Page 128 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

‘Mrs Arundel would be furious I’ve let them spread so far,’ he said, his shears at the ready to take them down to the root.

She placed her hand on the damp, soft grass and pushed herself up from her knees.

‘Let me help.’ The gardener dropped his shears beside him and stooped toward her.

‘I’m okay, Dennis.’ She smiled, because she was. For the first time in so long, she was…okay. More than okay. She was flourishing like her little seeds.

Dennis released her elbow.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and stroked the swell of her stomach.

Together they stood, looking at the wild bush.

‘Leave them,’ she said.

‘Leave them?’

‘The holly, the brambles. Build a trellis,’ she said. ‘We will contain them, but we’ll let them grow.’

‘A good idea.’ He nodded, and his eyes smiled. ‘The student becomes the teacher.’

‘Hardly!’She chuckled softly. She did that often these days. Laughed, because she could. Because she felt like it. Because it felt good to do so.

‘I will build it,’ he said. ‘Do you want help to get into the house?’

‘I’m pregnant, not an invalid,’ she rebuked him lightly.

‘It will be good to have a young one here.’ His eyes moved over the manor standing tall at the edge of the grounds. Arundel Manor. A house, but never a home. At least, it hadn’t been before.

‘It will,’ she agreed.

Dennis smiled. Waving, he left her alone in the garden of cabbages and wild blackberries.

She walked over to the wall of invasive fruit. Pinched the top of a juicy one, picked it. It was almost black. Ready and ripe. And she felt the urge to put it into her mouth, clamp her teeth through it and lick the juice from her fingers. But she knew she shouldn’t. Not because her mother would have been appalled, but because it should be washed first.

She was ready to do the hard work. The preparation was done for the life growing inside her.

She gathered her skirt into a mock bowl and stared at the bump she couldn’t hide beneath the green cotton. Didn’twantto hide.

It was her little seed.

Finding out she was pregnant, she’d known she had to take charge of her life, learn how to be independent, live for herself. And so she had. The cook was teaching her how to prepare food, the gardener how to grow food.

It was something primal, she knew, and she embraced it. The need to have the skills to give her baby everything she hadn’t. Freedom to dig a hole in the earth.

She reached for another blackberry and dropped it into her skirt. It would stain,probably. But she’d bought so many new dresses, dresses with jangly and dangling bits. Dresses her mother would have hated, butsheadored.

He adored your dress.

She should not think of him.

But she did. Often. Too often.

She remembered in moments like these, when the world felt so right, that it wasn’t because of her she’d changed. Not entirely. It was because of him. And she remembered too, late at night, when her hand, her fingers, found their way between her thighs, and she began to crave the fullness she’d felt with him.

He was the reason she had this gift inside her.

A baby.