Page 31

“Me and you and Uncle Nathaniel, like a family.”

“I would like that very much,” Laura agreed, and found she meant it, despite her feelings about her husband.

Iris burrowed closer and said nothing more for a while, and Laura let her, watching the last of the light dim across the tulip beds, the black shape of a horse and rider long since vanished from the ridge.

The castle behind them was lit window by window as the servants went about with candles.

For the first time since she’d arrived here, it looked less like a fortress and more like a home. One that simply hadn’t been given the chance yet.

CHAPTER 11

Nathaniel had spent the morning at the Aldridge farm arguing with a tenant about drainage and had come home with mud to his knees and a headache pressing behind his eyes.

He had thought about nothing beyond a hot bath and an hour of silence. What he found instead stopped him dead in the entrance hall with his gloves half off.

He took a deep breath.

What has changed here?

The place smelled different. That was the first thing he noticed, before he’d even worked out why.

Not the usual mustiness of old stone and older dust, but something green and alive, and it took him a moment to trace it to the arrangement of flowers sitting on the hall table. For three years, nothing had sat there but a dish for calling cards no one left.

The faded runner on the stairs had been beaten and set straight. Someone had polished the brass sconces until they threw back the afternoon light instead of swallowing it.

What is going on here?

He made his way to the drawing room, half convinced he’d wandered into the wrong castle. He took a turn around the room and found new plump moss-green cushions on the settee, and a fire laid and crackling even though the day wasn’t cold enough to need it. The curtains he vaguely remembered as gray with age had been pulled back to let the light in rather than hanging half shut as they always had, as if the room itself had been ashamed to be seen.

It was not a different castle. It was the same castle, every stone and beam of it. But it looked, for the first time in longer than he cared to count, lived in.

He went to the window, and that was when he saw them.

Down past the terrace, in the garden that had gone to bramble and neglect since Isabella’s death, the beds had been turned and planted, the paths swept clean of leaves, and the fountain was running.

In the middle of it, her hair coming loose from its pins, her skirts hitched up, Laura was chasing Iris in circles around the old oak while the girl shrieked with a careless delight he hadn’t heard from her in longer than he wanted to admit.

He watched Laura catch her and swing her half off her feet, both laughing too hard to stand up straight. He felt something in his chest crack open before he could brace against it.

She looks just like her…

He and Isabella had played that same game under that same tree twenty years and a lifetime ago. Long before their father had decided that a future duke had no business chasing his sister among the flowerbeds and put a stop to it. He could still hear her laughter if he let himself go there, high and delighted, before everything had taken it from him.

He shut the curtains and turned away from the window.

He went to his study, shut the door, and did not let himself feel any of it further than he had to. He sat there for the better part of an hour, ledgers open and his mind nowhere near them, when a light knock at the door startled him.

He set his hands on the desk, bracing himself for what he knew was on the other side. “Enter.”

Laura stepped inside.

The sight of her in such a disheveled state knocked the breath from his lungs.

She looked perfectly at ease, half her hair undone and hanging loose against her flushed cheeks. Sweat glistened along her throat, and she wiped it with the back of her hand, entirely unselfconscious and unaware of what the gesture did to him.

Suddenly, Nathaniel imagined pressing his lips right there, tasting the subtle, sun-warmed salt of her exertion, feeling the fragile heat of her breath hitching against his mouth.

The thought struck him hard, sending a sudden, sharp ache straight through his chest. He pictured his hands sliding up to cup her jaw, feeling the smudge of dirt beneath his thumbs as he pulled her closer, trading the suffocating silence of their distant dinners for the breathless, chaotic rhythm of her skin against his.