The Daisy Chain: Love's Bloom

By Raven McAllan

FROM POPULAR ROMANCE AUTHOR RAVEN MCALLAN

A Love's Bloom story

Life is what you make it. Daisy has to decide—stay with the same old, same old, or take a leap of faith and move on.

What with a hippy mum, a free-wheeling dad and ditching a loser for a boyfriend, is it any wonder Daisy is wary of what life holds in store?

Then there's the so-called Cave of the Dragon, an inquisitive reporter, the wedding of her best mate and a hot as Hades, arsy-as-hell best man.

Daisy has her hands full.

But life is what you make of it...

Is Daisy ready to take a leap into the unknown and go with the flow? Chance her luck, have faith in Callum and see what the future brings? Or will she decide to ignore everything that shouts go for it', and opt for a quiet—but boring—life instead?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Totally Bound Publishing
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839434976

Raven McAllan

After 30 plus years in Scotland, Raven now lives near the east Yorkshire coast, with her long-suffering husband, who is used to rescuing the dinner, when she gets immersed in her writing, keeping her coffee pot warm and making sure the wine is chilled. With a new home to decorate and a garden to plan, she’s never short of things to do, but writing is always at the top of her list. Her other hobbies include walking along the coast and spotting the wildlife, reading, researching, cros stitch and trying not to drop stitches as she endeavours to knit. Being left-handed, and knitting right-handed, that’s not always easy.

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Author

Totally Bound Publishing books by Raven McAllan

Single Books

Hong Kong Heat

Taken Identity

Fairground Attraction

The Duke’s Temptation

The Viscount Meets his Match

Diomhair

Secrets Shared

Secrets Uncovered

Secrets Remembered

Secrets Dispatched

Secrets Learned

Secrets Dispelled

Daring Ladies

The Earl and The Courtesan

Castle on the Loch

Love by the Stroke of Midnight

Anthologies

Bully for You: Chasing Charlie

Collections

A Little Bit Cupid: For One Night Only

Love’s Bloom

THE DAISY CHAIN

RAVEN MCALLAN

The Daisy Chain

ISBN # 978-1-83943-497-6

©Copyright Raven McAllan 2021

Cover Art by Claire Siemaszkiewicz ©Copyright April 2021

Interior text design by Claire Siemaszkiewicz

Totally Bound Publishing

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

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The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

Published in 2021 by Totally Bound Publishing, United Kingdom.

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Love’s Bloom

Life is what you make it. Daisy has to decide—stay with the same old, same old, or take a leap of faith and move on.

What with a hippy mum, a free-wheeling dad and ditching a loser for a boyfriend, is it any wonder Daisy is wary of what life holds in store?

Then there’s the so-called Cave of the Dragon, an inquisitive reporter, the wedding of her best mate and a hot as Hades, arsy-as-hell best man.

Daisy has her hands full.

But life is what you make of it…

Is Daisy ready to take a leap into the unknown and go with the flow? Chance her luck, have faith in Callum and see what the future brings? Or will she decide to ignore everything that shouts ‘go for it’, and opt for a quiet—but boring—life instead?

Dedication

To Paul,

Ann

and the rest of the team at Totally Bound

Thank you for your help and support

Trademark Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

Gavi: Banfi Products Corporation

Bluetooth: Bluetooth SIG Inc

PayPal: PayPal, Inc

Footsie 100: FTSE Group

MINI Clubman: British Motor Corporation

Kindle: Amazon Technologies Inc

Brownies: World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts

Twitter: Twitter Inc

Mulberry: Mulberry Company (Design) Limited

Macallan: Macallan Distillers Limited

Highland Park: Highland Distillers LTD

Bugs Bunny: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc

Chapter One

Stewart, Daisy’s soon-to-be ex-lover—even if he wasn’t aware of it—came with a groan and a shudder that Daisy swore shifted the bed three inches.

Outside rain splattered on the window, and the wind crept in around the sash and stirred the curtains.

Welcome to spring in Scotland. Where was the sunshine and warm balmy days?

Not here for sure.

Unsatisfied—not only by the weather—and not anywhere near sated, Daisy muttered something unrepeatable and thought, Sod it, I’m not faking again. Faking an orgasm was about as fulfilling as eating four-day-old pizza that no one had thought to cover and the mice had nibbled. She didn’t even like fresh pizza. Her Italian food of choice was spaghetti with clams and a bottle of Gavi.

That was a good topic for her weekly newspaper column. She’d need to make a note of it later. Not the wine, but the yawn-a-gasm. ‘To fake or not to fake, that is the question’.

She wasn’t doing it. Enough was enough. Time for a shake-up. She was in a rut, and was sick of the view.

That summed up her life, and not just with Stewart, although that—and he—were the catalyst.

Three months previously, they had met at a pre-Christmas party and had appeared to connect. How wrong could she be? One month of skirting around each other, two of having sex—piss-poor sex, if she were honest—and Daisy knew their relationship was doomed. Should she tell him now or later?

The insistent buzz of her mobile phone answered that.

Later.

She hefted Stewart to one side, ignored his incoherent mumble, picked up the phone and squinted at the caller’s name.

Plum…

Oh shit, what now. She flicked it on. Stewart grunted contentedly. Glad it wasn’t a second earlier. Great, eh?

Oh how she’d like to say, ‘no, you selfish shit, it wasn’t’. Daisy ignored him and spoke into the phone. Hi, Ma, what’s up?

The voice on the other end of the phone was nigh on incoherent. But as ever, Daisy got the gist of it. Arrested? What the hell for? She listened for a moment more as Stewart got up, scratched his cock and balls and wandered in the direction of the bathroom, as uninterested as ever in her family and their goings-ons.

You did what? Oh for f…flip’s sake, Ma, how many more times? No, I’m not bailing you out this time. Ask Pete the… Just in time she stopped herself from calling him ‘the plonker’. Her mum got really agitated when she did, and she supposed she couldn’t blame her. The guy you’re ah…seeing. Better than saying ‘screwing’ to your mum. Not that it would faze her mum, but it just didn’t feel right.

Her mother’s diction became clear. I’ve ditched him, Daisy. He wanted me to wear a bra. Her voice rose. Can you believe it? The controlling bastard. A bra. She sounded as if she’d been asked to eat meat and she was a card-holding vegetarian. "I mean, where would I get one? What a waste of money. And if that wasn’t enough, he thinks I should call myself Priscilla. I am not a Priscilla, am I? Prissy Pris. So not me. It was the last straw, Daisy, it really was. Pr…isss…illa." If you could hear a shudder, Daisy heard it.

However, Daisy could agree with that statement. Prickly Pris maybe, not prissy, anything but. Her hippy mum, who thought free love should include condoms on the NHS, had called herself Plum ever since she’d snuck into one of the early Isle of Wight music festivals, met Gregory, a.k.a. Leaf, Daisy’s dad, and gone to live in a tepee on the edge of a Scottish loch. There they’d communed with nature by picking wild fruit and berries, had a lot of dodgy tummy upsets when they didn’t know what they’d picked, swam naked and ate guddled fish. Not, Daisy devoutly hoped, all at the same time.

Even now, Plum mostly lived there. Leaf, a reasonably successful musician, was as he said, like his name, still blowing in the wind. Daisy met him a few times a year and suspected he and her mum did the ex-with-benefits meetups slightly more often. She chose not to ask. Her mum could be a bit too graphic at times. Enough to scar a person for life. After all, who needed to know just how her dad turned her mum on? When Plum had started going on about erogenous zones, ice cubes and pressure points, Daisy had zoned out. It was bad enough seeing her mum’s peek-a-boo scanties on the washing line. She didn’t want—or need—any more information.

Unless it was for her column of course, but nobody knew about that except the editor of the paper and herself. Sexpert Sadie, the lady with all the answers. Except, it seemed, with regards to her own sex life.

She had to be very careful in some of her replies, in case anyone recognised them as similar to something they had said or done that she knew about. It was a pity because some things she’d been told about were doozies. The cock ring someone had put in the freezer before using it and getting ice burns just where you didn’t want them, or the time someone had got caught out having sex in a hut they’d thought was derelict but had turned out to be used by the local coalman for storage. They’d been locked in behind two dozen full coal bags. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except they were married, and not to each other. The excuse that the man had been trying to help the woman rejuvenate her marriage by giving her some sex tips hadn’t quite rung true. Daisy could have achieved more than one week’s column about the ecstasy and pitfalls of that.

The joys of having a sideline you didn’t tell anyone about.

Anyway, I don’t need bailing out, just picking up, Plum went on robustly. Just at the local nick, as ever. They’re getting a bit too zealous these days. And some of them are hardly old enough to be my grandkids. That is, they would be if I had any.

Daisy ignored that. She’d have had to have been very precocious for offspring old enough to be policemen to be realistic.

Get real, Mum.

Thank you, dear, I am. Just not a granny yet. Oh, hello, Sarge, how’s the bunion?

Daisy sighed, accepted the last question wasn’t directed at her and got out of bed, careful not to roll onto the icky sticky bit Stewart had left behind. Why did he always do that? She knew it could be an occasional hazard, but every time? It was…disgusting, she decided and showed no respect for her or