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“It might not be your definition of freely, Lady Rosamund, but the doors will be open for you from now on, as long as you do not frighten Mrs. Johns to death.”

“Is this still about the lemon cakes?” she asked, a little cheekily. She could not help herself. She was supposed to hate this man, and she still did, but their conversations had been building a foundation of knowledge between them.

“No. It is not, but it can be about them,” he said, rather solemnly.

“When you wake up tomorrow morning, you may forget about this, or you may remember and regret it,” Rosamund insisted.

“I am still here, navigating a social event with you, Lady Rosamund,” the Duke reminded her. “Perhaps, we should be more trusting.”

“Mm,” Rosamund mused, aware that people were watching them. Some might even be wondering what was happening, especially after Westbourne showed Lord Frederick how displeased he was to be the object of speculation. “There is a trick here, somewhere. You dance with me. You will allow me to visit Ashbourne whenever I like. Is this all about showing how far your charity can reach? What game are you playing, Your Grace?”

The Duke paused and looked at her directly, then. The rakish features that he had been using on the ladies earlier were completely absent. He was watching her with an expression she could not read.

“There is no trick, Lady Rosamund,” he said, his blue-gray eyes steady on hers. “You wanted entry to your childhood home, a place that holds your memories. Who am I to deny you that?”

A response was at the tip of her tongue: “You are the man who bought the estate. The deed is in your name. You can choose to deny me everything.”

Yet, she saw something in him that made her pause.

Two days later, Rosamund stood before Ashbourne Hall. It was her childhood home, and she had informed Mrs. Johns she was coming, but something still held her back.

It was not a trick, he had said.

Rosamund prepared to be glared at or greeted coldly by the housekeeper. The old servants knew her, maybe even missed her, but the housekeeper was an addition from the Duke’s own estate. After all, what was she doing there? She almost felt like an inconvenience. For weeks, she had been trying to annoy the Duke of Westbourne by walking within his property. Now that she was right inside, she felt a tremor of anxiety.

“Good day, Lady Rosamund!” Mrs. Johns exclaimed warmly. The woman looked to be in her late fifties, an addition from Westbourne House itself.

“Good day to you, too, Mrs. Johns. I hope that I am not in your way,” Rosamunde said.

“Oh, no, dear,” the housekeeper reassured her. “Here are the keys. Take them and explore to your heart’s content. His Grace has explained that this was your home, and that you must be allowed to walk through it as you see fit.”

“That is quite generous, I should say,” Rosamund murmured. She still felt like there might be a trick somewhere and the Duke had become much wiser than she ever hoped to be.

But still…

Mrs. Johns gave her a curtsy and left her alone to walk around in private, as she would have if she were still living in Ashbourne Hall. Walking through the corridors felt like becoming a part of a ghost story.

Her heart clenched at the thought. Her family used to live here. It was good to see that some of the white cloths had been lifted from over the furniture and the statues, but it still felt strange to see it so uninhabited.

The Duke lived here, but he did not truly live here. That was the impression that Rosamund got. When she received the open invitation to see Ashbourne Hall once again, she thought that she would find a place stripped bare of personality and of the history of the Harcourts.

Desecration or empty spaces was what she expected, but she was met with the opposite.

None of their things were gone.

Perhaps she could understand if the Duke of Westbourne had kept the furniture and the rugs, but he kept everything, even those that marked it as the former property of the deceased Earl of Ashbourne. The gallery of portraits showing her ancestors, a line of Earls, was still there. Even the one of her great-grandfather that sometimes startled her in his sternest was there. She would have forgiven the Duke if he had taken that one down.

But no.

Light entered the rooms generously. It seemed that Ashbourne Hall was beginning to breathe again, opening itself to the outside world. During her last visit, she only got to see the drawing room and brief glimpses of white cloths creating the haunted silhouettes inside the house. Some of the objects no longer had the full value they might have had if they were not damaged, but the carriage clock with the chipped face remained, as was the memory of her father bringing it for her from Paris.

Confusion mounted as Rosamund moved deeper into the house. She expected to be outrage. She thought the trick was that the Duke wanted her to see her former home becoming a shell of what it once was.

This was not what she expected.

Her father’s study still held his volumes of leatherbound books. They were exactly as she remembered them. She knew. There was a rare edition of Virgil in the midst of the second shelf with a red spine among brown ones, and it was still on the same spot.

The desk was not scrubbed clean of stains. The ink spilled by a young Rosamund on the right corner closest to her father’s seat was still there.