Blossom (The Blossom Trilogy Book 1)
BOOK ONE OF THE BLOSSOM TRILOGY
Christopher Lentz
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Blossom
Copyright, © 2015 by Christopher Lentz
Cover and internal design by Bambi Crowell
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Blaze by Christopher Lentz. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the author’s permission is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written approval must be obtained by contacting the author at www.christopherlentz.org.
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Two women. One too many brides. Only one knows it…
Powerful forces are about to hit. Irresistibly drawn to each other, fortune-cookie maker Blossom Sun and silver-fortune heir Brock St. Clair find love at first sight. They also find that every secret has a price. The problem: He’s about to be married and she’s engaged. The bigger problem: It’s April 18, 1906, and a catastrophic earthquake and inferno are about to bring San Francisco to its knees. A Cinderella story like no other, Blossom will leave you breathless.
“A compelling story of the power of love in the face of an unprecedented disaster; of a man who has to choose between his duty and a love that transcends two cultures. Lentz writes an amazing story that brings the San Francisco earthquake to life—first rate!”
—Anne Cleeland, acclaimed author of historical fiction and contemporary mysteries such as Daughter of the God-King
Dedication
To my wife, Cheryl, for teaching me the meaning of love—and for kidnapping me to San Francisco for my 40th birthday—I dedicate this novel. It was that long weekend of exploration and romance in the City by the Bay that sparked this story. While the women of Chinatown who we saw hand-making fortune cookies did not resemble the young woman named Blossom in my imagination, their demure posture and rhythmic motions made an everlasting impression.
I thank Cheryl for supporting my dream of writing a novel, including what might have appeared to be endless procrastinating and incubating, as well as red-hot writing spurts that inevitably turned into slow productive simmers.
This novel is also dedicated to love. Though it took many seasons of crafting, Blossom is a love story written from the heart to the heart. For those who love and those who are fortunate to be loved in return, I sincerely hope that Blossom helps you bring back warm memories and look forward to the love that lies ahead.
“‘Tis a fragrant retrospection—
for the loving thoughts that start
Into being are like perfume
from the blossom of the heart.”
From An Old Sweetheart of Mine by James Whitcomb Riley, 1888
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – Fortune Favors The Heart
Chapter 2 – Wisdom Comes With Age
Chapter 3 – Time For A Pinky Swear
Chapter 4 – Everything In Its Proper Place
Chapter 5 – Favor From A Little Brother
Chapter 6 – Back For More
Chapter 7 – Dining At The Golden Palace
Chapter 8 – Fortune-Telling Cookies
Chapter 9 – Confessing To A China 5 Phone Operator
Chapter 10 – All About Men
Chapter 11 – The View From Twin Peaks
Chapter 12 – East Wind Blows At The Mahjong Table
Chapter 13 – Sixpence For Good Luck
Chapter 14 – Something Borrowed
Chapter 15 – An Experienced Single Woman
Chapter 16 – Not A Good Idea
Chapter 17 – Something Blue
Chapter 18 – Broomstick And Black Cat
Chapter 19 – Deception
Chapter 20 – Listen With Your Heart
Chapter 21 – The Time Had Come
Chapter 22 – The Rice Bowl That Never Empties
Chapter 23 – The Unforeseen And The Seen
Chapter 24 – Irreplaceable
Chapter 25 – The Last Place On Earth
Chapter 26 – A Time To Celebrate
Chapter 27 – Tonight Is The Night
Chapter 28 – In Over Her Head
Chapter 29 – Into The Fire
Chapter 30 – Stirring The Pot
Chapter 31 – A Veiled Discussion
Chapter 32 – Revelations
Chapter 33 – The Morning After
Chapter 34 – It Must Be Love
Chapter 35 – Being Held With Hungry Arms
Chapter 36 – Meant For Each Other
Chapter 37 – Trouble In Paradise
Chapter 38 – Making A Whopper Of A Decision Lickety-Split
Chapter 39 – Windows Have Eyes
Chapter 40 – Confusion
Chapter 41 – A Taste Of Their Future
Chapter 42 – Rendezvous With The Girls
Chapter 43 – Not A Misfit After All
Chapter 44 – An Inconveniently Placed Piece Of Paper
Chapter 45 – Living Dangerously
Chapter 46 – Totally Happy And Totally Miserable
Chapter 47 – Candles And Cologne
Chapter 48 – Stardust
Chapter 49 – The Earth Dragon Stirs
Chapter 50 – From The Roof’s Edge
Chapter 51 – Scarlet With Blood
Chapter 52 – Taking In Sights That No One Should Have To Witness
Chapter 53 – Saddled To A Tornado
Chapter 54 – Church Bells Are Ringing
Chapter 55 – The Most Precious Thing This World Holds
Chapter 56 – Broken Hearts
Chapter 57 – Saying Goodbye Is Only The Beginning
Excerpt From Blaze, Book Two In The Blossom Trilogy
Epilogue: From The Ashes
Reading Group Questions
Author’s Note
A Conversation With Christopher Lentz
Acknowledgements
About Christopher Lentz
Chapter 1
Fortune Favors The Heart
Saturday, April 14, 1906, 11:05 a.m.
Four days before the earthquake and firestorm
Brock St. Clair was only planning to get a bag of the newest craze from the Orient: fortune cookies. The request for the prophetic desserts sounded harmless enough to Brock when his fiancée made it.
Following an uneventful walk from Nob Hill, Brock was surrounded by red paper lanterns swaying in the San Francisco Bay breeze. The grey skies split apart and unleashed an explosion of warm sunshine. In an instant, everything gleamed. He squinted at the glistening parallel rails in the street, watching how an open-air cable car traveled along the defined track that had no visible deviations.
Brock thought about how his life was like a cable car. He continued to look at the tracks with an open hand raised near his eyes to cut the glare. That’s me. Always on track. His thoughts were interrupted by the winds of change, literally. A gust stole his straw boater hat and playfully begged him to chase after it. The hat skipped and rolled away from him down a street he wasn’t intending to take. “Hey, I jumped my tracks,” he whispered to himself.
As he captured his wayward hat, Brock found himself on the fringe of Chinat
own. He slowed to study the cobra-like plumes of burning incense that wafted out of the open storefronts. Ginger and ginseng perfumed the air and grew more pungent the deeper he ventured into Chinatown.
“Looks pretty much like the rest of San Francisco,” Brock said quietly as he noticed how rust wept out of anything metal. Chinatown’s weathered fancy wood and brick Italianate buildings stood shoulder to shoulder unlike those in the images he’d seen of China. There were no pagoda towers, no dragon sculptures and no intricate tile roofs. Brock remembered learning in school that Chinatown was merely a downtown district that businesses had left behind in a migration to other areas thought to hold more potential.
“Looks better from up above,” he added.
“What you say?” asked an elderly Chinese man who was passing by.
“Nothing…nothing at all. Pardon me.”
Geographically, Chinatown was not far from Brock’s world of wealth and comfort on Nob Hill, but he was aware that—in ways not measured by distance—Chinatown might as well have been located in China itself. Its few city blocks were a fortress for its people. It was self-contained and self-sufficient. And while Chinatown welcomed visitors and their money, its inhabitants were rumored to rarely stray beyond its borders.
Brock grew up knowing that Chinatown had a reputation as well-defined as Nob Hill’s. However, Chinatown’s opium dens, brothels and warring gangs were the topics of most conversations, rather than its respectable shops, restaurants and theaters.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been here, but Brock was more aware of his surroundings. As he studied the streets and alleys, Brock saw how Chinatown was a ghost town reborn. While to some it was a hellhole, to many more it not only looked like home…it was home.
Though he didn’t think the area looked foreign, the sounds—like the clickety-clack of a nearby shopkeeper registering his sales on the beads of an abacus—and, more specifically, the voices were worlds apart. Men barked orders at each other in abrupt-sounding words that were nothing like English.
However, finding someone to help him who spoke a little English didn’t take as long as Brock figured. In fact, the first man he asked about fortune cookies gave him clear directions. “Go to Golden Palace. It small, but very popular. Look for yellow flag. It mean restaurant. Golden Palace run by Chang Sun and his mother. She called Grand Ma Maw.”
After navigating the crowded streets and taking in their unusual smells, Brock reached the intersection of Clay and Dupont streets. What died and how long ago did it die? He kept his thoughts to himself this time.
People called out from open windows on the second and third floors to men down below. He noticed that the latest news must have just been posted on the exterior wall of the building because a group gathered to read, point at and discuss what appeared on colorful papers that hung vertically like unrolled scrolls.
Within the commotion, Brock saw one man turn his head quickly and his precisely braided queue pigtail lashed the man next to him, triggering a more heated exchange of comments. Each voice was heaping on the other to be heard, with undecipherable shouts fighting for attention.
Brock made his way down the street and found the three-cornered yellow silk pennant next to The Golden Palace’s sign. He stumbled through the doorway when his boot heel caught on the raised threshold. The bell hanging above the shop’s door helped announce his graceless arrival. An enticing sweet aroma rode on the backs of several warm breezes as they escaped the open door a few feet from him. A tall, thin man with striking ebony-colored hair—without a queue—approached him while humming a tune that sounded strangely similar to a song Brock heard in a saloon recently about “Irish eyes a-smiling.”
The shopkeeper bowed and said in a choppy way, “Ni hao. How I help?”
Brock bowed in return. “Knee how,” he replied to the best of his ability, assuming that the phrase was a pleasant greeting. “Hello to you. My fiancée sent me to get a special dessert. She thought it was called a moon cake. But then she said it might be called a fortune cookie. She wasn’t sure. I was told you had fortune cookies here.”
“How she know of moon cake? Wrong time of year for moon cake. Need yokes of duck eggs. Make shape of full moon—”
The shopkeeper violently slipped. His arms swung out in flailing and erratic ways as he reached for something to help break his fall. Brock was surprised not just by the fall, but the array of colorful glass marbles that ricocheted around the floor. Marbles in a bakery?
Brock lunged forward, but his effort was not quick enough as the man who was just humming yelled out, “Damn. Damn. DAMN!” He knocked several metal trays off of the counter, making for a dramatic fall. Brock’s eyes darted to follow glimpses of baked goods as they took flight and sailed across the room in a chaotic airborne ballet.
Brock lowered himself to his knees just behind the shopkeeper’s shoulders to be in a sturdy position to lift him. He reassured the shopkeeper. “Please, let me help you. That was a nasty fall. Is there someone—”
Brock’s words stopped midstream as his eyes met those of a girl who emerged from the next room where the sweet-smelling breezes came from moments ago. She froze. She looked first at the man on the floor, and then at the one who was cradling him from behind.
His eyes locked with hers.
She allowed Brock’s eyes to pierce hers, peering much more deeply than was customary.
In spite of the shopkeeper’s growling and damning the marbles on the floor, Brock’s eyes remained locked on hers. His heart pounded. Breathe, make yourself breathe, Brock shouted in his head.
She extended her hands to the shopkeeper without breaking eye contact with Brock. Together, they helped the shopkeeper to his feet.
“Shay shay—I mean, thank you,” the shopkeeper said to Brock. He brushed off his clothes and kept his eyes lowered. The shopkeeper sent the girl to the workroom with a gentle nudge. She looked back at Brock as she passed through the doorway.
Brock’s gaze followed her like a shadow. He moved closer to the doorway to see where she went. He noticed how she appeared startled and hesitated before looking down at her work. He wasn’t in the habit of staring at strangers. He was raised with better manners. But this girl entranced him like no other. Brock saw that she needed to return her full attention to the task at hand because she’d suddenly burned a fingertip on the hot iron she was working with. She barely winced, however.
“Young man! Young man! Young man!” said the shopkeeper in what Brock noticed was a triple-repeat pattern. The shopkeeper picked up the metal trays and slammed them on the counter with a loud bang.
“If I might ask, what’s she making?” asked Brock, never looking back at the man and continuing to watch the girl.
“Fortune cookies, of course!”
“Then I’ll take one dozen, please. They will—”
“I give you happy price. Good value. Fifteen cent,” interrupted the shopkeeper. “Some say Japanese make first. I no agree. Fortune cookie as Chinese as…as…me!”
Brock dug into his pocket and retrieved a dime and a nickel. He now looked at the man to deliver the coins without dropping them.
The shopkeeper placed a bag on the counter.
Brock’s eyes darted back to the girl in the other room. She was looking at him even though her hands continued their work with graceful rhythm and movement.
“May I see how the cookies are made?” Brock asked. I really want to see the girl who’s making the cookies.
“Fine. Come, come, come. Follow me,” muttered the shopkeeper as he made a waving motion with his hand.
“This my daughter, Mei-Hua,” he said standing tall, his shoulders back and a grin on his face. Brock thought how in a sea of people with brown eyes and black hair, the girl’s deep brown hair and lavender eyes must make her stand out whether she wanted to or not.
“Her name mean beautiful flower. People call her Blossom. She beautiful, no?” He didn’t give Brock a chance to answer. “My name Sun Chang. You call me
Chang. In old times, family name come first to honor ancestors. Given name next. Now many Chinatown people put given name first.”
Brock sensed someone else in the room. His feeling was confirmed as he spied two beguiling dark eyes peering around the corner of the wall behind Blossom.
“Well, hello to you,” Brock directed to the corner of the room.
“Ting Ting. Come out, Ting Ting,” ordered Chang.
The child, who Brock estimated was about six or seven years old, obeyed. She bowed and smoothed out her bright canary yellow shirt.
“This See Ting Ting. Her family live next door. Fireworks and tea, that their business. She spend time with us in afternoons, with orphaned…adopted…sister named Little Sunflower. She not here now. They sometime leave toy on floor, like marbles behind counter.” Chang gave Ting Ting a stern look.
“Blossom like sister to them. When Ting Ting good girl, we call her Rose Bud. Not so often, though. Her little lips red like rose, no?”
“No, I mean yes,” replied Brock.
Ting Ting scooted out and stood close to Blossom. The chubby girl’s eyes twinkled above cheeks that appeared to have a dumpling stashed in each one. She whispered in what sounded like Chinese to Brock. Blossom smiled at the girl and patted her on the shoulder, drawing her in even closer. Ting Ting bounced back a bit when the hand that held her music box collided with Blossom’s body.
Ting Ting slipped her feet into Blossom’s unoccupied shoes. Chang looked down and noticed. Blossom was working wearing her socks. The music-making “hurdy-gurdy” had a hand-held metal cylinder with a tiny crank that had a shiny red bead on the end. Ting Ting examined the bright-colored paper that was glued around the cylinder. Brock could see that it featured circus acts.
Ting Ting turned the crank to play the signature circus tune, Entrance of the Gladiators, as Blossom got back to work.
With great precision, Blossom took the thin circles of dough and laid them on the hot metal pedestal. Using two sticks—not with her fingers, as she did before—she inserted a strip of paper and folded the dough into a three-dimensional crescent shape. She didn’t look up once as Brock observed her work. He asked about the messages on the pieces of paper.