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My grandfather had totally ripped Kew Gardens off there.
But my favorite part was the part the public never saw. Our personal gardens spanned a few acres and consisted of greenhouses and vegetable gardens, flowerbeds, a wildlife pond, and the secret garden.
The secret garden was where I was heading now.
As a child, I’d fallen in love with the book, and my aunt had helped me carve out my own little space that was hidden behind what looked like a blocked gate.
It was not blocked.
I brushed my hand over the top of one of the hedges as the gravel path crunched under my feet. The weather was truly beautiful, a far change from the rainy showers this morning, but such was life in England.
If we didn’t have at least three of the four seasons in one day, I’d start thinking something was wrong.
I passed by the vegetable garden and paused. Miles Kingsley had been our head gardener in our personal garden for the past six months—he worked on the public ones, too, but he was happier where there were no people.
I felt the same, personally.
He was annoyingly handsome—the kind of handsome that turned heads wherever he went, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that was why he preferred to stay away from the public gardens.
He was quiet, reserved, and, well.
He was grumpy.
A real brooding kind of guy.
If my life were a novel, he was the kind of guy the heroine would bond with and make him fall in love with her bright, girlish charms.
Unfortunately for me, Miles couldn’t stand me.
And I wasn’t all that great with the girlish charms, either.
“I know you’re there,” he said gruffly without turning around. “Why are you watching me?”
I put my hands in my pockets. Gosh, I loved a dress with pockets. That was really all a woman needed to be happy.
Pockets.
Real ones.
Big enough for snacks.
“I was just passing,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other. “Is that the pumpkin patch?”
He turned his head and peered at me out of the corner of his eye. “It’s the potato bed, Lady Hastings.”
Oh.
Right. Of course. There were no tell-tale monstrous leaves of a pumpkin plant.
“Gabriella,” I replied quickly.
“I’m sorry?”
“Gabriella.” I shifted my weight to the other foot again. “My name.”
He turned back to his weeding. “You’re my employer.”
“But my name is Gabriella. And there’s no need to use the title unless it’s in a formal setting. You weeding the potatoes while I attempt to hide from my father’s matchmaking attempts isn’t a formal setting.”
Miles grunted. “Traumatic, I’m sure.”
Actually, it was.
“Sorry, I’m busy. I don’t have time to talk.”
“Right. Of course.” I swallowed and looked down. “I’ll just leave you to it, then.”
He nodded, fully focused on what he was doing, and tossed a weed into his wheelbarrow. “You do that.”
I backed up away from the archway that led into the vegetable garden and turned, heading in the direction of the secret garden.
See?
Grumpy as hell.
CHAPTER TWO
“I quite like the gardener.”
Me and my cousin, Alexander, looked up at Aunt Cat’s random proclamation.
“You called him a ten-year-old yesterday,” I pointed out. “How can you have suddenly changed your mind?”
“Ah-ha. I said he was ten years old, not that he was a ten-year-old.”
Alexander blinked at her. “That’s the same thing.”
“It is not.” She wiggled her finger at him. “Don’t you have anything better to do than lounge around here playing chess? Do you not have a child who needs tending to?”
“Here we go,” I muttered.
“Olympia is at school, where all good ten-year-old children should be on a Tuesday afternoon in May,” Alexander said, moving his bishop and taking out my rook.
Bloody hell.
I sucked at this game, and he was essentially a grandmaster.
He would have been, too, if not for his birth right.
“Hmph.” Aunt Cat joined us at the table, scanned the board, and tutted. “No wonder you never win, Gabriella. You’re simply dreadful at this.”
“I know,” I lamented. “But nobody else will play with him because they always lose. Even Arthur, who actually enjoys chess, respectfully declined. I almost sacked him on the spot for subjecting me to this.”
“Do you realise that you’re losing, dear?”
“Yes, but I’m awful at it, so it doesn’t really matter in the end.” I moved a knight to cover my king. “And Alexander is apparently banned from the local chess club.”
He sniffed. “It’s not my fault I beat the champion. He’s lucky I didn’t punch him.”
“What did you say?” Aunt Cat deadpanned.
“I didn’t say anything!” He made his move. “He told me that it wasn’t right like a toff like me could play because I’d done nothing my entire life except go to Eton, learn chess, and learn how to fleece the working class man. I told him to shut up unless he wanted to see how hard a toff could punch. Check.”
I dipped my head to hide a laugh. Duke of Worcester or not, Alexander Winthrop-Bentley was not a man to be trifled with. He’d struggled academically as a young teen, and it had led to him fighting a lot with the other boys—fights he almost always won.
