Bad Bloom

She can read a marriage in the flowers a couple chooses — every lie, every apology, every secret they think they're hiding. She never once thought to read her own best friend.

Catherine "Cat" Riley built the most sought-after floral studio in the city on a dead language almost no one still speaks: the meaning hidden in every bloom. So when the flowers for the society wedding of the year start going quietly, catastrophically wrong — her deliveries rerouted, her work rigged to fail in front of everyone who matters — she'd have called it sabotage even if the wedding's planner hadn't shown up to tell her it was. He's seen this exact scheme before. The woman running it ran it on him.

Her husband and her glossy best friend of two years aren't just having an affair. They want the studio — her name, her client book, her whole life — and the cheating is the smallest part of it. The friend who knew her better than anyone was never a friend at all. She spent two years studying Cat to learn how to become her.

So Cat smiles, and keeps arranging, and says nothing. Then she partners with the one man who knows exactly how this woman operates — the rival planner she used and threw away on her way up, the man who now controls the room where it all comes down, and who kept four years of receipts. Let the best friend walk all the way up to her coronation at the wedding of the season. Let her claim a ballroom full of flowers, in front of five hundred people who can read.

Because you can copy every arrangement Cat ever made. You will never once know what any of them mean.

Closed-door · curvy heroine · betrayed-wife revenge · the husband's mistress is the best friend · secretly powerful wife · the language of flowers · slow-burn co-conspirators · a society wedding · good-for-her glow-up · standalone HEA

A complete standalone. No cheating heroine, no cliffhanger, no reconciliation — just a wronged woman, a language only she speaks, and the last word, in front of everyone. Closed-door heat.