The Billionaire's Convenient Bride. Liz Fielding

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      Kam Faulkner looked around at the room that had once been Sir Hugo Prideaux’s bedroom, a room his mother had cleaned every day of her working life at Priddy Castle.

      A room strictly out of bounds to the likes of him. Not that he’d ever obeyed rules, never let one keep him out of somewhere he wanted to go. He’d been in here before, when Sir Hugo Prideaux had been away up to his own kind of mischief. He knew that Lady Jane hadn’t slept in here with her husband.

      This part of the castle had been built in the sixteenth century and had diamond-pane windows, linen-fold panelling and an ancient four-poster bed with heavily embroidered drapes. He hoped the mattress was a little more recent.

      He dropped his bag, tossed the old-fashioned room key on the dressing table and walked across to the window.

      The sun, finally breaking through the mist, lit the froth of fresh, bright spring leaves of the trees in the castle woods, sparkled along the creek and off the hulls of the yachts moored in centre of the creek. His playground as a boy.

      He’d known every nest, where to watch for badger cubs, wait quietly to hear a nightingale sing. He’d seen ospreys swoop for sea trout and dodged the warden to catch them himself without any fancy gear. There would have been a hefty fine if he’d been caught.

      These days he could afford the rods and the licence to fish legally but doubted there would be the same fun in it.

      He turned back to the room, but it wasn’t the impressive four-poster he was seeing. It was Agnès Prideaux’s face as she’d recognised him. Something in those grey eyes before the shutters had come down and she’d been back in control and asking, oh, so politely after his mother.

      That moment when she had seemed to lose her balance and he’d reached out and caught her arm. For a fraction of a second he’d had the feeling that all he had to do was draw her close, complete the circle, and his world would come right.

      Imagination, he knew. If there had been anything it had been uncertainty, embarrassment, fear, because she knew his return could mean nothing good. Nothing good for her, anyway.

      And there was absolutely nothing wrong with his world.

      His phone pinged, a text from his PA demanding his attention, and he left the past to give his full attention to the present.

      The future would wait until his lunch date with Agnès Prideaux.

      * * *

      Agnès washed and dried Dora, but when she took the dog back to her grandmother’s room she was asleep in her armchair.

      Agnès gently rubbed behind Dora’s ear. ‘It looks like it’s just you, me and the boiler, sweetie.’

      Dora gave a happy little yap as if she couldn’t think of anything she’d like better, and the boiler, having had time to think about it, finally juddered into life.

      She sagged with relief as the tension left her. The chances were that it would behave for a few days, but she urgently needed a heating system that didn’t lurch from one crisis to another.

      She needed a long-term solution and there was only one option left.

      Showered, changed into the silk shirt and dark trouser suit she wore as her work uniform, Agnès stopped at Reception to let Suzanna know that they had hot water, at least for today.

      ‘That’s a relief,’ she said, and meant it. Suzanna lived in and it wasn’t only her job but her home that depended on the viability of the castle. She wasn’t alone in that.

      There were other staff who might not find work easily if she lost the castle, herself among them. And there was her grandmother. She had become increasingly frail and there was no money for care-home fees.

      ‘Jamie is on top of your lunch. You won’t be embarrassed in front of your friend,’ Suzanna said, a question mark in the word ‘friend’.

      ‘He’s... Kam’s mother used to work at the castle.’

      ‘Oh, right. So he’s back to take a look at his old home...? Are you okay, Agnès?’

      No, she was not okay. She was far from okay, but she said, ‘I need some air after being stuck down in the boiler room.’ Space to come to terms with what she had to do.

      ‘Not a problem. Someone has to walk through the woods and check on the progress of the bluebells and it’s not going to be me.’

      Dora was at the door before Suzanna—who would do anything rather than step out of her high heels, pull on a pair of boots and walk a muddy path—handed her the pair of wellingtons kept behind the desk.

      Once upon a time, back in the days when gardeners came in dozens and were paid a pittance, the castle gardens had been open to the public by request only. If you wanted to visit Lady Anne Prideaux’s rose garden, you had to write and make an appointment.

      Her great-grandfather had gone a little further, opening to the public on half a dozen days in the year when for a small sum—all in aid of charity—the castle servants would serve you with a cream tea in the Orangery.

      It was what a gentleman did.

      Her grandfather had needed hard cash and by then there wasn’t a duke, marquis or earl who wasn’t opening up his stately home to the public to help pay for the upkeep of their ancestral piles.

      He’d opened up the gardens to the public for five days a week in the summer. It was, however, special flowers—the snowdrops, bluebells, azaleas—that drew the crowds in the spring. And then, in summer, Lady Anne’s rose garden, planted in the early nineteenth century with roses brought back by a plant-hunting cousin from Persia, filled the air with scent and drew the crowds.

      In the early days her grandmother had offered cream teas in the garden in good weather, in the Orangery in the colder, wetter months. Darjeeling, Orange Pekoe and Earl Grey, served in bone china. Scones, baked in the castle kitchen by the under cook, served with jams made from fruit grown in the kitchen garden.

      Some people had come just for the tea.

      Now they took in B & B guests, and lunches and afternoon tea in the Orangery were self-service from a counter. More practical, maybe, and no one walked off with the plastic spoons, but no one came just for the tea, either.

      Aware that it would be colder under the trees, Agnès grabbed a jacket and scarf and paused at the door to breath in the fresh, damp air of an April morning.

      Rainwater was dripping from guttering that needed replacing, but the sun had finally burned off the mist, a blackbird was singing in an oak tree and the sky was a clear pale blue. It was one of those perfect moments that needed savouring and Agnès closed her eyes and lifted her face to the light.

      ‘Don’t you have more important things to do than walk your grandmother’s dog?’

      Kam’s caustic remark didn’t faze her. He might have grown, become a man, but his footsteps were an echo through time. She’d heard him coming across the polished oak floor and steeled herself not to react as he came to a halt beside her.

      The scent was new, though.

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