Even if Miles wouldn’t let me in his beloved greenhouse.

I changed into a dress and grabbed a sunhat and glasses and walked through the house.

Arrowwood Estate was the ancestral home of my family and the dukedom that came with it. My father was the current Duke of Bath, and we were about thirty minutes from the city itself. I only ever really ventured in for my qualification, for when I needed to do some in-person learning or testing.

The proximity to the tourist hotspot meant we were always busy.

It was no bad thing—an estate the size of ours cost a lot of money to upkeep. My father and grandfather had done what they could to modernise the manor house while keeping it true to itself and its history, but there was only so much they could do.

My grandfather had invested a lot of money into the gardens. About one hundred acres of the three hundred we owned were open to the public, and they were all immaculately presented. We had everything from perfectly manicured box bushes to pruned fruit trees and expansive flower gardens, including a huge orangery that had a giant koi pond.

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.