How to Find Love in a Book Shop by Veronica Henry

think there’s any hope.’
    Sarah Basildon spoke about her rose as if it were a beloved animal she was having put down. Her fingers moved gently over the space on the planting plan taken up by the sick flower, as if she were stroking it better.
    ‘I’ll take it out for you,’ said Dillon. ‘You won’t have to know about it. And once it’s actually gone, perhaps you won’t notice.’
    Sarah smiled a grateful smile. ‘Oh, I’ll know. But that’s good of you. I’m just too much of a wimp.’
    Of course, Sarah was far from a wimp in reality. She was redoubtable, from her gumboots to her chambray denim eyes. Dillon Greene thought the world of her.
    And she him. They were as close as could be, the aristocrat and the horny-handed son of toil, thirty years apart in age. They loved nothing better than sitting in the dankness of the garden room, drinking smoky builders’ tea and dunking custard creams. They could easily get through a packet in a morning as they put the world and the gardens to rights.
    Sarah’s planting plans for the next year were spread on a trestle table in the middle of the room, the Latin names spidered all over the paper in her tiny black italics. Dillon knew the proper names as well as she did now – he’d been working with her at Peasebrook Manor since he left school.
    As stately homes went, Peasebrook was small and intimate: a pleasingly symmetrical house of Palladian perfection, built of golden stone topped with a cupola, and set in two hundred acres of rolling farmland. When Dillon joined as a junior gardener in charge of mowing the lawns, he quickly became Sarah’s protégé. He wasn’t sure what it was she had recognised in him: the shy seventeen-year-old who hadn’t wanted to go off to university as his school had suggested, because no one else in his family ever had done. They’d all worked outdoors: their lives were rugged and ruled by the weather. Dillon felt comfortable in that environment. When he woke up, he looked at the sky, not the Internet. He never lay in bed of a morning. He was at work by half seven, come rain or shine, sleet or snow.
    One teacher had tried to persuade him to go to horticultural college, at the very least, but he didn’t see the point of sitting in a classroom when he could learn hands-on. And Sarah was better than any college tutor. She grilled him, tested him, taught him, demonstrated things to him, and then made him show her how it was done. She gave praise where it was due and her criticism was always constructive. She was brisk and always knew exactly what she wanted, so Dillon always knew exactly where he was. It suited him down to the rich, red clay on the ground.
    ‘You really have got green fingers,’ she told him with admiration and increasing frequency. He had a gut feeling for what went with what, for which plants would flourish and bloom together. To supplement his innate ability, he plundered her library and she never minded him taking the books home – Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Capability Brown, Bunny Williams, Christopher Lloyd – and he didn’t just look at the pictures. He pored over the words describing their inspiration, their visions, the problems they faced, the solutions they came up with.
    Dillon, Sarah realised one day, knew much more than she did. More often than not these days he questioned her planting plans, suggesting some other combination when redesigning a bed or coming up with a concept for a new one. He would suggest a curve rather than a straight line; a bank of solid colour instead of a rainbow drift; a bed that was conceived for its smell rather than its look. And he used things he found around the estate as features: an old sundial, an ancient gardening implement, a bench he would spend hours restoring. It was reclamation at its best.
    Her greatest fear was losing him. There was every chance he would be headhunted by some other country house because the gardens at Peasebrook Manor had become