His Cinderella Heiress

by Marion Lennox

  Silence. Jo didn’t say a word.

  She couldn’t.

  What was there to say?

  He’s got another woman and she’s in the family way.

  This had been a fairy tale, she thought in the tiny part of her brain that wasn’t filled with white noise. This inheritance, this castle, this...love story? This fantasy that she could possibly have found her home.

  But fairy tales came to an end, and happy ever after... Well, that was just part of the fantasy. What happened to Cinderella after she married her prince? Did he go on being a prince while she went back to sitting by the fireside waiting for the snippets of time he was prepared to give her?

  There was so much rushing through her head. Hammering at her were the times as a kid when she’d started feeling secure, feeling loved. ‘Would you like to be our child? Would you like this to be your home?’

  She should never, ever have trusted.

  ‘He’ll be back for a late dinner,’ Mrs O’Reilly said, sounding frightened. ‘He said he just needed to sort things at home. He said not to worry. He’ll be back before you know he’s been gone.’

  ‘You’re...sure?’ she managed. ‘That there’s another woman.’

  ‘“My Maeve...”’ Mrs O’Reilly told her, and she was quoting verbatim. ‘That’s what her dadda said. “You’ve been sweet on each other for ever,” he said. “Look at you in your grand castle with your grand title and if you think you can walk away from your responsibilities... You’ll come home and marry her or I’ll bring her here, even if I have to pick her up and carry her.”’

  And there was that word again. Home.

  It was such a little word, Jo thought bleakly. It was thrown around by those who had such things as if it didn’t even matter.

  You’ll come home.

  He’d said he’d had a long-term girlfriend, she thought dully, but she hadn’t asked for details. It wasn’t her business. But how could he make love to her, knowing what was in the background?

  A woman called Maeve.

  A baby.

  ‘I’ll make you some lunch,’ Mrs O’Reilly said uneasily. ‘Things always look better when you’re fed.’

  Right, Jo thought. Right?

  She wanted, suddenly, desperately, to go home.

  Home?

  Home was her bike, she thought. Home was Australia—all of Australia. Home was wherever her wheels took her.

  Home was certainly not in some great castle.

  Home was not with Finn.

  ‘I need to take some tapestries out of the stream,’ she said and was inordinately pleased with the way her voice sounded. ‘I’ll set them out in the long room—the sun’s warm in there. Would you mind turning them for me as they dry? Every couple of hours or so. I dry them flat but they need a wee shake every couple of hours just to get them ventilated underneath.’

  ‘Why can’t you do it?’ the housekeeper asked, but by the look on her face she already knew.

  ‘Because I don’t belong here,’ Jo told her. ‘Because it’s time I went...home.’

  * * *

  It was a long journey to Dublin, a fraught time, and then an even longer journey back to the castle.

  Why couldn’t they have sorted it between them? Still, at least it was done. Maeve’s Steven was a wimp, Finn decided. He was even weaker than Maeve. No wonder they’d feared facing Maeve’s father. He should have taken the two of them in hand a month ago and made them face the music. But at least it was now out in the open. Maeve’s father was still blustering, but Finn was out of the equation.

  ‘At least now I can organise a wedding,’ Maeve had sobbed and he’d managed a smile. He knew Maeve. Now her father’s distress had been faced, pregnant or not, she’d have a dozen bridesmaids and she’d have a glorious time choosing which shade of chiffon they’d all wear.

  Jo wouldn’t be into chiffon. The thought was a good one and he was smiling as he entered the castle, smiling at the thought of lack of chiffon but smiling mostly because Jo was here and he’d been away all day and she’d smile at him...

  Only she wasn’t.

  ‘She’s left,’ Mrs O’Reilly said, and handed him an envelope before stalking off towards the kitchen. She slammed the door behind her so hard the castle seemed to vibrate.

  He stood in the entrance hall staring down at the envelope, thinking, What the...?

  Read it, he told himself but it took a surprising amount of resolution to slit the envelope.

  It was brief.

  I should have asked about your background. That’s my dumb fault. You know all about me and I was so happy I didn’t want to know that you had happy families playing in the background. But now Mrs O’Reilly says you have a woman called Maeve and she’s five months pregnant. Happy families? I don’t know what this is all about but you know what? I don’t need to know. All I know is that nothing’s solid. Nothing’s true. I’ve known it for ever, so how dumb can I be for forgetting? For hoping things could change?

  Finn, I know you want to farm the castle land and, thinking about it, I want you to have it. You’re the Lord of Glenconaill and it seems right that your place is here. I know you can’t maintain the castle without the fortune, but I don’t need a fortune. I mean that, Finn. I’m no martyr, but I have a bike and I make good coffee. I’m free and that’s the way I like it.

  So I’ll write to the lawyer from Australia. I won’t be a total doormat—I’d like enough to buy myself a small apartment so if I ever fall off my bike I have security, and I’d like to upgrade my bike, but the rest is yours. It’s the way it should be. For you’re part of a family, Finn, in a way I never can be. In a way I don’t want to be. Being a family is a promise I don’t know how to keep.

  So that’s it. Don’t feel guilt over what’s happened. I’m over it already and I’m used to moving on. Keep the cows safe. Oh, and I’ll do some research and send you details of someone who can be trusted to restore the tapestries.

  Despite all this, I wish you all the best, now and for ever.

  Jo

  He stood in the entrance hall and stared blindly at the letter.

  All the best, now and for ever.

  Jo.

  For ever.

  Then he swore so loudly that Mrs O’Reilly came scuttling back from the kitchen.

  ‘I need to go to Dublin,’ he snapped.

  ‘There’s no use.’

  ‘What do you mean, no use?’

  ‘I heard her on the phone. She got one of the last tickets on tonight’s flight to Sydney. That’s why she had to rush.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Her plane would be leaving now. Poor girl.’

  The door crashed closed again and Finn stood where he was, letting his emotions jangle until he felt as if his head was imploding. Then he walked out to the field where the little cows stood. The calf was suckling. The light was fading and the mountains in the background were misty blue.

  This place was heaven. This place called him as nothing ever had before.

  Except Jo.

  He should have told her. He should have talked of his problems. Even though what was between him and Maeve was essentially private, essentially over, even, he conceded, essentially humiliating, he should have shared.

  He could phone her, he thought. As soon as she reached Sydney...

  Did he have a number? No.

  Email then? No.

  Follow her? Catch the next flight? Pick her up and bring her home?

  Home. The word was a sudden jolt, tumbling through his jumbled thoughts. Where was home?

  Home could be here, he thought, gazing out at the land of the Conaills, of the land of his forebears. He could make this wonderful. This place should be where his loyalty lay.

  But Jo...

  Being a family is a promis
e I don’t know how to keep.

  How could Jo fit into his vision of home? Into his vision of loyalty?

  He couldn’t pick her up and carry her anywhere.

  Did he want to?

  He was suddenly thinking back over twenty years, to the night of his father’s funeral, sitting in the flower-filled living room trying to stem his mother’s inconsolable weeping. He was the oldest and he’d been thought of as the bright one of the family. There’d even been talk of him going to university. But never after that night.

  ‘Please don’t leave us,’ his mother had sobbed. ‘If you leave the farm I’ll never be able to support the young ones. Finn, I need you to be loyal to this farm. It’s our home.’

  So he’d built it up until he could survey it with pride. He’d thought he loved it but now...

  He stood in the stillness and wondered whether it was the farm he’d loved or was it the people who lived there? He’d thought of selling it to move to the castle. Love, then, wasn’t so deep.

  And Maeve? Had he loved Maeve or was it home and place that she represented? She’d been his friend and that friendship had morphed into something more. But caught up in his relationship was his love for the land and Maeve’s loyalty to her father. And overriding everything was her father’s unswerving loyalty to his farm.

  Maeve’s father had encouraged their courtship since they were teenagers, aching for the farms to be joined. He’d almost lost his daughter because of it.

  The night wore on. His thoughts were jumbled, confusing jolts of consciousness he was having trouble sorting, but he was getting there.

  He was moving on from Maeve...sorting the mess that loyalty to place had caused...

  He was focusing on this castle and Jo.

  He’d fallen for the two of them. From the time he’d first seen the castle he’d felt a deep, almost primeval urge to work on this land, to restore this estate to what it could be. But part of that urge was the fact that Jo was in the deal. He knew it now because Jo wasn’t here and the place felt empty. Desolate.

  His thoughts moved back, to Maeve and her father and the not too subtle blackmail.

  ‘If you love me you’ll never leave,’ Martin had told his daughter. ‘This is our farm. Our place. Marry Finn and we’ll join the boundaries. It’s our home.’

  He’d thought this castle could be home. He’d thought this place could hold his loyalty.

  He thought of Jo, heading back to Australia. With no home.

  Her home should be here.

  And then he thought, Why? Why should it be here?

  What cost loyalty?

  He stood and stared at the distant mountains and he felt his world shift and shift again.

  Jo.

  Home?

  CHAPTER TEN

  THREE WEEKS LATER saw Jo running a beach café on the south coast of New South Wales.

  She hadn’t returned to work in Sydney—why would she? She didn’t want work colleagues asking how her trip went. Instead she’d ridden south, to a small holiday resort gearing down for the Australian winter. The owners had a new baby, the baby was colicky and when Jo answered the advertisement she was offered as much work as she wanted. She took a vacant room above the shop and got on with her life.

  Except she missed things. Things she wasn’t allowed to miss?

  She worked long hours, from breakfast to dinner. At night she’d pull out her partly done tapestry, of Finn beside cow and calf, with the castle in the background. She wanted it done but she couldn’t work on it for long.

  It was because she was tired, she told herself, but she knew it was more than that. She could hardly bear to look at it.

  Sleep was elusive and her dreams were always the same.

  Now, three weeks after she’d arrived back in Australia, she woke at dawn feeling as if she hadn’t slept. But work was calling. Even this early, she knew she’d have locals waiting for the café to open. By now she knew them all and they treated her as a friend.

  But she wasn’t a friend.

  ‘Don’t get too attached,’ she muttered to herself as she headed downstairs and saw them waiting through the glass doors. ‘I’m itinerant. I should have a sign round my neck that says Born To Move On.’

  And then she paused because it wasn’t just her usual locals waiting. There was someone behind them. Someone with deep brown hair with hints of copper. A big man, half a head taller than anyone else. A man with green eyes that twinkled in the early morning light. Strikingly good-looking. Gorgeous!

  A man called Finn.

  Her heart did some sort of crazy backflip and when it landed it didn’t feel as if it was in the right position. She stopped on the stairway, trying to breathe.

  She should head back upstairs, grab her things and run. For a dizzy moment she considered the logistics of hurling her bag from the window, shimmying down the drainpipe and leaving.

  But Finn had come and her locals were looking up at her in concern.

  ‘Jo?’ Eric-the-retired-librarian called through the glass door, no doubt worried that she’d stopped dead on the stairway and wasn’t rushing to cook his porridge. ‘Are you okay? Should we wake Tom and Susy?’

  Tom and Susy were the owners and she’d seen their light on through the night. She knew they’d been up with their baby daughter. She couldn’t do that to them.

  So no shimmying down drainpipes.

  Which meant facing Finn.

  ‘You can do this,’ she muttered to herself and somehow she put on a cheery smile and headed down and tugged the doors open.

  It was brisk outside, with the wind blowing cold off the ocean. Her locals beetled to their normal tables clustered round the embers of last night’s fire. Eric started poking the embers and piling on kindling.

  None of them seemed to notice that Finn Conaill had walked in after them.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, grave as a judge, and she almost choked.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m here for coffee,’ he told her. ‘And a chat but maybe it should wait until we’re fed. Eric tells me you make excellent porridge and great coffee. Could I help you in the kitchen?’

  ‘No!’ she said, revolted, and then she looked closer and realised he was wearing leathers. Bike leathers?

  He looked...cold.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ she managed and he smiled at her then, a tentative smile but it was the smile she remembered. It was the smile that told her her world could never be the same now this man had entered it.

  ‘From Ireland three days ago,’ he told her. ‘But it’s taken me all that time to organise a bike. I wanted the biggest one but hiring one’s impossible, so I had to buy. I picked it up from a Sydney dealer last night.’

  ‘You rode from Sydney this morning?’

  ‘I did.’ He even looked smug.

  ‘On a bike.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t know you rode.’

  ‘There’s lots of things we don’t know about each other yet,’ he told her and smiled again, and oh, that smile...

  He was tugging his gloves off. She reached forward and touched his fingers, a feather-touch, just to see. His fingers were icy.

  ‘Wh...why?’ How hard was it to get that one word out? And of course she knew the answer. He wouldn’t come from Ireland to Australia without a reason. He’d come to see her.

  Maybe this was the Lord of Glenconaill being noble, she thought wildly. Maybe he was objecting to the letter she’d sent to the lawyer. She’d listed what she could use from the estate and she’d stated that the rest was Finn’s. He could do what he wanted with it, with or without a woman called Maeve.

  ‘I’ve come home,’ he told her, and the jumble of thoughts came to a jarring halt.

 
Home?

  The word hung. Behind them the locals had abandoned tending the fire. They weren’t bothering to peruse the menu they always perused even though they must have known it off by heart for years, but instead they were looking at them with bright curiosity.

  They lived here, Jo thought wildly. She didn’t.

  Home was nowhere.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve come home?’ she demanded and if she sounded snappish she couldn’t help it. Of all the stupid things to say...

  ‘It seems a good place,’ Finn said, looking around the cosy café with approval. ‘Nice fire, or it will be. Warm. Good view. And porridge, I’m told. What’s not to like? This’ll do us until we move on.’

  ‘Finn!’

  ‘Jo.’ He reached forward and took her hands. His really were freezing. She should tug him forward to the fire, she thought. She should...

  What she should do was irrelevant. She couldn’t move. She was standing like a deer caught in headlights, waiting to hear what this man would say.

  ‘I should have told you about Maeve,’ he said. ‘It was dumb not to tell you. When I first came to the castle, when I first met you, I had a worry about Maeve in the background. In retrospect, I should have shared that worry with you.’

  ‘You should have shared that worry with her,’ she managed and it really was a snap now. ‘You’re having a baby and you don’t even talk about it? You don’t mention it? Like it’s no big deal. That’s like my mother...’

  ‘It’s not like your mother.’ She copped a flash of anger from him then. ‘I know your mother thought a baby was no big deal.’ The grip on her hands tightened and she could hear his anger in his voice. ‘Have a baby, head back to Ireland, refuse to sign adoption papers? Your mother used the fate of her child to try and shame her father, and that seems a very big deal to me. I wish she was alive so I could tell her.’

  ‘But you and Maeve...’

  ‘Jo, it’s not my baby.’ He paused and his anger faded. His voice became gentle. ‘Maeve and I have been best of friends since we were five years old. We always assumed we’d marry. Why not? We loved each other. We always have and we still do. But Maeve’s dad is the worst kind of emotional blackmailer. Her mum died when she was seven, and she spent her childhood trying to make him happy. But making her father happy was always a huge ask. He dreamed that we’d marry, that I’d be the son he lost when his wife died in childbirth. We’d join our two farms together, make the empire he’d always dreamed of. It made me uneasy, but I loved Maeve and there was no point in fighting it.’