Two days after Christmas, Ella went down to the Linwood Castle stableyard with her husband. Her husband. Decimus Pryor. Dex. The man who’d not only filled her heart with color, but had given it wings.
HerThe afternoon was chilly and gray, bleak, but Ella’s heart skipped as joyfully as if it were midsummer. The stableyard smelled of horses and hay and manure, scents that were earthy and unrefined, but not at all unpleasant, not even the manure. Dex called one of the grooms over. “Bryce, can you fetch Mr. Conran for us, please?”
The groom departed in the direction of the kitchen gardens, a vast expanse of beds and trellises and succession houses that Ella hoped to explore soon.
Dex took her hand and drew her into the dim, fragrant warmth of the stables. It was a cavernous place, far larg
