His Cinderella Heiress

by Marion Lennox

  ‘Become a Lord in fact? Buy myself ermine robes and employ a valet?’

  ‘Fix a few stone walls?’

  ‘That’s more tempting,’ he said and then he grinned. ‘So your existence has saved me from a life of chipping at cope stones. Thank you, Jo. Now, shall we find out if Mrs O’Reilly intends to feed us?’

  And Jo thought...it felt odd to walk towards Castle Glenconaill with this man by her side.

  But somehow, weirdly, it felt right.

  ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ Finn asked and she was startled back to the here and now.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re carrying sewing needles. I’m not a great mind, but it does tell me there’s likely to be sewing attached. Or do you bring them on the off chance you need to darn socks?’

  ‘No, I...’

  ‘Make tapestries? On the plane? Do you have a current project and, if so, can I see?’

  She stared up at him and then stared down at her feet. And his feet. One of his boots was dripping mud.

  Strangely, it made him seem closer. More human.

  She didn’t show people her work, so why did she have a sudden urge to say...?

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay?’ he said cautiously.

  ‘It’s not pretty. And it’s not finished. But if you’d really like to see...’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘When your foot’s dry.’

  ‘Why not with a wet foot?’

  ‘My tapestry demands respect.’

  He grinned. ‘There speaks the lady of the castle.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘But my tapestry’s up there with anything the women of this castle have done.’ She smiled then, one of her rare smiles that lit her face, that made her seem...

  Intriguing? No, he was already intrigued, he conceded.

  Desirable?

  Definitely.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked and he caught himself. He’d known this woman for how long?

  ‘I’m very sure,’ he told her. ‘And, lady of the castle or not, your tapestry’s not the only thing to deserve respect. I will take my boot off for you.’

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ she told him. ‘Fifteen minutes. My bedroom. See you there.’

  And she took off, running across the forecourt like a kid without a trouble in the world. She looked...free.

  She looked beautiful.

  Fifteen minutes with his boot off. A man had to get moving.

  * * *

  The tapestry was rolled and wrapped in the base of her kitbag. He watched as she delved into what looked to be the most practical woman’s pack he’d ever seen. There were no gorgeous gowns or frilly lingerie here—just bike gear and jeans and T-shirts and sweaters. He thought briefly of the lawyer and his invitation to dinner in Dublin and found himself smiling.

  Jo glanced up. ‘What?’

  ‘Is this why you said no to our lawyer’s invite? I can’t see a single little black dress.’

  ‘I don’t have a use for ’em,’ she said curtly.

  ‘You know, there’s a costume gallery here,’ he said and she stared.

  ‘A costume gallery?’

  ‘A store of the very best of what the Conaills have worn for every grand event in their history. Someone in our past has decided that clothes need to be kept as well as paintings. I found the storeroom last night. Full of mothballs and gold embroidery. So if you need to dress up...’

  She stared at him for a long moment, as if she was almost tempted—and then she gave a rueful smile and shook her head and tugged out the roll. ‘I can’t see me going out to dinner with our lawyer in gold embroidery. Can you? But if you want to see this...’ She tossed the roll on the bed and it started to uncurl on its own.

  Fascinated, he leaned over and twitched the end so the whole thing unrolled onto the white coverlet.

  And it was as much as he could do not to gasp.

  This room could almost be a servant’s room, it was so bare. It was painted white, with a faded white coverlet on the bed. There were two dingy paintings on the wall, not very good, scenes of the local mountains. They looked as if they’d been painted by a long ago Conaill, with visions of artistic ability not quite managed.

  But there was nothing ‘not quite managed’ about the tapestry on the bed. Quite simply, it lit the room.

  It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. It was colour upon colour upon colour.

  It was fire.

  Did it depict Australia’s Outback? Maybe, he thought, but if so it must be an evocation of what that could be like. This was ochre-red country, wide skies and slashes of river. There were wind-bent eucalypts with flocks of white cockatoos screeching from tree to tree... There were so many details.

  And yet not. At first he could only see what looked like burning: flames with colour streaking through, heat, dry. And then he looked closer and it coalesced into its separate parts without ever losing the sense of its whole.

  The thing was big, covering half the small bed, and it wasn’t finished. He could see bare patches with only vague pencil tracing on the canvas, but he knew instinctively that these pencil marks were ideas only, that they could change.

  For this was no paint by numbers picture. This was...

  Breathtaking.

  ‘This should be over the mantel in the great hall,’ he breathed and she glanced up at him, coloured and then bit her lip and shook her head.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What do you do with them?’

  ‘Give them to people I like. You can have this if you want. You pulled me out of a bog.’

  And once more she’d taken his breath away.

  ‘You just...give them away?’

  ‘What else would I do with them?’

  He was still looking at the canvas, seeing new images every time he looked. There were depths and depths and depths. ‘Keep them,’ he said softly. ‘Make them into an exhibition.’

  ‘I don’t keep stuff.’

  He hauled his attention from the canvas and stared at her. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Well, maybe my bike.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Where I can rent a room with good light for sewing. And where my sound system doesn’t cause a problem. I like my music loud.’ She shrugged. ‘So there’s another thing I own—a great speaker system to plug into my phone. Oh, and toothbrushes and stuff.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’ He thought suddenly of his childhood, of his mother weeping because she’d dropped a plate belonging to her own mother. There’d been tears for a ceramic thing. And yet...his focus was drawn again to the tapestry. That Jo could work so hard for this, put so much of herself in it and then give it away...

  ‘You reckon I need a shrink because I don’t own stuff?’ she asked and he shook his head.

  ‘No. Though I guess...’

  ‘I did see someone once,’ she interrupted. ‘When I was fifteen. I was a bit...wild. I got sent to a home for troublesome adolescents and they gave me a few sessions with a psychoanalyst. She hauled out a memory of me at eight, being moved on from a foster home. There was a fire engine I played with. I’d been there a couple of years so I guess I thought it was mine. When I went to pack, my foster mum told me it was a foster kid toy and I couldn’t take it. The shrink told me it was significant, but I don’t need a fire engine now. I don’t need anything.’

  He cringed for her. She’d said it blithely, as if it was no big deal, but he knew the shrink was right. This woman was wounded. ‘Jo, the money we’re both inheriting will give you security,’ he said gently. ‘No one can take your fire engine now.’

  ‘I’m over wanting fire engines.’

  ‘Really?’

  And she managed a smile at that. ‘W
ell, if it was a truly excellent fire engine...’

  ‘You’d consider?’

  ‘I might,’ she told him. ‘Though I might have to get myself a Harley with a trailer to carry it. Do Harleys come with trailers? I can’t see it. Meanwhile, is it lunchtime?’

  He checked his watch. ‘Past. Uh oh. We need to face Mrs O’Reilly. Jo, you’ve been more than generous. You don’t have to face her.’

  ‘I do,’ she said bluntly. ‘I don’t run away. It’s not my style.’

  * * *

  Mrs O’Reilly had made them lunch but Finn wasn’t sure how she’d done it. Her swollen face said she’d been weeping for hours.

  She placed shepherd’s pie in front of them and stood back, tried to speak and failed.

  ‘I can’t...’ she managed.

  ‘Mrs O’Reilly, there’s no need to say a thing.’ Jo reached for the pie and ladled a generous helping onto her plate. ‘Not when you’ve made me pie. But I do need dead horse.’

  ‘Dead horse?’ Finn demanded, bemused, and Jo shook her head in exasperation.

  ‘Honestly, don’t you guys know anything? First, dead horse is Australian for sauce and second, shepherd’s pie without sauce is like serving fish without chips. Pie and sauce, fish and chips, roast beef with Yorkshire pud... What sort of legacy are you leaving for future generations if you don’t know that?’

  He grinned and Mrs O’Reilly sniffed and sniffed again and then beetled for the kitchen. She returned with four different sauce bottles.

  Jo checked them out and discarded three with disgust.

  ‘There’s only one. Tomato sauce, pure, unadulterated. Anything else is a travesty. Thank you, Mrs O’Reilly, this is wonderful.’

  ‘It’s not,’ the woman stammered. ‘I was cruel to you.’

  ‘I’ve done some research into my mother over the years,’ Jo said, concentrating on drawing wiggly lines of sauce across her pie. ‘She doesn’t seem like she was good to anyone. She wasn’t even good to me and I was her daughter. I can only imagine what sort of demanding princess she was when she was living here. And Grandpa didn’t leave you provided for after all those years of service from you and your husband. I’d have been mean to me if I were you too.’

  ‘I made you sleep in a single bed!’

  ‘Well, that is a crime.’ She was chatting to Mrs O’Reilly as if she were talking of tomorrow’s weather, Finn thought. The sauce arranged to her satisfaction, she tackled her pie with gusto.

  Mrs O’Reilly was staring at her as if she’d just landed from another planet, and Finn was feeling pretty much the same.

  ‘A single bed’s fine by me,’ she said between mouthfuls. ‘As is this pie. Yum. Last night’s burned beef, though...that needs compensation. Will you stay on while we’re here? You could make us more. Or would you prefer to go? Finn and I can cope on our own. I hope the lawyer has explained what you do from now on is your own choice.’

  ‘He has.’ She grabbed her handkerchief and blew her nose with gusto. ‘Of course...of course I’ll stay while you need me but now...I can have my own house. My own home.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Jo told her. ‘If that’s what you want, then go for it.’

  ‘I don’t deserve it.’

  ‘Hey, after so many years of service, one burned dinner shouldn’t make a difference, and life’s never about what we deserve. I’m just pleased Finn and I can administer a tiny bit of justice in a world that’s usually pretty much unfair. Oh, and the calendars in the kitchen...you like cats?’

  ‘I...yes.’

  ‘Why don’t you have one?’

  ‘Your grandfather hated them.’

  ‘I don’t hate them. Do you hate them, Finn?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There you go,’ Jo said, beaming. ‘Find yourself a kitten. Now, if you want. And don’t buy a cottage where you can’t keep one.’

  She was amazing, Finn thought, staring at her in silence. This woman was...stunning.

  But Jo had moved on. ‘Go for it,’ she said, ladling more pie onto her fork. ‘But no more talking. This pie deserves all my attention.’

  * * *

  They finished their pie in silence, then polished off apple tart and coffee without saying another word.

  There didn’t seem any need to speak. Or maybe there was, but things were too enormous to be spoken of.

  As Mrs O’Reilly bustled away with the dishes, Jo felt almost dismayed. Washing up last night with Finn had been a tiny piece of normality. Now there wasn’t even washing up to fall back on.

  ‘I guess we’d better get started,’ Finn said at last.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Sorting?’

  ‘What do we need to sort?’ She gazed around the ornate dining room, at the myriad ornaments, pictures, side tables, vases, stuff. ‘I guess lots of stuff might go to museums. You might want to keep some. I don’t need it.’

  ‘It’s your heritage.’

  ‘Stuff isn’t heritage. I might take photographs of the tapestries,’ she conceded. ‘Some of them are old enough to be in a museum too.’

  ‘Show me,’ he said and that was the next few minutes sorted. So she walked him through the baronial hall, seeing the history of the Conaills spread out before her.

  ‘It seems a shame to break up the collection,’ Finn said at last. He’d hardly spoken as they’d walked through.

  ‘Like breaking up a family.’ Jo shrugged. ‘People do it all the time. If it’s no use to you, move on.’

  ‘You really don’t care?’

  She gazed around at the vast palette of family life spread before her. Her family? No. Her mother had been the means to her existence, nothing more, and her grandfather hadn’t given a toss about her.

  ‘I might have cared if this had been my family,’ she told him. ‘But the Conaills were the reason I couldn’t have a family. It’s hardly fair to expect me to honour them now.’

  ‘Yet you’d love to restore the tapestries.’

  ‘They’re amazing.’ She crossed to a picture of a family group. ‘I’ve been figuring out time frames, and I think this could be the great-great-grandpa we share. Look at Great-Great-Grandma. She looks a tyrant.’

  ‘You don’t want to keep her?’

  ‘Definitely not. How about you?’ she asked. ‘Are you into family memorabilia?’

  ‘I have a house full of memorabilia. My parents threw nothing out. And my brothers live very modern lives. I can’t see any of this stuff fitting into their homes. I’ll ask them but I know what their answers will be. You really want nothing but the money?’

  ‘I wanted something a long time ago,’ she told him. They were standing side by side, looking at the picture of their mutual forebears. ‘You have no idea how much I wanted. But now...it’s too late. It even seems wrong taking the money. I’m not part of this family.’

  ‘Hey, we are sort of cousins.’ And, before she knew what he intended, he’d put an arm around her waist and gave her a gentle hug. ‘I’m happy to own you.’

  ‘I don’t...’ The feel of his arm was totally disconcerting. ‘I don’t think I want to be owned.’ And this was a normal hug, she told herself. A cousinly hug. There was no call to haul herself back in fright. She forced herself to stand still.

  ‘Not by this great-great-grandma,’ he conceded. ‘She looks a dragon.’ But his arm was still around her waist, and it was hard to concentrate on what he was saying. It was really hard. ‘But you need to belong somewhere. There’s a tapestry somewhere with your future on it.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s not. Not if it has grandmas and grandpas and kids and dogs.’ Enough. She tugged away because it had to be just a cousinly hug; she wasn’t used to hugs and she didn’t need it. She didn’t! ‘I’m not standing still long enough to be framed.’

 
‘That’s a shame,’ he told her, and something in the timbre of his voice made her feel...odd. ‘Because I suspect you’re worth all this bunch put together.’

  ‘That’s kissing the Blarney Stone.’

  He shrugged and smiled and when he smiled she wanted that hug back. Badly.

  ‘I’m not one for saying what I don’t mean, Jo Conaill,’ he told her. ‘You’re an amazing woman.’

  ‘D...don’t,’ she stammered. For some reason the hug had left her discombobulated. ‘We’re here to sort this stuff. Let’s start now.’

  And then leave, she told herself. The way she was feeling... The way she was feeling was starting to scare her.

  * * *

  The size of the place, the mass of furnishings, the store of amazing clothing any museum would kill for—the entire history of the castle was mind-blowing. It was almost enough to make her forget how weird Finn’s hug made her feel. But there was work to be done. Figuring out the scale of their inheritance would take days.

  Underground there were cellars—old dungeons?—and storerooms. Upstairs were ‘living’ rooms, apartment-sized chambers filled with dust-sheeted furniture. Above them were the bedrooms and up a further flight of stairs were the servants’ quarters, rooms sparsely furnished with an iron cot and dresser.

  Over the next couple of days they moved slowly through the place, sorting what there was. Most things would go straight to the auction rooms—almost all of it—but, by mutual consent, they decided to catalogue the things that seemed important. Detailed cataloguing could be done later by the auctioneers but somehow it seemed wrong to sell everything without acknowledging its existence. So they moved from room to room, taking notes, and she put the memory of the hug aside.

  Though she had to acknowledge that she was grateful for his company. If she’d had to face this alone...

  This place seemed full of ghosts who’d never wanted her, she thought. The costume store on its own was enough to repel her. All these clothes, worn by people who would never have accepted her. She was illegitimate, despised, discarded. She had no place here, and Finn must feel the same. Regardless of his inherited title, he still must feel the poor relation.