Instead she wiped a smudge from the wooden drainer, rearranged a jug full of garden flowers she’d put on the windowsill, straightened a row of old boots in the mud room. She always found it hard to drag herself away from this house. It felt lonely, as if it needed her.

Which was plainly ridiculous.

What it needed, she thought, was a couple who would love it and cherish it and fill it with children. A proper family to bring life to silent rooms, children to play Chopsticks on the piano, build dens in the overgrown garden. A woman with time and love to lavish on it and turn it into a home. Someone like Lady Gabriella and the imaginary family with which she’d populated it during the last few months. Eight-year-old Oliver, six-year-old Sasha, little Chloe. And a shadowy masculine figure who was not the man she’d loved, married, lost-this was not his place-but someone utterly different, a man who, until now, she’d managed to avoid bringing into focus…

Enough. Time to go. She picked up her backpack, then paused to guiltily dead-head the bedraggled pansies in a dreary stone trough by the kitchen door-something else that looked as if the last person who’d taken any notice of it was Dr Faulkner’s great-grandmother.

Ben Faulkner stood at the arched gothic window of his study and watched as Ellie March struggled to mount a vintage sit-up-and-beg bike of the kind that his great-grandmother had probably ridden. The flighty one who’d read romantic fiction and caused a scandal.

If she’d been around today, he thought, she’d probably be wearing hip-hugging jeans, a cropped T-shirt and have a gold ring in her navel, too. Ellie March was not only a danger to any man who made the mistake of getting too close to the ladder she was perched on, but dressed like that she was a serious traffic hazard.