Free Patricia Rice by This Magic Moment

believe Grandfather left her a large dowry, and I assume Peter must earn his living if he wishes to have his own household. They live simply. I think they prefer the rural society of Brighton to London.”
    She nodded without comment.
    She was beginning to make him feel uneasy. Shouldn’t a woman chatter incessantly, or comment upon the countryside, or ply him with questions about the home that would be hers? What was happening inside that whirling dervish of a mind of hers?
    “This is the drive.” After riding a mile or so from the village, Harry stopped to pull the bar to open a gate. The gatehouse appeared to be in good repair, and the gate swung readily.
    Oaks lined the drive, blocking the view of the stately home ahead. Or the once stately home, he revised. In his youth, it had been a rambling structure of crumbling old castle harmoniously merged with a brick manor house of the 1500s. He remembered playing among the stone parapets of the castle and leaping to the slate roof to hide among the brick chimneys of the manor.
    His mother had overseen the construction of a new wing and begun restoration of the old parts before she died of ague. His father had obsessively continued building and restoring after her death. Harry had left for Oxford the day his father hired workmen to dig a tunnel from the new wing to the stable so no one could see him when he left the house.
    Every holiday that Harry had returned home, there had been some new and more grotesque “improvement.” He’d left for good when his father began constructing stairs to towers that no longer existed and windows overlooking a courtyard that had long since been built over. The towers that remained had doors opening onto thin air, and interior walls sported windows looking into the next room—sometimes through the ceiling.
    He hadn’t been able to bear watching the deterioration of his once hearty, jovial father into the haunted architect of a nightmare.
    Spring leaves whispered on the trees above them. The lush lawn spread down to the fields just as he remembered. He knew that the copse of woods on the next hill hid the remains of a Roman villa where he’d spent many a happy day hunting treasure.
    He fell silent as the mansion rose into view above the trees.
    Christina gasped in delight at the sight of pennants flying from a distant tower and row upon row of brick chimneys extending across a… She looked closer. A parapet? Castles had parapets. Houses had chimneys. Sommersville apparently had a lot of both.
    She pondered the oddity of the brick dome over the stone portion that ought to be a castle, and the stone parapet that fronted the brick portion of the house that ought to be a Tudor mansion. She wasn’t an architect, but she’d seen many beautiful stately homes. This wasn’t one of them.
    A new brick wing jutted out to the front with the evenly spaced windows and centered door in the current mode. The builder had used a tile roof to match that of the Elizabethan section, and the two parts might have blended harmoniously had the new wing not possessed an elegant portico entrance while the manor entrance was stripped to a single granite step.
    Curious, she turned to Harry, but her question died on her tongue. His aura was streaked through with black. His face was a shuttered mask. He held his jaw so tautly, a muscle ticked near his eye. He rode with shoulders stiff and straight and nothing of his usual careless seat in the saddle. He looked every inch the formidable duke.
    Harry did not want to go home, she concluded. From the looks of it, he ought to turn around and gallop back to London as quickly as his horse could take him. Biting her lip, looking longingly at the fascinating structure ahead, Christina halted her mount.
    “If you did not wish to bring me here, you should have said so.” She tried to keep the hurt out of her voice, but she wanted honesty in their marriage.
    “I know you’re used to better,” he said stiffly. “I’ll do