“Are you sure this is all right?” Richard asked not for the first time. The way he kept staring around…he appeared shell-shocked, or bewildered to be in the house. “Sorry.” Now he looked sheepish when he met Ethan’s stare. “Not been in here for years.” He waved a hand toward the sitting room off the kitchen where they stood. “The conservatory wasn’t there when I last came in.”
Had it been so long? Though a recent addition, the conservatory off the lounge had been installed before Ethan took over the study adjacent to the kitchen as his room. That meant Richard’s last visit home happened before the refurbishment—the addition of the glasshouse and reconfiguring the downstairs living space into a more communal area, the new layout provided by input from the staff who lived there.
The opport
