As if he could feel Nora's presence, Martin turned around and smiled at her the next moment, the two women following his gaze.

Despite the insufficient light and the cold courtyard separating them, she could see the joy and... affection filling his green orbs, and it sufficed to scatter her despairing thoughts and smile back at him, her own heart overflowing with happiness because she was close to him again, and earlier than she had expected. She didn't care what he was, how much he still had to tell her about his life, she loved... being with him, and that was enough.

Taking another deep breath, she walked towards him on shaky legs, even as he crossed the courtyard to meet her halfway, pulling her in for a kiss the instant he could reach her.

That kiss earned her a couple of disappointed looks from the two women as they walked past them towards the hotel, wishing them a good night hastily.

"Friends?" Nora asked once they were beyond the glass door.

"Guests," he replied, taking her hand in his. "They lingered behind after the last tour to ask a few questions about the castle."

"Right," she said, smiling. To her, they seemed more interested in their guide than the castle. Well, she couldn't blame them, she mused, looking up to observe his profile as he led her back towards the door where she had seen him before. He looked dashing with his hair tied back with a leather thong, swathed in the floor-length coat with the Count's coat of arms embroidered on his chest billowing around him in the wind-- like a character from a Victorian novel. "So... the Count makes you work as a guide, too? He doesn't have a heart!"

Suddenly, somehow, she was absolutely sure that the Count stood in front of her, like that time when she understood that Daniel belonged to him. It was as if another piece slid smoothly into her mental puzzle of this man. But she would wait for him to tell her that himself; it wasn't important. It would change nothing about her feelings for him, just like his being Daniel's father changed nothing; it only made her admire him more.

He gave her a speculative sideway glance, gauging how much she had already put together, most likely, before he replied. "This was an exception. A guide called in sick at the last moment, and there was no one else available. But I was coming here to interview you anyway, Miss Princ."

They stopped by the door and he turned to her now, grinning, as he pulled a silver ring the size of a bracelet with a multitude of huge iron keys attached to it like charms, from the pocket of his coat.

"It was supposed to be a surprise, the interview. I mean, I meant to tell you about it if I got the place..." she muttered, feeling her panic rise as he pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside. How was she to do this with him? He was her... almost boyfriend of sorts, and her temporary employer, let alone the fact that he was almost certainly the Count, the owner of the castle she loved...

He simply smiled in reply, beckoning her in, but she felt too nervous to keep silent.

"Are you sure you are interviewing me? How, oh why... I can't! How can you interview me?!" she blabbered, letting him take her hand in his again and pull her inside, shutting the door behind them, switching on the light at the same moment.

While Nora breathed in the castle to calm down, noticing how the scent of centuries old wood, stone, and the ancient dust hiding in the carpets and tapestries replaced the scent of snow, frost, and moat-water which filled the courtyard, he pulled her closer and brought their joined hands to his lips before he said, "I promise I'll be as professional as... as I can. I want you to relax, Nora, we're only going to walk through the castle and I want you to tell me how you feel, tell me anything that comes to your mind, without thinking about it."

He pressed his warm lips to hers then, making her lean against the door behind her back for support as her arm, quite without her volition, wrapped around his neck, her fingers pulling at the irresistible ponytail... Right, this should be interesting. She sighed, staring into his eyes for a long moment after he, very professionally, pulled away, looking for her courage and the memorised knowledge of the castle's history his kiss banished into the most distant corners of her mind, before she said, closing her eyes briefly, "Fine. Let's go in before I change my mind."

He smiled and took her hand in his, then towed her behind him up a flight of wooden stairs so worn by the previous owners' and visitors' footsteps that they seemed collapsed in the centre, concave where the wood once was flat.

It took several more flights of steps before they reached the first room where the guided tours started.

Martin, choosing a key from his ring opened the door, switched on the light in the room and made Nora walk in before he switched off the lights behind them, then closed and locked the door again. He remained by the door allowing Nora to absorb the atmosphere of the castle while she collected her memories of the many guided tours she had taken in the past, and all the things, both facts and legends, she had read about the castle.

It was a wonderful feeling being back here, Nora realised, feeling her heart swell with joy, pushing Martin's watchful presence into the margins of her consciousness. She loved this castle since she was a small girl; she grew up in the shadows cast by its towers, and she always dreamed of becoming a guide just to be a part of the place somehow. She couldn't explain the feeling; if she believed in past lives and reincarnation, she would think that she had been connected to the castle in the past in some way...

Nora shook her head to banish those distracting, nonsensical thoughts, took a deep, overwhelming breath-- the essence of the ancient building obliterated her reality instantly, threatening to pull her under, back into the fantasy of her teenage years. But the grown-up part of her mind reminded her that she was here for an interview, and she had been asked to speak about her feelings and knowledge of the castle.

"Bojnice Castle is one of the oldest and most significant monuments in Slovakia," she muttered the line, which all the guides she had ever heard always started with.

She giggled, shaking her head again, glancing at Martin who still stood by the door like a silent shadow, his eyes trained on her as she moved from one picture hanging on the walls of the room to another. These were not her words, and even though they were true, there were many other things about the castle that were so much more interesting.

Like the building being constructed entirely of wood in the beginning, in the 10th century, or the king Matthias Corvinus, the owner of the castle in the 15th century who liked to dictate his official documents under a linden tree in the castle's park, a tree which was still alive today. "Sub nostris dilectis tiliis bojniciensibus," Nora muttered, remembering Martin when he took her by the hand again, and led her into the adjacent room filled with portraits of people long dead, then the impressive Pentagonal Tower, and finally the room she loved the most, the Winter Garden.

It was a very long room, a gallery rather than a chamber, whose two opposite walls were lined with rows of tall, diamond lattice windows.

"This room was used to store plants in winter months," Nora mused, walking further into the room while Martin locked the door behind them. "Imagine it full of potted lemon and orange trees, rosebushes in bloom, flooded with scent of flowers and sunshine, while you could look at the heaps of snow filling the world outside through the windows," her eyes strolled to the windows that were now perfectly black, "and the heat from the huge ceramic stoves fed by the servants from the corridors so they would not to disturb the noble owners and guests playing cards, chatting, flirting..."

Martin kissed the rest of the sentence off her lips, his sudden closeness coaxing her out from her vision of the past, making her smile at him.

"You promised you'd be professional!" she complained, pulling him in for another kiss.

"I am kissing you very professionally, I think," he said seriously, and she nodded, very seriously, in acquiesce.

"Come, let me show you my favourite picture in this room," she said, pulling him towards one of the walls.

"Why her?" Martin asked, looking at a large portrait of Marie Antoinette surrounded by portraits of her husband, the French king Louis XVI, her brother Maximilian Habsburg, with her parents Maria Theresia and Franz Stephan Lothringer hanging on the wall to the right.

Nora shrugged, her eyes glued to the painting of the queen. "She looks so young, naive, and innocent... I guess I could relate to her when I was a girl, somehow. And I always wondered how it would feel being related to them, however distantly, a descendant of the royalty of the old."

She cast Martin a sideways glance, but he wasn't ready with the confession she was expecting apparently, and studied the picture for a while longer before he pulled her across the long, wood-panelled gallery, so cold now, when all the people who loved it once were here no more to enjoy it, that their breaths appeared in iridescent puffs as they neared the door set in the far wall.

❄️Author's Note❄️

The castle is real, and I thought it deserved to be named in the story.

However, I changed a few things about it for this book: There's no hotel, it's only a museum, and it isn't privately owned.

The spa mentioned in the story is really that close, but it doesn't belong to the castle. That is privately owned, with its hotels and thermal pools and lakes.

And there's no Count Martin, so anything he's behind, like the Park Rangers, does not exist. There's the oldest ZOO in the country, founded by the Count responsible for the last reconstruction instead of Martin's stables.