Page 66 of Legacy of Roses

Rosalie listened to him talk about his plans with almost as much enthusiasm as he felt. Her fire for life flowed out to everything she touched—she wasn’t the type to selfishly hoard it away.

She was particularly enthused about his thoughts on how the manor could benefit the local region. She had suggestions of her own each time the topic came up, and he appreciated her input since she knew the area and its needs far better than he did. A banked fire seemed to have taken residence in his belly, giving off a warm glow whenever he thought about how well they worked as a team.

He stretched in bed for several minutes, thinking pleasantly about his plans for the day. The night before, over the evening meal, she had expressed interest in seeing the kitchen, and he had promised to take her in the morning. They had already explored the rest of the manor—some sections many times over—but they hadn’t ventured to the kitchen.

He had slept a little longer than normal, but he didn’t think Rosalie would mind. She had stocked up on books from the library the day before, and he suspected she was happily reading while she ate her breakfast. Sure enough, when she came to her bedchamber door, he caught a glimpse of the teetering pile stacked on her bedside table.

“What?” she asked defiantly when she noticed the direction of his gaze. “I have to make up for lost time.”

He laughed. “I’m not complaining. You can read as much as you like.” He hesitated. “Did you want to keep reading now, or do you want to come see the kitchen?”

“The kitchen,” she said without hesitation, making his heart warm. Had she realized she was choosing him?

They started walking together, the glow still filling him. “Before the Legacy started cooking for us, I’d barely worked out how to use half the items in the kitchen,” he said. “It’s clearly designed to be used by a team of people with far greater knowledge than me.”

“Given the size of the main dining room, I’m not surprised,” Rosalie said. “If they really used to have so many here for meals, they would have needed a huge team to feed them.”

They descended the stairs, and Dimitri froze. The double front doors were always firmly closed, but now one of them was ajar. His hand went to the key in his pocket, but it was still there.

“Rosalie,” he murmured, but she had already seen it too. She looked at him with wide eyes.

“Go back to your room and lock yourself in,” he whispered, but she stubbornly shook her head.

“My room is the most dangerous place to be, remember?” She gave him a look that told him there was no chance he was winning the argument.

Quietly, he descended the remaining stairs. At the bottom, he paused, looking to all sides for any further sign of another person. There was none.

Walking swiftly across the large entryway, he examined the door. There was no indication of forced entry. If he didn’t know better, he would suspect it of having been left open since the day before. But neither of them had used it since their adventure in the garden. It had been closed and locked the previous day, as it had been all the days before. At least as far as he knew.

He glanced at Rosalie. “You didn’t open it this morning, did you? Or last night, perhaps?”

“I don’t have a key.” She patted her pocket. “All I have is the one for my room.” She moved a step closer to him, her voice lowering as her eyes darted around the empty entryway. “Does that mean there’s someone in here?”

“Possibly.” He wanted to believe otherwise, but it was hard to come up with any other conclusion. “Either that or they already came and went.” He looked at her more sharply. “Your room…?”

She shook her head. “Everything was normal in my room, and I didn’t hear anything in the night.”

“They still may have been and gone. There are other valuables to steal in the manor. We should…” He trailed off, not sure what to suggest.

It was a large building with an unnerving number of places where someone could be concealed. Even if they did a systematic search, they couldn’t guarantee that the places they checked remained clear. An intruder could easily move around while they were searching somewhere else. Two people just weren’t enough to effectively search the whole manor. And that was assuming they split up—something he wasn’t willing to do.

“If it’s an ordinary thief, they must surely have left by now,” Rosalie said, showing remarkable calm given the situation. “They won’t be looking for a confrontation. If it’s Jace, on the other hand…” She frowned unhappily. “I don’t think Jace will be cowering in a cupboard somewhere. He was brazen from the start, and his success with my family only seems to have made him more so.”

“He’s had a taste of wealth and power, and it’s feeding his ego.” Dimitri’s hands balled into fists. He still felt angry every time he remembered the way Jace had looked at Rosalie, let alone the way he’d talked to her.

“So the question is,” Rosalie said, “if you were Jace, where would you be?”

Dimitri suppressed his instinctive repulsion at the idea of thinking like Jace and forced himself to consider the matter objectively.

“The dining room,” he concluded. “The main one.”

Rosalie looked at him questioningly, and he shrugged. “You keep calling this a castle, but it isn’t one, so we have no throne room. That enormous dining table seems like the closest equivalent.”

Rosalie’s nose wrinkled. “You think Jace is playing at being lord of the manor? That sounds painfully accurate. Let’s try there first.”

She started in the direction of the dining hall, but he caught her arm, stopping her.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked. “You really want to confront him? We don’t know how many men he has with him.”

---