Free Aimée and the Bear: A BBW Bear-Shifter Romance (Fairy Tales with a Shift) by Cara Wylde

CHAPTER ONE
     
    My family wasn’t always poor. Until a year ago, my father was a wealthy merchant who brought fine silks, exotic spices, and precious stones from the Middle East. Sadly, he wasn’t very good with managing his income, so when his trade ships were destroyed in a storm on their way home, we lost everything. Instead of buying new ships and hiring a new crew, father had to pay all his debts, which led to us losing our house and having to start a new life out of the city. My two sisters and I had been raised as proper ladies, and when we saw ourselves at a farm, away from the world we loved, with no servants to cook and clean for us, we panicked. Actually, they panicked. I was a little more adaptable. After all, I couldn’t just stand there and wait for a miracle to happen when my father woke up every day before dawn and started working.
    He was a good man, my father. After mother died of a strange, incurable disease, he took care of us and made sure we studied with the best professors and had everything we wanted. Beautiful dresses, expensive jewelry… We might have been the daughters of a merchant who had worked all his life to get where he was, but we were as well-dressed as the queen herself. In retrospect, maybe father should have saved the money he spent on us and invested it in a second business. It was all gone now, and there was nothing we could do about it. So, while my sisters, Cécile and Diane, moaned about how hard life at the farm was, I decided to help my father as much as I could and learn the little he knew about farming. If we stayed united, we’d eventually rise back to a respectable social and financial status, I was sure of it.
    Usually, I was the one who went with him at the market to sell our produce. My sisters avoided the market at all costs. They didn’t want to be seen in washed-up dresses, mingling with what they called the common people. Honestly, I couldn’t care less. All our friends already knew about our misfortune, so it wasn’t like we had anything to hide. To them, we didn’t even exist anymore.
    Little by little, we managed to get some loyal customers. Our vegetables were always ripe and fresh, and we often sold everything in just a couple of hours. The clients were wealthy people who sent their servants every morning to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. But these were not the only things they bought… It was at the market that I saw how servants and maids were looking for… roses. Of all the flowers, roses were the most popular, but they were also very rare in this part of the country. Of course, there were a lot of people who sold greenhouse roses, but the wealthiest members of the highest society wanted nothing more and nothing less than big, beautiful roses that grew naturally, preferably in the wilderness, uncontrolled and unconditioned by man, which smelled so divine that the smallest sniff could knock you off your feet and make you dream of Heaven. The problem was that these pretentious flowers were impossible to grow naturally, outside of a greenhouse. They just didn’t like the soil. There was one single place in these parts where they grew freely and beautifully: the deserted gothic mansion up on the Eastern hill. For reasons no one could comprehend, the blood red roses everyone was dying to have on their living room tables loved the soil in the huge garden that stretched behind the mansion. Some said it was the magic there, others said it was the curse that had led to the family’s mysterious disappearance years ago. Whatever the true reason, one thing was certain: the old mansion was believed to be haunted and no one dared even approach its gates.
    Lucky me that I had never believed in curses, magic, ghosts, or monsters. The folk tales that went around were just that: folk tales. Fiction. It might have been normal to impress those who didn’t know how to read, never opened a book or studied with a professor, but they didn’t impress me. So, the moment I