Free Growing and Kissing by Helena Newbury Page A

put them down here,” she said. “Thank you.”
    I didn’t put them down. I had to know what was going on—was she growing somewhere? “Let me carry them inside.”
    “I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
    That’s when I caught a faint scent wafting from her apartment. “Ah, no,” I groaned, my stomach tightening. “You couldn’t be that fuckin’ daft....”
    Before she could protest, I pushed past her. Since she was trying to block the doorway, that meant muscling her out of the way. I tried not to think about how good she smelled, or how soft her skin was as it brushed against mine.
    Inside, everything was long drapes and too many cushions—you could tell women lived there. And I’ve never seen so many things growing: plants in pots, plants on shelves, even plants on the window ledges. But the normal plants weren’t what were making the smell.
    Right in the middle of the room, arranged in neat rows, were about thirty marijuana plants.
    “Are you kidding me?” I said to myself. I dumped the fertilizer sacks on the floor and spun to face her. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?! You can’t grow here!”
    She quickly shut the door. “I don’t have anywhere else!” She crossed her arms defensively.
    “So you do it in your apartment? You’re going to just haul everything up here: fertilizer, lights, the plants... oh, Jesus, you carried those up here! How many people saw you?”
    “None! I brought them up one at a time, in boxes.”
    “And you’re going to do that for the other—how many do you need, to make half a million?”
    She shifted from foot to foot and looked at the floor. “A few hundred.”
    I looked around. “There’s no space! And what about the smell? I could smell these out in the hallway and that’s thirty plants, at the start of the season. When it’s two hundred, fully grown, you’ll be smelling it a block away!” She stared at the floor. “And what happens when the super comes around to fix a leak? What happens when your sister comes home?”
    She finally snapped her head up and glared at me. “If I don’t do this, she’s not coming home!”
    We stood there glaring at each other. Those big green eyes were blazing at me, her chest was heaving and her lower lip was stuck out in an angry, sullen pout.
    I’d never wanted to kiss a girl so much.
    “You can’t grow here,” I said again. The anger was ebbing away, to be replaced by a sense of impending doom. I wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of this. I could see that now. She was going to grow, no matter what I said. She was going to wind up dead or in jail...unless I helped her.
    I let out a long sigh and tapped the nearest pot with my foot. “Can you really grow this shit? Do you know what you’re doing?”
    She tilted her chin to look up at me and her eyes narrowed. Hopeful, but cautious: I’d disappointed her once already. “Yeah,” she said at last. “Yeah, I know what I’m doing.”
    I looked around at the plants and ran a hand through my hair. Then I let out an enormous sigh.
    It was the only way.
    “Okay,” I grunted. “I’ll help you.”
    She bit her lip and nodded quickly, thanking me. I wasn’t ready for how that made me feel: like a hot bomb going off in my chest.
    “But on one condition,” I told her, as gruffly as I could. “We do it my way. You do the growing but when it comes to the other stuff, you do exactly what I tell you.”
    She swallowed. “I’ll do exactly what you tell me,” she repeated. In her voice, it sounded like the most erotic thing imaginable.
    I had to keep my distance from her. The deeper she got involved with me, the more chance there was I’d destroy her life the way I destroyed everything else. This had to be a temporary alliance, a business relationship. Nothing more.
    The next six months were going to be fucking unbearable.
    I took a deep breath and sealed my fate. “Alright then,” I said. “Let’s grow some