How to Find Love in a Book Shop by Veronica Henry Page A

increasingly popular over the past few years. There were three formal rose gardens, a cutting garden and a walled kitchen garden, a maze and a miniature lake with an island and a ruined temple for visitors to wander around. There had been a flurry of articles in magazines, many of them featuring pictures of Dillon at work, for there was no doubt he was easy on the eye. More than once her own heart had stopped for a moment when she’d rounded a corner and seen him in his combat shorts and big boots, his muscles coiling as he dug over a bed. He’d be television gold.
    She would do anything in her power to keep him. She couldn’t imagine life at Peasebrook without him now. But there was a limit to how much she could afford to pay him. Times were hard. It was always a struggle to balance the books, despite all their best efforts.
    But today, at least the stress took her mind off her grief. Her secret grief. She’d had to put her heart in a straitjacket and she’d hidden her heartbreak well. She didn’t think anyone was any the wiser about how she was feeling or what she had been through.
    Six months, if you counted it from the beginning. It had ripped through him, devoured him with an indecent speed and she could do nothing. They had snatched as much time together as they could but—
    She shut off her mind. She wasn’t going to remember or go back over it. Thank God for the gardens, she thought, day after day. She had no choice but to think about them. They needed constant attention. You simply couldn’t take a day off. Without that momentum she would have gone under weeks ago.
    ‘What about the folly?’ asked Dillon, and Sarah looked at him sharply.
    ‘The folly?’
    ‘It needs something doing to it. Doing up or pulling down. It could make a great feature but—’
    ‘We’ll leave it for now.’ Sarah used her ‘ don’t bring up the subject again’ voice. ‘That’s a long-term project and we don’t have the budget.’
    He looked at her and she held his gaze, praying he wouldn’t push it. Did he know? Is that why he’d brought it up? She had to be careful, because he was perspicacious. More than perspicacious. He almost had a sixth sense. It was one of the things she liked about him. Sensitive wasn’t quite the right word, she thought. Intuitive, maybe? He’d once told her his grandmother had ‘the gift’. That kind of thing could be hereditary. If you believed in it. Sarah didn’t know if she did, but either way she wasn’t going to give anything away at this point.
    He was right, though. The folly did need attention. It was on the outer edge of the estate, high on a hill behind a patch of woodland. An octagon made of crumbling ginger stone, it was straight out of a fairy tale, smothered in ivy and cobwebs. It had been neglected for years. Inside, the plaster was falling off the walls, the floorboards were rotten and the glass doors were coming off their hinges. There was just an old sofa, steeped in damp and mildew. Sarah could smell it now, its comforting mustiness mixed with the scent of his skin. She’d never minded the insalubrious surroundings. To her, it could have easily been the George V or the Savoy.
    She didn’t want anyone else going in there.
    ‘Let’s just shut off the path to the folly for the time being,’ she told Dillon.
    She thought of all the times she had been along it, the tiny woodland path that led up the hill to their meeting place. He would park his car in the gateway on the back road, behind a tumbledown shed. The road was barely used except by the odd farmer, so with luck no one had ever noticed. Although sometimes drunk drivers used it as a rat run from the pub, and it only took one person to put two and two together …
    She couldn’t worry about it. It was almost irrelevant now, and certainly no one could prove anything. She tried to put it out of her mind and concentrate on the wedding instead. As the mother of the bride, it should be her priority. But it seemed