Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 117740 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 589(@200wpm)___ 471(@250wpm)___ 392(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117740 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 589(@200wpm)___ 471(@250wpm)___ 392(@300wpm)
She’s the countryside girl who is determined to break him first.
But when hearts are involved, can either of them truly win?
I, Rose Matthews, have always considered myself a perfectly reasonable person.
Until the day Oliver de Havilland—the hottie I wham, bam, thank you ma’am’d two weeks ago—shows up at Hanbury Allotments and hands me a closure notice. In two months, he’s going to shut down the place I love the most—the very place that keeps the dwindling community of our village alive.
Long story short; I’m ready to riot.
Riot. Protest. Run naked through the village centre with nothing but lettuce leaves covering my lady bits. You know, the usual.
The new Duke of Hanbury is as arrogant as the last, but there’s no way I’m going to let him get away with this. Especially not since his plan is to sell the land to make way for more cookie-cutter housing nobody wants.
This is more than a battle of wits—it’s a war, and a dirty one at that.
But I won’t lose.
Because if Oliver didn’t want to play dirty, he shouldn’t have roughed up a gardener
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
* * *
ROSE
Hanbury Allotments
“Behold my schlong!”
I stabbed my trowel into the raised vegetable bed in front of me and stared over the fence at my neighbour. “George, I’ve told you not to talk about your marrows that way. I’ve already had to calm Carol down three times because her grandson told all the ladies at church to ‘behold his schlong.’”
“That sounds like Carol’s problem,” George said nonchalantly, shrugging his drooping shoulders.
“It’s mine when she complains to me as the head of the allotment committee,” I pointed out.
“I know I’ve used it frivolously in the past, but I mean it this time. Look, Rose.” He leant over the waist-high fence and held his monstrous tiger marrow out in front of me. “It’s fuckin’ massive.”
He wasn’t lying. He needed two hands to hold it, and never had I seen a man so proud of one giant vegetable.
Size really did matter, it seemed.
“Mind your language,” Susan said from the other side of my plot. “And stop referring to your vegetables as genitalia, George. It makes it sound like you’re overcompensating for something.”
“I don’t need to overcompensate for anythin’.” George huffed, hugging his marrow to his chest. “Just because you aren’t getting any.”
“I’m seventy-one. What am I supposed to be getting? The bloody flu? Backache? Cataracts surgery?”
That was a bit dramatic of her.
She wasn’t that old.
She was practically middle-aged these days. And the picture of health, thank you very much.
Then again, Susan wouldn’t be Susan if there wasn’t a little drama in her day.
“Sex, Susan. Sex,” George said, enunciating each word. “S-e-x.”
“Psh.” She waved her gloved hand through the air in front of her. “Who has the time for sex? What’s wrong with a good cup of tea and reruns of The Chase to fulfil all your needs on a Friday night?”
Well, a cup of tea, for a start, but if I said that out loud, I’d be chased out of the country.
“What needs are being fulfilled by The Chase?”
“Bradley Walsh.” Susan licked her lips. “Now, there’s a man I’d let sex me up.”
Disgust contorted George’s aged features, and his jowls wobbled when he shuddered. “I don’t come to the allotment for casual sexual harassment like this.”
“You’re the one calling your marrow a schlong.”
“That’s less harassment than saying you’d sleep with Bradley Walsh.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I bet Bradley Walsh would.”
“How do you know? You haven’t asked him.”
“I don’t need to ask him to know what he’d think.”
“What about Gordon Ramsay instead, then? He’s a tasty thing.”
“Susan, he’d probably tell you that you’ve spent too long in the oven.”
“How rude—and what utter nonsense. If I were a meal, I’d be a dessert. No oven required.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because desserts are the best part of a meal, and I am most certainly far too good to be a mere appetiser and too sweet to be the main.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder. “That’s how I know.”
“Sweet? More like sour.”
I sighed and rubbed my hand down the side of my face, probably leaving a trail of dirt smeared over my cheek, but who cared? I was surrounded by chaos, which was saying something considering I was usually the chaos.
Thirty-six.
There were thirty-six plots at this allotment site, and mine was smack bang in the middle of two seventy-somethings playing out some perverted enemies-to-lovers fantasy like they were tragic protagonists in a romance novel.
I didn’t care what either of them said. They absolutely had the hots for one another, and they most certainly got a thrill out of flirt-arguing over the top of my head.
Sexual harassment? Pfft. I was the one being bloody sexually harassed here, thank you very much.
I just wanted to plant my marigolds to keep the whitefly off my tomatoes, for the love of God.
“Can you two take your flirting elsewhere?” I said, getting to my feet. “My pure and innocent ears are being corrupted by your depravity.”
“How can you call yourself pure and innocent?” George snorted. “Didn’t you pioneer the naked allotment calendar last year?”
I paused. “Yes, and that raised a lot of money for the farmer’s youth club to go on their trip this summer. We’re doing it again this year, and I’m not letting you get out of it, either.”
Susan laughed. “You can show the whole village your schlong then, George.”
He’d be showing more than just the village. Those calendars had been a viral hit.
It was truly surprising how many people were interested in a calendar of naked people covering their wobbly bits with their homegrown vegetables.
The internet was a strange place.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing,” I said, turning to her. “You’re getting your melons out, Susan. You didn’t do it last year, either.”
She dropped her trowel. “I can’t get naked in public!”
“You did that plenty in your younger days,” George said. “You once danced through the high street wearing nothing but a grass skirt and coconut bra.”