LITMIR.BIZ

      For Nikki—we made a great team!

      And for Andy, my own triffid-loving Indiana Jones.

ONE

      Daniel always grumbled that his mobile phone rang at the most inconvenient of moments, and it didn’t disappoint him now. Just as he was lifting a delicate Venus flytrap out of its pot, his hands full of roots and compost, his trouser pocket buzzed. Since he refused to assign fancy ringtones to everyone in his contact list the double ring of an old-fashioned phone told him precisely nothing about the caller’s identity.

      Once upon a time, he’d have ignored it—his hands being full of an uprooted Dionaea muscipula and all—but these days he could never quite push the thought from his mind that it might be his younger sister, telling him she was ill again. Or worse, a stranger telling him she’d collapsed and was in Accident and Emergency, and casually requesting he pick her kids up from pre-school.

      Reluctantly, he shook the earth off his right hand, cupped the clump of roots and foliage in his left and fumbled in the thigh pocket of his cargo trousers for his phone. He balanced the handset on his shoulder and squeezed his cheek onto it to keep it in place as he attempted to brush more of the compost that caked his fingers off on the back of his trousers.

      ‘Yup.’

      The phone started to slide and he quickly grabbed for it with his still-dirty hand.

      ‘Daniel Bradford?’ a deep yet annoyingly upbeat male voice asked.

      ‘Yup,’ he repeated, more focused on trying to replace the prize specimen in its pot with the use of only one hand. It wasn’t going well. He wasn’t planning on dividing this one for propagation yet but it was threatening to do just that.

      ‘Well, Daniel, this is Doug Harley and you’re live on Radio EROS, London’s most romantic radio station!’

      Daniel stood up straight, then twisted round, scanning the tropical nursery at London’s famous Kew Gardens, expecting to see a group of snickering underlings hiding behind a palm in an adjacent room of the sprawling greenhouse. This had to be a prank, right? And, if there was one advantage of working in a place where ninety per cent of the buildings were made of glass, it was that there was nowhere to hide. He’d find them and make their lives hell for this.

      But all he could see was a lone horticultural student, wheeling a trolley of seedlings past the door, plugged into his music and oblivious to the world. The rest of the multi-roomed greenhouse was unusually quiet.

      ‘Daniel?’ the silky smooth voice crooned in his ear.

      He pulled the phone away from his head and stared at the display, seriously considering just hanging up. He didn’t have time for this.

      ‘What do you want?’ he barked at the man as he put the phone back up to his ear. ‘I’m busy.’

      There was an equally smooth—and equally irritating—chuckle on the other end of the line. ‘Not too busy for this, Daniel. I promise you.’

      He clenched his jaw. The over-familiar manner in which the DJ kept inserting his name into every sentence was getting on his nerves.

      ‘Convince me,’ he said.

      The chuckle again. As if the man was the insider to some joke that Daniel didn’t know about. His eyes narrowed.

      ‘I’m sure you know what day it is today, Daniel?’

      Confusion wrinkled his brow further. It was Tuesday. So what?

      Oh.

      He swore inside his head, remembering the collection of red and pink envelopes that had been sitting on his desk when he’d arrived for work this morning. He’d shaken his head, pushed them to one side unopened and had done his best to forget about them. Not just any Tuesday, but one slap-bang in the middle of February.

      ‘Or what year it is...’ the voice added.

      Daniel let out a huff. He’d been right all along. A half-baked radio contest run by some sappy station he’d never heard of. He was pretty sure he didn’t want whatever prize this idiot was offering. Seriously, couldn’t they come up with a better question than what year it was? Even his four-year-old nephew could answer that one. He was just about to tell Mr Silky Smooth that when he was interrupted.

      ‘Of course, leap years have their perks,’ the man said, and a rumble of perfectly pitched deep laughter followed. ‘We know it’s a couple of weeks until the twenty-ninth, but we’ve got a Valentine’s surprise for you, Daniel. There’s a young lady who’d like to ask you something.’

      Daniel looked down at the plant in his hand. Even in its current uprooted state, a fly was attracted to the sweet nectar oozing from the glands in its trap. It darted around, weaving in and out of

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