Collecting Thoughts
by Irene Davidson
A beautiful French chateau nestled in a quiet backwater of rural France. It's a designer's dream. Landscape Architect, Darcy, leaps at a job offer to redesign the gardens, thinking that she'll have time to collect her thoughts after finding that her husband has cheated on her. However in her hasty search for peace and quiet, she never quite took into account the chateau's new owner, Gabriel DuboisDarcy's husband, Patrick-le-Pew, turned out to be a right stinker. He casually announced over dinner one evening that he was leaving her for one of their dinner guests. Needless to say, the dinner ended badly.Oblivious to her rival sitting at her own dining table, Darcy didn't see it coming.Now the husband is an ex- and Darcy is left to pick up the pieces.She packs up her life and her two children, leaving London for rural France and a job designing a new garden for an old chateau not far from the historic city of Rouen, thinking this will be a golden opportunity to collect her thoughts before she moves on to something more permanent. But Life, like even the best of design, seldom goes precisely to plan and Darcy discovers that unexpected opportunities and complications arrive in the form of the chateau's straight-shooting owner and local bad boy made good, Gabriel Dubois.