“Just let him do what he wants,” her mother had said. Flora opened her legs a little. She felt his knee between her thighs. Then something else. Something . . . hard. Flora knew what that was. She had grown up with two brothers, after all.
“Should I?” Friedrich looked at her inquiringly. “Is it all right if I—”
Flora let out a small laugh. “Oh, Friedrich, of course you should.”
He laughed with her then, and kissed her lips softly.
After that, everything happened very quickly. Friedrich moved up and down, and Flora’s back ached a little as he did so. He whispered a few more endearments in her ear, how lovely, how beautiful she was. Then he groaned and rolled off her.
“My angel, you have made me very happy!” He gazed at her from shining eyes.
“And you have done the same for me,” said Flora, her voice husky. That was everything? It couldn’t be. Could it?
She snuggled close to Friedrich, pulled at the bedcover that he had wrapped around himself. “I’m going to need a corner of that if I don’t want to freeze to death on my wedding night.”
“Should I get another blanket? Or something to drink? A towel? I saw a whole pile of hand towels on the chair by the door.” He was already climbing out of bed.
Before he got back, Flora lifted the bedcover. Why hadn’t she thought to lay a towel down first? She was sure that’s what the pile on the chair was intended for.
She prodded carefully at herself with one hand and felt a slight twinge beneath her fingertips, but it did not really hurt. Nor had it hurt just a minute before, when Friedrich . . .
Her mother had been right, again—it had not been so bad.
So now she was a real woman. Although, she had to admit, she did not feel so much different from before.
Flora took the hand towel from Friedrich, then lifted the bedcover for him. When his now cooled body touched hers, she flinched.
“What a day,” said Friedrich, and yawned. “I am terribly tired.”
Flora smiled. “Don’t you think the twins went a little too far with that drinking song of theirs? I don’t know what your mother must have thought. Friedrich?”
But a snore was all the answer she got that night.
Chapter Thirty
Two days after the wedding, the young couple returned to Baden-Baden with Friedrich’s parents. Of course, there were tears during the goodbyes.
But Helmut and Hannah were already halfway to Bohemia in their minds. Hannah was overjoyed to go away with her husband and talked to Flora at length about the closeness between herself and Helmut that developed anew every time they went on their adventurous and never entirely safe journeys. Valentin, however, was happy to be able to stay home and give his sore back—which had been plaguing him—a little rest.
The arrangement, however, was possible only because Flora would tend to the Baden-Baden Samenstrich by herself that year, which secretly made her very anxious indeed. Would the customers be as willing to buy from her as they were from Hannah? Despite the impending customer visits, however, Flora was looking forward to getting back to the town. She could hardly wait to see the nest that Friedrich had created for the two of them.
Now that Seraphine had reminded her about the language of flowers, Flora was also dying to collect more material on the subject. Friedrich, whom she had already let in on her plans, wanted to accompany her to the library at the first opportunity, but he also advised her not to say a word about her ideas to the ever-skeptical Kuno, at least for the time being. That was fine with Flora—she was far from certain that they would go anywhere, after all.
Could she attract the spa guests to the shop, assisted by the language of flowers? Or were Seraphine and her father—with their talk about “putting on a show” for the rich visitors—oversimplifying things?
In Baden-Baden, Flora was thrilled to see the two rooms that she would be living in with her husband in the future. The marriage bed and a large wardrobe stood in what had once been Sybille’s room, and Friedrich had turned his old room into a kind of sitting area, with a patchwork rug on the floor and two flower pictures on the wall above an old sofa.
“A bit of peace and quiet again, finally!” said Sabine grimly as she helped Flora get her clothes into Friedrich’s wardrobe. But Flora knew Sabine well enough to realize that she was not comfortable with the thought that Flora was now her “mistress.”
She put one arm around Sabine’s shoulders. “The only thing that is changing between us is that I’ll be living one floor lower down. You’ll be in trouble if you start calling me Mrs. Sonnenschein! For you, I am and I will always be just Flora.”
“Really? I can’t just—”
“Oh, yes, you can! Let’s just not make a big production of it, all right?”
Relieved by Flora’s words, Sabine returned to the kitchen, and Flora—just as relieved—went to the shop.
Even after getting married, Flora and Friedrich remained the best of friends, and their life together worked well. Now that it was winter, Friedrich did not have to be constantly available at the Trinkhalle, and while he checked in several times a day to make sure everything was fine there, he had more freedom than during the spa season. If it had been up to him, he and Flora would have been in bed much of the time. With every passing night of love, their awkwardness faded, and with each act of love they grew a little more familiar and assured in their motions. Before long, Friedrich knew that although Flora enjoyed the feel of his hands stroking her breasts, she fended him off when he tried to kiss her there. And Flora quickly learned that Friedrich could use a little assistance in reaching his goal, and that afterward it was best if she lay very still.
So this is what it felt like to be husband and wife . . .
They enjoyed the tender hours they shared on those long, dark winter nights, but at the crack of dawn Flora swung herself out of bed, ready to tackle the day. On the streets of Baden-Baden, she encountered many of the gardeners and nurserymen that she had met the winter before with her mother. They acknowledged each other, said hello, and exchanged a few words. Before long most of them knew that she had married into the Sonnenschein family and, of course, the flower shop. That she continued, simultaneously, to be a daughter of the Kerner seed family from G?nningen did not seem to bother them at all.
“The main thing is that I’m still able to order my seeds as I always have,” said the gardener from the Holl?nder Hof hotel.
And Mr. Flumm, once he had placed his annual order, remarked, “I’ve got a dozen particularly nice orchids on offer. I actually had Maison Kuttner in mind, but if you want them, they’re yours.”
Flora glanced wistfully at the pots containing the exotics. “I fear we can’t yet afford something quite that exclusive.”
Still, her seed trade in Baden-Baden thrived. At the end of a busy week, she packed a pile of order forms into an envelope and sent them off to G?nningen.
When Flora had left Baden-Baden at the start of October, the town had been filled with all the chaos and frantic hustle of the departing guests.
Now, early in the new year, it was as if the streets had been swept clean. Few gave any thought to flowers. Enough potatoes in the cellar, wood and coal for the stove—those were the essentials, and a visit to the flower shop was far down anyone’s list of priorities.
Flora would never have believed that a day could drag on so long. She spent hours tidying drawers and sorting bits and pieces out of sheer boredom. Or she cleaned the windows. Now that it was cold outside and cozy and warm inside, the windowpanes fogged over faster than Flora could wipe them clear. How were they supposed to lure passersby into the shop if they could not even see through the window?