www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      NASH GALLAGHER knew he was crazy. He hadn’t intended to stay. He was just passing through, stopping for a last look at the garden before the bulldozers moved in. Keeping a promise to an old man.

      It had been a mistake.

      Somehow he’d expected it to be the way it was in his memory. Everything ordered, everything perfect, the one place he had always been sure of in a confusing world.

      Stupid.

      Gardens weren’t static things.

      The walled kitchen garden might have survived the break-up of the estate, but the small garden centre his grandfather had run from it had been closed for nearly two years. Everything had run to seed, gone wild...

      He dragged a hand over his face in a vain attempt to obliterate the image. He’d sworn he wouldn’t fall for his grandfather’s attempt at emotional blackmail, but maybe the old man knew him better than he knew himself.

      It was the peach trees that did it.

      Remembering how, when he was a boy, he’d been lifted up to pick the first ripe fruit, the taste of it, the juice running down his chin...

      The memory was so strong that Nash rubbed his chin against his shoulder, as if to wipe the juice away, then he angrily pulled away a handful of the weeds that crowded against an ancient trunk, choking it.

      Stupid. In a few weeks it would all be gone.

      But the old trees were covered with small fruit, swelling in the sudden burst of hot weather, refusing to give up despite the lack of pruning, despite the thick choking weeds at their roots. Like his grandfather, they refused to give up in the face of the inevitable. He couldn’t leave them like that.

      He wanted the men with the bulldozers to know they were smashing something that had once been cared for. It wouldn’t take long. He could spare a day or two for the peach trees.

      Except it wasn’t just the peach trees.

      There were the greenhouses with their old coke stoves and hot pipes. A wonderful place to play when it was too cold outside. A magic place full of warm, earthy scents.

      It still was, despite the damage. A thin cat had given birth to a litter of kittens behind the stove. He’d spotted her once or twice, flashing through the long grass with some small creature clamped in her jaws and, as he stood there, the bravest of the kittens ventured out amongst the broken glass that littered the floor.

      He moved it out of harm’s way and then reached for an old broom. He was sweeping up the broken glass, wondering at how swift nature was to reclaim its own, when a ball blasted him out of the past as it smashed through the roof and he swore volubly as the fine shards showered him and sent the kitten flying back to safety of the nest.

      For a moment he stared at the ball, big, bright red, intrusive, and an unexpected fury boiled up in him. People were so damned careless. Didn’t they know, didn’t they understand how long this had been here? Care about the generations of men who’d spent their lives working, harvesting, loving the place as he did?

      He shook the glass out of his hair, carefully peeled off his T-shirt, then bent to pick up the ball, intent on telling the idiot who’d kicked it without a thought for the consequences, exactly what he thought of him.

      ‘Mummy, Clover’s kicked the ball over the wall again!’

      At the most trying stage of refitting the handle to a freshly painted door, Stacey couldn’t do much about her youngest daughter’s plaintive cry, other than put her on hold.

      ‘Tell her she’ll have to wait,’ she called back as she tried to juggle the handle and the screwdriver at the same time as fitting a screw with a life of its own into the hole. There were times, she felt, when two hands were simply not enough. But then, she had never been much use at this sort of thing.

      Give her something solid to work with, a spade or a hoe, and she was perfectly at home. She could double-dig a vegetable plot, build a compost heap without raising a sweat. But put a screwdriver in her hand and she was all fingers and thumbs.

      Not just a screwdriver. She wasn’t much use with a paintbrush. There was more paint on her clothes and her skin than there was on the door.

      ‘Mummy!’

      ‘What?’ The screw took advantage of this momentary distraction to make an escape bid. It hit the quarry-tiled floor, bounced once and disappeared beneath the dresser. Stacey only had four screws, the ones she’d taken out of the door plate when she’d removed it. Now she’d have to strip the dresser of china before she could move it and retrieve the wretched thing. Great. She dug screw number two out of her pocket, then remembered that her daughter wanted her for something. ‘What is it, Rosie?’

      ‘Nothing.’ Then, ‘Clover says not to worry, she’ll climb over and get it herself.’

      ‘Right,’ she muttered, through teeth clamped around the handle of the screwdriver. If she could just get one wretched screw in place everything would be easier. She jammed it hard into the hole so that it stayed put while she retrieved the screwdriver and then realised what Rosie had said. ‘No!’

      As she spun round to make sure she was obeyed, the metal plate pivoted on the screw and gouged an arc