Weeds had sprung up and were threatening to overwhelm the delicate herbs she and Blake had spent years caring for. The netting protecting some of the now rotting strawberries had torn away and caterpillars had almost completely decimated the lettuce crop.

Rage filled her, hot and scouring and not all of it directed at Henry. A good part, but not all. It had been too long since she’d been here, unwilling and unable to face the new lord of the manor. But now … ohhh. Now she would let him have it.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

She jumped, startled by the angry voice of the man she had been imagining murdering in several colourful ways. Spinning, she turned on him and launched towards him, still snapping the secateurs.

‘You!’ Lily exclaimed. ‘You! How dare you!’

‘Excuse me?’ His indignant reply burst from lips that were full and that seemed, to Lily, almost carnal. Henry looked utterly devastating in a pair of jeans that clung to strong thighs, topped by a dark blue cable-knit jumper pressing against the outline of a very well-defined torso.

Why couldn’t he have run to fat? she internally moaned. Why couldn’t he have just become … ugly? It made her even more angry and devastatingly conscious that she had come from her kitchen wearing an old pair of jeans, a loose white V-neck T and a large fluffy orange cardigan.

‘How bloody dare you! This place is nearly ruined.’

‘Ruined?’ Once again, he sounded dumbfounded.

‘Yes! Look,’ she commanded, waving the secateurs to the left. ‘Just look at it. Stinging nettles! We haven’t had stinging nettles in here for nearly three years. And the caterpillars!’ Lily hated the way she had to crane her neck to look up at him, not realizing how close they were standing.

‘That’s hardly my fault.’

Lily wanted to jump up and down on the spot and stamp her foot like a child. Of course it wasn’t his fault. It was hers. She just hadn’t been able to face coming back here since Blake … let alone wanting to stay away from Henry.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded slowly, as if desperately seeking patience.

‘I wanted to call a truce,’ Lily practically growled, knowing full well that the tone of her voice suggested anything but. And from the glint in Henry’s eyes, he seemed to find it just as ironic.

‘And you do this by breaking and entering—’

‘Breaking and—’

‘Causing damage to private property—’

‘Damage?!’ she cried.

‘And … theft,’ he said, peering into the basket of her bicycle, containing some of the herbs she’d managed to forage before his arrival.

The gall of the man!