Soon she came to the narrow, unpretentious driveway and discreet sign that marked the entrance to the Pembroke. Not long ago there’d been no sign, just the crumbling, pitted driveway. No more. Transforming Ulysses Pembroke’s dilapidated house and grounds into an inn and spa had been Dani’s biggest gamble. So far, it looked to pay off.

The biggest miracle, she thought, was that Nick hadn’t sold the property to a mall developer years ago, never mind that she’d threatened everything short of murder if he did. Instead, she’d leased the land from him and revived Ulysses’s long-defunct mineral springs, turning it into a profitable company that enabled her to buy out her grandfather. Of course, Nick liked to claim he’d never have sold out on her. Hadn’t he hung on to the old place, let it be a drag on his finances, for decades? But Dani was unimpressed. Nick Pembroke was a gambler. This time he’d just gambled on her.

Walking up the driveway, she could smell the roses even before she passed the rose garden she’d restored, first on her own, with goatskin gloves and some books on roses, then later with a gardener and landscape architect. The garden was free and open to the public, as Ulysses Pembroke himself had intended when he’d first planted roses there over a hundred years ago.

Beyond the gardens the paved road veered to the right, onto the hillside where she could see the lights of the main house through the trees. It was as big and ugly and ostentatious-and amusing-as one would have expected of someone as grandiose as her great-great-grandfather. The outbuildings were just as unconventional: a sixteenth-century stable the legendary rascal had had shipped stone by stone from Ireland; a Vermont red barn for which he’d had no discernible use; a marble bathhouse with Roman columns. There were two guesthouses and more gardens-informal, formal, vegetable, flower, herb, perennial, annual. Dani had had everything gutted, renovated, spruced up, modernized, restored-whatever was necessary, she did.