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V ictoria lay awake into the night, staring up at her ceiling in the dark and thinking about the conversation she'd had over dinner.

She didn't want to take it too seriously. She shouldn't take it too seriously. She had made up the tale about ghosts that she had told James. There were no ghosts in this house. She'd lived here for two years. She knew there weren't.

How could it be that the place felt more frightening, more forbidding, now that someone else had moved in than it ever had when she had been on her own?

The loneliness should have made the house more frightening, not less, but now she longed for the days when she had been here on her own—days she knew were gone forever.

With a sigh, she got out of bed. Her heart was beating too rapidly to allow her to relax, and she knew that it was unlikely to stop any time soon. Every time she thought her mind might be at ease, she remembered what James had said about noticing cold spots.

Everyone knew that cold spots were signs of ghosts being present. And after all, there had been a death in this house not very long ago. What if the late duke's spirit was not at rest? What if he walked these halls even now?

She shivered. There was absolutely no way she was going to be able to sleep tonight.

She decided to go to the library, as she sometimes did when she was restless.

The library had been a blessing over the past two years, giving her countless options when she wanted something to read.

Since she wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight, a book seemed like just the thing to take her mind off of her troubles.

She made her way down the hall. As she pulled open the library door and heard the familiar creak—a sound that had become downright homey to her over the last two years—it occurred to her that if James had his way she would soon be losing access to this.

She would no longer be able to sit and read these books at her leisure.

In fact, she would be unable to read them again at all.

Perhaps her new husband would also have a substantial library…

She shook her head. What was she thinking?

There wasn't going to be any new husband.

She was resolved in her decision not to marry.

That wasn't going to change. She'd allowed herself to be shaken by the fact that James claimed he had experienced the effects of a haunting, but…

well, he was probably lying, wasn't he? She had been lying about it.

He was probably lying too. There was probably nothing to worry about.

Probably.

She went into the library and scanned the shelves, eventually selecting a book.

Victoria's usual habit was to scan the spines of the books until she found one that looked promising, so she usually ended up reading things she hadn't chosen deliberately.

It was a practice she was proud of, because it meant that she read more widely than she otherwise would have.

As soon as the book was in her hands, she began to feel more sure of herself.

She went over to the fire and settled in her favorite chair, grateful for the fact that she had instructed her servants to keep the fire in this room lit all night long.

It meant she would always have light and warmth when she came to the library in the middle of the night, and it also meant that the library felt like a refuge to her.

It had become a place where she could retreat and be herself without any worries about what was going on in the rest of the world.

And that was how she felt now, the moment she opened the book in her hands.

All her troubles seemed to melt away. Her anxiety at the possibility of the house being haunted disappeared, and so did her anger at James and her worry over what he might do to her.

It was impossible to feel those things in a moment like this.

She began to read.

Before long, she was so engrossed in the book that she had lost track of everything going on around her. Even immediate things, like the crackling of the fire, no longer touched her. She had slipped entirely into the world of the book.

" Victoria …"

The voice in her ear was a low whisper, sinister and alarming, and it brought Victoria crashing back to the moment. In her shock, she let go of the book, and she began to let out a startled yell of fear…

A big hand covered her mouth, catching the sound she had been about to make. Another hand appeared and caught the book she had dropped neatly before it could hit the floor.

"Hush," James said. "You'll wake the staff. You don't want to do that, do you?"

She didn't. She shook her head slowly.

"I'm going to uncover your mouth," James told her. "No yelling."

He peeled his hand away slowly.

Victoria stepped quickly away from him. Her heart was pounding like a drum.

She hated being caught by surprise by someone's touch like that, though a part of her acknowledged that there was no way he could have known how unpleasant she would find that.

But she was also shocked to realize that she hadn't found it all that unpleasant. She had enjoyed it, in a strange way. There was a shiver of delight that he had put a hand on her face, and she could still feel the warmth where he'd touched her.

She had to get away from him. She couldn't let him see that he had provoked these feelings in her.

"What did you do that for?" she demanded once she was satisfied with the distance between the two of them.

"I've just told you," James said. "You were about to yell and wake up the whole house. I had to stop you." The smirk on his face made him all the more handsome, accenting his bold features, and it was maddening.

"You must know that isn't what I mean," Victoria snapped. "Why did you sneak up behind me and breathe in my ear like that? Anybody would have been frightened."

"You really were off in your own little world, not to have even noticed me come in," he said. "What were you reading, anyway?" He looked at the book in his hand, and his eyes widened slightly. "Voltaire?"

"Does that surprise you?"

"I didn't realize ladies ever read Voltaire," he said.

"I imagine ladies read all sorts of things," Veronica said dryly. "As for me, I read whatever catches my interest, and today that happened to be Voltaire. At least, I was interested in it until you snuck up on me and ruined the experience. What are you doing out of bed at this hour?"

"I might ask you the same question," James retorted.

"You might," she agreed, "but I asked it first, so you wouldn't get an answer unless I got my answer first."

"I see. You're very deft sometimes, you know. Very good at negotiation. That's a skill that will serve you well in your marriage."

Victoria hated that he had mentioned her marriage. It felt worse than usual, though she couldn't have said exactly why.

"I can't believe you'd have the nerve to say that to me right now, after you just snuck up on me. You scared the daylights out of me, you know," Victoria told him. "I was reading very peacefully until you did that. And I really didn't need a scare like that tonight."

"I just can't believe that scared you," James said, a wicked twinkle in his eye. "What with all the ghosts running around this place, I would have expected that you would be impossible to scare. I would have thought that you would be used to things sneaking up on you."

He was mocking her. She could tell by the look in his eyes and by the way his lips quivered, as if he was trying not to smile.

It was clear now that he had never believed there were any ghosts in this house.

He hadn't believed her story when she had tried to tell him, and he hadn't meant the things he had said to her in response, either.

Fury flared up within her. Even though she was dimly aware that they had done exactly the same thing to one another, she couldn't help it—she was still angry with him for it.

"It's ghosts I'm used to," she said. "Not arrogant dukes who march about my home as if they own the place and deliberately try to frighten me in the middle of the night.

I'll never get used to that sort of thing.

And thankfully, I don't have to get used to it, because there are so few people in the world who act the way you do. "

"You're very naive if you believe that everyone in the world is going to be nice to you," James said. Her comment had clearly nettled him.

"I don't think everyone is going to be nice to me," Victoria said.

Images flashed through her mind—Jonathan, the man she'd once thought she would marry; the late duke, looking her up and down and telling her how lucky he was to have a young wife all to himself; her father, knowing how badly she wanted to escape marriage to the duke and refusing to step in on her behalf even when he could have done it.

She wished she'd had the luxury of believing that the world was a place that would take care of her, but she hadn't.

That had never been her life. It bothered her immensely that James would assumed she'd lived that way when she hadn't.

"If you didn't think that, you wouldn't be so shaken by a little teasing," James said.

"I know that people are unkind in this world," Victoria said.

"But most of that unkindness comes out when a person sees something they want.

Something they might gain. You're different.

I think you're unpleasant to me out of habit, or because you enjoy making me unhappy.

But it's not a path to anything you truly want.

You're not bothering me in the library tonight because it helps you in some way to plague me in the middle of the night. "

He frowned. "You're speaking out of turn."

"You were out of turn when you crept up on me. Perhaps you thought I would be too frightened to tell you that, but I'm not."

He stood back and looked at her.

Victoria waited for him to speak. She had said a lot of things very quickly, and she found herself feeling very overwhelmed by everything she'd just articulated.

She had needed to say those things, though, and she knew it.

In a way, she was grateful to him for sneaking up on her in the middle of the night the way he had, because it had given her the chance to finally let loose with everything that had been on her mind.

"I didn't know you had so many thoughts about me," the duke said at length.

"Are you one of those gentlemen who believes that ladies don't think?" Victoria asked him.

"Don't be ludicrous."

"Well, you didn't think that ladies read Voltaire."

"I didn't think ladies would have an interest in Voltaire."

"I suppose you thought we just sit around reading about—about sewing notions."

He laughed. "You really don't think much of me, do you?"

"Not very much, no."

"Is there anything I can do to improve your opinion of me?"

"You don't care about my opinion of you," she reminded him. "You want to get me married and out of your hair. Don't lose track of your goal now just because you discovered that I know how to read."

To her utter shock, James burst out laughing.

"I didn't realize you had a sense of humor, either," he confessed. "I think there's a lot you and I don't know about one another."

And he strode past her and sat down in the very chair in which she had been seated before he had come in.

Victoria wasn't surprised by him taking her chair. But what happened next did shock her.

He gestured to the chair beside him.

It was a clear invitation for her to sit down and join him.