up to sit astride the crumbling brickwork.
The derelict garden centre had once been the walled kitchen garden of a grand house that had long since been turned into the headquarters of some multi-national corporation.
From the top, she could see the south wall and the ancient espaliered peach trees. There were a couple of big old greenhouses that had lost a fair amount of glass in a bad storm. Until then, she’d used them to raise her own seedlings. Well, Archie had told her to help herself.
Now it all looked so sad, grown wild with frightening speed and run to a riot of weeds that were beginning to flower in the gravel paths and between great clumps of perennials that had burst out of plastic pots and made themselves at home.
She glanced back down at the girls. ‘Stay there and don’t move,’ she said, then jumped down into a mini-meadow of buttercups and dog daisies and began to look about her for the girls’ ball.
It was big and red and should have been easy enough to find. The trouble was, she kept getting distracted. First by a clump of poppies with scarlet silken petals. Great. She’d come back for some seeds later in the summer. If she was still there later in the summer. Maybe she would have sold the house by then. Or maybe not.
It was a depressing thought either way.
She stopped to look at a huge blousy peony. Not her kind of flower but it broke her heart to think of it being torn up by a bulldozer. Even if she lifted it, though, it probably wouldn’t survive. Peonies hated to be moved. They had her sympathy. She didn’t want to move, either. She was comfortable where she was and she’d put down long roots, but, like the peonies, she didn’t have a choice.
At least in her case the move wouldn’t be fatal. Just very painful. And the end of any chance of getting her own wild plant nursery up and running.
She pushed her way along the overgrown paths, looking for the ball and wondering just how far it could have gone, when she caught a glimpse of red beyond a row of overgrown bushes. She pushed through and saw the strawberries. Big and red and luscious.
Nash emerged from the greenhouse and looked around. Nothing. No one. Then at the far side of the garden he saw someone peering over. It was a child. A little girl. Then she disappeared and his anger evaporated with her.
She meant no harm. It was an accident. The place was a wreck and she could hardly make it worse. He began to pick his way around the raised beds, the thicket of waist-high weeds, planning on tossing the ball back over the wall.
He was about halfway there when another, much older girl appeared, her baggy shorts giving him ample opportunity to admire her long legs as she flung them over the wall. Not a little girl, this one, not if the skimpy top she was filling out so nicely was anything to go by. And he found himself grinning as she jumped down to wade through the knee-high flowers, the sun backlighting the strands of chestnut hair that had escaped the little bobble thing she’d used to hold it back from her face.
She was too busy checking the ground to notice him and he remained quite still, watching her as she waded through the long grass looking about her for the ball. Every now and then she would stop to look at a flower. Not picking it, but just looking, gently touching the petals of the big daisies, the vivid poppies as if saying hello.
Definitely not a vandal.
Then, as she stopped by one of the peonies, the sun lit up her face and he saw a look of genuine pleasure lift the corner of her mouth, before her smile faded to sadness. She wasn’t a girl at all, he realised, but a full-grown woman.
He took half a step, opened his mouth to call out to her, but she turned suddenly. And he knew she’d spotted the strawberries.
It would be a criminal waste to leave them to the slugs, Stacey thought. The wretched creatures already feasted like kings in her garden, despite all her environmentally friendly attempts at controlling them. It was only fair to share, she reasoned, as she got down on her hands and knees and picked half a dozen of the biggest strawberries she could find as a treat for Clover and Rosie.
Then she picked one for herself and ate it warm from the sun, the way strawberries should be eaten. The juice dribbled down her chin and she wiped it off with her fingers and then licked them. Heaven. She couldn’t think how the slugs, or the birds, had missed them, but she was glad they had and took one more.
In fact, if the garden was going to be bulldozed for housing, she might as well come back when Clover and Rosie were at school and get some runners; then they could have their own strawberries next year. She checked to see how soon the little plantlets would be ready. Then she stopped.
What was the point? They wouldn’t be there next year.
Okay, so she’d been saying that for the last two years, but time was running out. She might not be saddled with a mortgage, but there was no chance that she could sell enough wild plants to keep up with the outgoings. And if she was reduced to producing boxes of petunias and bizzie lizzies, she might as well get a job in an office. And with that miserable thought, she began to back out of the strawberry bed.
Her feet encountered an obstruction and she stopped, frowning. She hadn’t noticed anything on the path as she’d crawled in amongst the strawberries and, puzzled, she turned to look behind her.
The obstruction was wearing a pair of well-worn boots with thick socks rolled down over them. Above the boots were two long, well-muscled legs with scarred brown knees, hairy thighs and a pair of denim cut-offs, worn duster-soft with use, clinging to the kind of hips that should be carrying a health warning.
‘Can I help?’ The voice that went with the legs was duster-soft, too.
Stacey felt her face turn the colour of the poppies. To be caught trespassing was bad enough. To have a handful of filched strawberries as evidence of her fall from grace rang a loud nine on the Richter scale of embarrassment; yet to abandon them would only compound her crime. She was still trying to think of something to say when Clover rescued her.
‘Mummee! Have you found it yet?’ Her oldest daughter, paying technical lip-service to her promise not to climb the old wall, was instead perched on a branch of an equally ancient apple tree and peering anxiously over the wall.
‘Get down!’ She should have been angry, but her daughter’s appearance at least lent her the cloak of respectability. She was a mother. A widowed mother, moreover. What could be more respectable than that?
She scrambled to her feet and, turning to face her embarrassment head on, found herself looking up at the kind of man who should not only have a health warning tattooed to his backside, but to his chest, his arms and his thoroughly workmanlike shoulders. To say nothing of a lean, tanned face, periwinkle-blue eyes and the kind of floppy sun-bleached hair that had always gone straight to her knees. Which was why she’d been married on her eighteenth birthday and a mother by her nineteenth, sieving vegetables for baby Clover instead of learning the business aspects of growing them at the local agricultural college.
That this delectable hunk of manhood didn’t have a health warning tattooed to his limbs or any other part of him, she could see for herself since, except for a suntan, the cut-offs were all that he was wearing. Apart from the boots and socks. And she had no doubt that his feet and ankles matched the rest of him and were of the killer variety. Like his smile.
‘Is this what you were looking for?’
‘Looking for? Oh, looking for…’ Stacey
