Heiress Gone Wild

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  “As if there’s any doubt,” Jonathan commented dryly as they watched the baroness toddle off across the room, the feathery end of her stole trailing behind her. “And this so-called count is probably panting to meet an heiress. Once he sets—”

  “Oh, I see.” Marjorie faced him, her delightful mood dampened a bit. “It’s not that a man might wish to meet me, that he might see me across the room and find me attractive. No, it’s that I’m an heiress, and any heiress will do?”

  “Once he sets his eyes on you, my sweet,” Jonathan resumed, ignoring her acerbic reply, “he’ll think he’s found nirvana. And though I know you are inclined to always believe the worst of me,” he continued as she stared at him, astonished by the compliment, “you might wait for me to finish my sentences before you draw conclusions about what I mean.”

  “Oh.” Marjorie grimaced, appreciating that she was far too prickly where he was concerned. “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted. But as we both know, most members of the aristocracy are broke. It is not unreasonable to question their motives.”

  The disdain in his voice was palpable. “You hate them,” she murmured in surprise. “Why?”

  “I don’t hate them.” He swirled his champagne and took a swallow. “I simply have little use for their way of life. Lilies of the field, most of them.”

  Marjorie frowned, confused. “But you come from British society, don’t you?”

  “My mother came from society,” he corrected. “My father did not. He was the son of a newspaper publisher—very lowbrow and middle-class.”

  “But what about your sisters? They married into the ton.”

  “And they seem happy there, but I have no desire to join them in that sphere.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d find it deadly dull. You see, I spent my first three years in America working across the continent. By the time I met your father in Idaho, I had been an oyster shucker, a fishing boat captain, a cattle wrangler, a journalist, the secretary to a railway magnate, and the manager of a gambling hall. For a while, I was even a bounty hunter. Good thing, too, for it proved to be good practice.”

  “Practice?” she echoed, struck by the word. “For what?”

  “Owning a mine. When your father and I staked our claim, we soon discovered that we’d have to fight off claim jumpers and mining magnates constantly in order to keep it.”

  “I can see I shall have to take back what I said about you being stuffy,” she murmured. “It sounds as if you really are an adventurous sort after all. You must like a challenge.”

  “Like it? No.” He paused, giving her a grin—a pirate’s grin, white teeth in a suntanned face. “I love it.”

  “I suppose British country life would seem a bit slow-paced after the things you’ve done.”

  “I’ve done more during my ten years in America than the average British gentleman does in a lifetime,” he told her. “The farthest my fellow countryman usually journeys is to Scotland or Paris, but I’ve traveled across plains so vast, Scotland’s a tiny speck by comparison. I’ve crossed mountain ranges so beautiful, so awe-inspiring, the sight of them takes your breath away and makes your chest hurt.”

  Even though the life he’d lived wasn’t the sort of life she wanted, as Marjorie studied his face, she couldn’t help feeling a faint, answering thrill. “The only place I’ve ever seen that might be described as remarkable in any way is Niagara Falls.”

  As she spoke, her thrill faded away, replaced by a strange and pensive melancholy. “I’ve never been anywhere,” she murmured. “Nor done anything, really.”

  “Until now.”

  “True,” she agreed, brightening at the reminder. “I am on my way to a whole different world.”

  “I hope you enjoy that world more than I.”

  “So . . .” She paused, nodding to their opulent surroundings. “None of this is enjoyable to you?”

  “I wouldn’t quite say that.” Something changed in his face as he looked at her, and when his lashes lowered, his tawny gaze sliding down, a wave of inexplicable heat washed over Marjorie—through her midsection, along her limbs, and into her face—a sensation so unfamiliar and unexpected that she couldn’t seem to move, or even breathe.

  “To look at beautiful women,” he said gravely, his gaze lifting again to her face, “is always a pleasure.”

  He thought she was beautiful. Suddenly, her wits felt thick as tar, her heart was pounding in her chest, and her body seemed to be tingling everywhere.

  She’d never felt like this before, but then, no man had ever really looked at her before, not this way. The only unmarried men she’d ever had occasion to meet were the widowed fathers who’d come to Forsyte Academy on Visiting Days, and those men were rare as hen’s teeth. They were also far too occupied with the state of their daughters’ education to take notice of her as anything more than a schoolteacher. This was the first time, she realized, that any man had looked at her as if she was a woman.

  The sensation was both dizzying and scary, rather as if she were a baby bird perched on a limb, longing to leap into space and fly, but also aware she could crash to the ground.

  “To eat good food,” he went on, “to drink fine champagne, sleep on luxurious sheets, engage in erudite conversation—I enjoy all of that, believe me. But after a time, I grow weary of the petty small-mindedness, the gossip, the snobbery, the triviality, and the excruciatingly slow pace, and I long to be off to the wilds again. I don’t mind stepping into a world of high society once in a while, but I have no desire to live in it permanently.”

  With that, any romantic excitement Marjorie felt fizzled and died. Everything he’d just told her confirmed what she’d already suspected. Forever inclined to wander, able to leave behind those who cared for him without regret, he sounded just like her father, and that made him the last man in the world any girl with sense ought to have romantic notions about.

  Marjorie knew that when she settled down, it would be with a man who’d stick, a man who wanted to build a home and make a life, not one who was always looking to the next horizon.

  “No wonder you and my father were such good friends,” she remarked. “He didn’t seem to fancy staying in one place any more than you do. Frankly, I’m amazed you two worked that mine as long as you did. But then,” she added thoughtfully, “it’s not as if I knew him well enough to understand his motives for anything.”

  “Is there . . .” He paused to give her a searching look. “Is there anything about him that you want to know? What he was like, or—”

  “No.” Aware of the uncompromising quality of her voice, she added, “I don’t really want to talk about him, or even think about him. I’m sure you think that’s awful.”

  “Actually, I don’t.” He expelled a sigh. “You were quite right in what you said earlier.”

  “I was?” Marjorie was amazed that he’d admit she was right about anything.

  “It was unfair of me to judge you so harshly for not grieving a man you didn’t know, even if he was your father.”

  She felt a glimmer of hope. “So, I don’t have to go into mourning after all?”

  “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that,” he commented ruefully. “Sorry, but I intend to see that you do whatever propriety requires.”

  She groaned and gave up. “So, if you’re such a restless man, why did you stay? At the mine, I mean?”

  “Well, when you tap into an enormous vein of silver worth millions of dollars, it’s deuced hard to walk away.”

  “So the two of you stayed just because of the money?”

  He considered, taking a sip of champagne before he replied. “I can’t speak for your father. But for myself, let’s just say I had things to prove.”

  “What things?”

  “I started out with nothing. I didn’t want to end up with nothing.”

  “A newspaper business doesn’t sound like nothing to me. Weren’t you the only son?”

  “That didn’t cut ice wit
h my father. He and I never got on. When I was eighteen, he cut off my allowance and disinherited me.”

  “How awful. What did you do?”

  He gave a shout of unexpected laughter. “You do have a poor opinion of me, don’t you? Assuming straightaway I did something to deserve being disinherited.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant! I was asking what you did in response.”

  “Well, with no money but the sixteen pounds in my bank account, it wasn’t as if I had many options. I left and came to America.”

  “You left, just like that? At eighteen, broke and alone?”

  His smile faded, a hard glint coming into his eyes, but when he spoke his voice was light. “Well, I did ask my fiancée to come with me, but somehow, she couldn’t see marrying a man who no longer had prospects or an income and going off with him to another country. Love is one thing. Material comforts, as she pointed out to me at the time, are something else.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was a long time ago. And honestly, I’m not sure we’d have been happy together. We’d probably have moved into some tiny, low-rent flat in Brooklyn, and I’d have spent the past ten years pegging away at some office job in Manhattan, a life we’d have both despised. She’s quite comfortably situated now, I heard, married to a wealthy banker and living in a luxurious house in Grosvenor Square.”

  She began to see why her teasing talk about furs, motor cars, and lavish parties had flicked him on the raw. “Is her husband wealthier than you?” she asked.

  “I doubt it.”

  She grinned. “How gratifying.”

  That made him laugh. “You are a wicked girl, Marjorie.”

  “I’m not,” she protested. “Don’t misunderstand. I have a lot of sympathy for her position. A woman needs to know that her children will have a home and be taken care of properly, and a tiny apartment in Brooklyn wouldn’t be very nice for them. But I see your side of it, too. She didn’t trust you to take care of her, and that, on top of what your father did, must have been a painful betrayal. And you said you had things to prove, so it must have been quite satisfying to know that you ended up richer than the man she did marry.”

  “Perhaps,” he admitted, “but she wasn’t the main one I wanted to prove things to. That would be my father. And though I enjoy making money for the challenge of it, material considerations don’t really matter much to me. I came to realize that once I struck it rich.”

  “What does matter to you, then?” she asked, curious. “What do you want from life?”

  “That,” he said slowly, “is an interesting question. Ten years ago, I was sure I knew the answer, but . . .”

  “But?” she prompted when he paused.

  He looked down, staring into his glass, watching the bubbles rise, silent so long, she thought he wasn’t going to reply.

  “Do you remember our conversation this morning?” he asked at last, looking up. “When I told you I know how it feels to have all one’s dreams snatched away?”

  “Yes.”

  “My grandfather was a shrewd man of business. He inherited two newspapers from his father and proceeded to build Deverill Publishing into an empire. In its heyday, we had twelve dailies, five weeklies, and several magazines.”

  She could hear a new note come into his voice as he spoke, a note of pride. “So, running the family business was your dream?”

  “More than that, I believed it was my destiny. My grandfather seemed to believe it, too. He often said I was just like him—that I had ink in my veins instead of blood, and that he knew I would be able to carry on what he had built, expand Deverill Publishing even more and take it into the next century. Unfortunately, he never got around to putting his faith in me in writing.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He never made a will.”

  “What? But why not?”

  “The attorneys said he kept procrastinating. It’s quite common, they said. Anyway, when he died, everything went to my father, who proved to be a dismally bad steward of my supposed destiny. By the time I was eighteen, the company was sailing very near the wind. I tried to avert the disaster, but my father wasn’t about to listen to advice from his adolescent son. We had a flaming row—not our first, by the way—and he told me that since I thought myself a better man of business than he, I ought to have the chance to prove it.”

  “That’s why he disinherited you and left you destitute? Because you tried to help him?”

  “Well, in all fairness, I also called him an incompetent idiot and told him he was unworthy of the Deverill name. It was stupid, but then, my father and I had always been like matches and gunpowder, even when I was a boy. Whenever we were in the same room, there were bound to be explosions.”

  “Couldn’t you have mended your quarrel? Apologized?”

  “For what? Being right? Hell, no.” He grinned, but in his hazel eyes, she could see a glittering defiance, something she suspected his father had seen often. “You said yourself I’m not good at apologies.”

  “Or compromises,” she replied, giving him a pointed look.

  He gave her a wry one in return. “That’s rich, coming from you. But,” he added before she could reply, “in all seriousness, I don’t think any attempts to compromise with my father would have made any difference. He was a weak, vain, and selfish man, and after my mother died, he began to crack. Later, when my grandfather died, when he found he’d inherited everything, it went to his head, and because he didn’t have my mother’s steadying influence, he fell completely apart. Only my sisters could reason with him, and even they couldn’t save him from his own incompetence. After I left, he eventually bankrupted the company. I sent money when I could, but there wasn’t much else I could do.”

  “Your sisters couldn’t smooth things over?”

  “They tried, but my father wasn’t having any. In fact, for the first couple years I was gone, my sisters didn’t even know where I was. Unbeknownst to them or me, our father was suppressing our letters. He was a spiteful cove.”

  “What happened to the company? Did it go under?”

  “Irene, my eldest sister, managed to save it. She salvaged one of the newspapers by inventing an advice column called Dear Lady Truelove. The thing became wildly popular, enabling Deverill Publishing to stave off the creditors, and she ran that paper for several years. She left my father’s name on the masthead and pretended to consult him to soothe his pride, but she’s the one who kept it afloat and made it a success.”

  She smiled. “It sounds like you’re not the only one in your family with ink in your veins.”

  “Oh, no, both my sisters have proved themselves to be just as much chips off Grandfather’s block as I was.” He glanced past her. “Here’s your baroness coming back, and since she’s looking like a cat who’s fallen into the cream, I think it’s safe to say that the count and his mother do indeed want to meet you. As if there was any doubt.”

  She made a face at him. “Their willingness to meet me doesn’t validate your opinion of the count’s intentions.”

  “Maybe not, but I’ve no doubt the man’s a bounder. He’s got an oily, predatory look about him. As your guardian, I intend to make it clear that if he’s angling for anything beyond an introduction, he’s doomed to disappointment.”

  Marjorie made a sound of protest at such high-handedness. “I have no say in this?”

  He gave a laugh that answered her question even before he spoke. “No.”

  “But how do you know anything about the man’s character?” she asked. “Have you met him before?”

  “Never in my life, but he makes my boot itch.”

  Marjorie frowned, bewildered. “What’s your boot got to do with it?”

  “Whenever I glance his way, I experience an instinctive, almost irresistible urge to kick him straight out the door and over the side.”

  “Since it would likely ruin everyone’s evening, I’d ask that you refrain,” she murmured, pasting a smile on her face and turning
toward the baroness as she halted in front of them.

  “My dear,” the older woman said, slipping between her and Jonathan to take her arm, “the contessa does wish to meet you, so I come to bring you to her. With your permission, Mr. Deverill?”

  “How kind of you to consider my wishes, madam.”

  Baroness Vasiliev didn’t seem to notice the sarcasm. “The count is from Spain,” she told Marjorie as she began leading her across the room. “But his English is excellent and his manners impeccable. You will find him most agreeable, I am sure.”

  Behind her, Marjorie thought she heard Jonathan give a snort of derision, but with the voices eddying all around them, she couldn’t be certain. Either way, unlike her guardian, she was prepared to be open-minded. “Being a count,” she said to the baroness, “he has estates, I suppose?”

  “Oh, yes. Vast estates.”

  “Where?” she asked when the baroness did not elaborate.

  “Oh, somewhere in the middle, I think. Cádiz, would it be?”

  Marjorie knew Cádiz was nowhere near the middle of Spain, but she didn’t point that out, for the baroness was clearly guessing, and besides, they were coming within earshot of the count and his mother.

  “Contessa,” the baroness greeted as she and Marjorie halted in front of the other woman. “May I present my friend, Miss McGann? Marjorie, the Dowager Contessa de la Rosa.”

  Thanks to the rigorous training of Forsyte Academy, Marjorie was able to offer a perfect curtsy, though because of the tightness of her gown, it wasn’t very deep. “My lady.”

  “Miss McGann.” The countess gestured to the man beside her. “This is my son, the Count de la Rosa. Étienne, Miss Marjorie McGann.”

  The count stepped forward. “I am delighted to meet you, Miss McGann,” he said in a deep, languorous voice that seemed to bring with it all the warmth of his homeland.

  He bent over her hand, and when his lips brushed her glove, Marjorie felt for the second time in her life the thrill that came from such masculine attentions, and when he straightened, that thrill grew stronger at the appreciation she saw in his black eyes.