race with every whispered breath of her name. But her dreams collapsed when she discovered that her marriage was built on a cruel bet. Her world crumbled further after a tragic family secret left her with no memories of the past. Seven years later, fate brings them together again through her mischievous, brilliant child, leading Flora Amor straight into Dixal's powerful construction empire. Now a changed man, Dixal is determined to fight for the wife he once lost. With the hidden enemies, family betrayals, and long-buried truths threatening to tear them apart, Flora Amor found the courage to hold on to the healing power of love