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“Your father and mother shared this room?” She couldn’t imagine the dowager snuggled up to a man.

Silvester nodded. “The chamber has been completely renovated, including a new bed. I turned the duke’s dressing room into a water closet. The Dower House has also been renovated, as my mother will live there when she pays us a visit. I waited to renovate the rest of the Grange, thinking that my wife would wish to direct the work.”

Stella’s heart plummeted to her feet.

Of course, the room had been renovated.

He had been preparing for a wife: Yasmin.

Stella looked around her, rather blindly. Petals blew across the four walls as if in a brisk wind, collecting in creamy eddies. The scene continued from wall to wall, as lovely and unique as Yasmin herself.

“It’s beautiful,” Stella said, her voice coming out with a hoarse edge, despite herself. She cleared her throat. “Is this an example of Chinese wallpaper?”

“Actually, I heard of some artists in Versailles who paint paper, rather than wood-blocking it. They came last summer to install it.” Of course.

French, just like Yasmin.

“We put them up in the South wing, but my butler reported they complained a great deal about the leaking roof.” Silvester’s voice was noncommittal. “I had hoped they would paper more than one chamber, but they returned to France in high dudgeon, so the other chambers await a duchess’s eye. My mother may have had a hand in dispatching them: she likes the Grange as it is.”

Stella was trying to digest the fact that the dowager duchess could like this ruin of a house. “Couldn’t you have fixed the roof in the South wing?” she asked.

“My mother has been unwilling to accept interference. We decided that I would have free rein with the London townhouse, until the point when I planned to marry. After that, she agreed to move to the Dower House and accept that my wife would oversee renovations.”

An enormous bed was pushed against one wall, covered with snowy white linen and more lacy pillows than she’d ever seen in one place.

As if the wallpaper suddenly came into focus, Stella realized that the petals on the walls were jasmine. Delicate jasmine petals everywhere she looked.

One emotion seared into Stella’s bones: she could not, she simply could not sleep with Silvester in the exquisite nest he designed for Yasmin.

“We could always rip out the wallpaper,” he said, as her silence went on too long. “Do you think it’s too frivolous?”

“That would be a desecration. The paper is a true work of art,” Stella said. She had never imagined anything like the playful way the petals swirled and eddied, sweeping across all four walls. It belonged in a museum.

Silvester walked toward her slowly, as if she were a kitten that might startle and run away.

“Shouldn’t Specs have arrived by now?” Stella asked hurriedly. They had consigned the cat to her maid’s carriage after she hissed at Silvester, who had expressed a strong desire not to be urinated on. Specs had clearly decided that Silvester was responsible for Stella’s absence.

“Their carriage followed closely after ours,” Silvester said. He moved to stand just in front of her and jerked his head toward one of the tall windows that presumably looked over the ducal lands. “I asked them to put a box for her on the balcony.”

“I’m not sure we should sleep together,” Stella said carefully. “My aunt would be—”

“Your aunt’s opinion is irrelevant to our marriage.”

Silvester didn’t interrupt often, but Stella had to admit he had a good point. His eyes were searing a question into hers.

“Privacy is important,” she blurted out.

He frowned.

“Privacy,” she repeated, fidgeting. “A woman’s privacy.”

He transformed before her eyes from a demanding husband to the endlessly courteous Duke of Huntington. “I apologize. I was being thoughtless.”

Profound disappointment washed over her because she was so stupid that she wanted him to argue over a rule that she’d just established.

He took a step toward the door. “I shall send your maid to you as soon as she arrives. And Specs, of course.”

“Where will you sleep?”