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Informationen zum Autor Raquel Vasquez Gilliland Klappentext A USA TODAY BESTSELLER! One of Amazon's Best Romances of September! A People Magazine Romantasy Pick! Legend goes that long ago a Flores woman offended the old gods, and their family was cursed as a result. Now, every woman born to the family has a touch of magic. Sage Flores has been running from her family—and their “gifts”—ever since her younger sister Sky died. Eight years later, Sage reluctantly returns to her hometown. Like slipping into an old, comforting sweater, Sage takes back her job at Cranberry Rose Company and uses her ability to communicate with plants to discover unusual heritage specimens in the surrounding lands. What should be a simple task is complicated by her partner in botany sleuthing: Tennessee Reyes. He broke her heart in high school, and she never fully recovered. Working together is reminding her of all their past tender, genuine moments—and new feelings for this mature sexy man are starting to take root in her heart. With rare plants to find, a dead sister who keeps bringing her coffee, and another sister whose anger fills the sky with lightning, Sage doesn’t have time for romance. But being with Tenn is like standing in the middle of a field on the cusp of a summer thunderstorm—supercharged and inevitable. Leseprobe 1 My great-aunt Nadia says it's a bad idea to reject a gift from a ghost. It's 'cause ghosts like to slide inside all kinds of worlds. They don't just roam the land of the living or the dead. They can show up in our dream worlds to meddle. They can touch the world of shadows and eat the light from your own home, just sucking up the long, thick gold of nightlights and fixtures like dead black holes. "Just ask your prima Cleotilde," Nadia always says, her wine-red acrylic nail in my face as she points. "She once offended the ghost of her abuelo, and boom. Lamps didn't work around her for years." The scariest world that ghosts can touch is the world of gods. The old gods. The ancient gods. The gods we've heard of and the even more numerous gods we haven't. Nadia pours one cup of espresso to these gods every single morning. This woman would rather light St. Theresa's on fire than skip this daily offering. And if you've got a ghost haunting you, there's no way to tell if one of these gods favors that ghost. So you offend a ghost? You reject her gift? You might be offending a god. Apparently, it's a really bad idea to offend gods. That's how you end up with the women in our family and our gifts. This means that when I climb in my janky-ass minivan and see the cup of coffee in the console? Yes, that cup of coffee-the mug, a gift from one of my former students, hand thrown and glazed the color of lilacs against a lightning storm. The one steaming with notes of raspberry and a hint of chocolate. The one that I most certainly did not place there. The second I smell it-because yeah, I smell it first-I throw myself into my seat and press my face into the steering wheel. "Shit," I say in a long exhale. I hate gifts from ghosts. In order to distract myself from the sweet steam swirling around me, I grab my phone, hitting buttons as fast as my fingers can go. Laurel picks up even before the first ring ends. "Hey! You on your way yet?" I glance at the back of my van. Every seat is pushed down to make way for half a dozen boxes, triple that in plants, and an antique reading chair. Most of the boxes contain books-I can see a sliver of Joy Harjo's She Had Some Horses peeking through cardboard I hadn't bothered to tape shut. It's my favorite of her collections, because it reminds me of the stories Nadia used to tell us when Teal, Sky, and I were tiny enough to squeeze onto one twin bed. I can still hear Nadia's smoky voice filling our room. "In the beginning, there were o...
