Mommy’s Gardener

Juniper is twenty-three, talented, and perfectly professional.

She has been hired to redesign the garden of an elegant older woman’s private estate. Weekly visits. Detailed consultations. Hands in the dirt, sketches spread across sunlit tables, iced lemonade in crystal glasses. Strictly business.

Victoria Watson is forty-four, divorced, and utterly composed. She knows exactly what she sees in the young designer kneeling in her flowerbeds. The flushed cheeks when their fingers brush over a shared blueprint. The tremble in that soft lower lip when praise lands a little too warmly. The way Juniper leans closer without realizing she has moved at all.

Victoria has guided women like this before. She is patient. She is gentle. She is thorough.

And she always gets what she wants.

From the sunroom to the master bedroom to the pool at dusk, Victoria will teach Juniper things no man ever could. With warming oil on bare skin. With forest green silk scarves binding willing wrists. With whispered praise that rewires everything Juniper thought she knew about herself.

By the time the garden is finished, Juniper will belong to her completely.

She just does not know it yet.