As I stood, rather uncomfortably, on the bones of my ancestral home, Donata turned her dark blue gaze on me. "Now, Gabriel, I know it's bad of me to pounce on you without warning, but I did so want to see the place. Do show me everything."

I complied.

A marvelous thing happened as I took Lady Breckenridge from room to room, explaining what was what. The past became just that, the past. My father was no longer the ogre who ruled my life. He'd become a distant ghost, gone for eight years now, releasing his stranglehold on me.

"Good bones, as I said," Donata remarked as she stood in the largest bedroom, empty of all furnishings. "Well anchored. The wing that has fallen in was an eighteenth-century addition, was it not? A good architect can restore it and fix the flaws that kept it from standing."

"The Lacey fortune hardly runs to architects," I said.

"But the Breckenridge one does." She watched me, waiting for me to object.

"I know you berate me for being too proud, Donata, but the last thing I want is to run through your money to repair my life. Every member of the ton supposes that's what I'm doing, but I want you to believe that I am not."

She shrugged. "I like you being proud, and to the devil with what my friends believe. But I am not being charitable, Gabriel. I am being practical. I will have to live here too, and so will my son, and I hardly want to worry about bricks falling on us as we walk about the passages. Besides, I will be inviting Lady Southwick-the friend with whom I am staying-and this house is ever so much better than hers. The Southwick house is gigantic, but modern, gaudy trash. I do so want to best her."

I was torn between amusement and alarm. "You say you care nothing for what your friends think."

"And I do not, but Lady Southwick and I have always been rivals. She even had it off with my husband-briefly-a long time ago. I believe she was as appalled by him as I was, so that did not quite work out as she liked."