by Liz Fielding
‘She sounds almost frightened.’
‘I know. I’m making discreet enquiries, but until I know who this man is I’m not going to hand over my niece. And I’m doing my best to find Saffy, too. But the last thing we need is a hue and cry.’
He put down the mug, knelt beside her.
‘This time I’m the one up the drainpipe, Mouse, and it’s raining a monsoon. Won’t you climb up and rescue me?’
‘I wish I could help—’
‘There is no one else,’ he said, cutting her off.
The unspoken, And you owe me… lay unsaid between them. But she knew that, like her, he was remembering the hideous scene when he’d come to the back door, white-faced, clutching his roses. It had remained closed to his knock but he hadn’t gone away. He’d stayed there, mulishly stubborn, for so long that her grandfather had chased him away with the hose.
It had been the week before Christmas and the water was freezing but, while he’d been driven from the doorstep, he’d stayed in the garden defiantly, silently staring up at her room, visibly shivering, until it was quite dark.
She’d stood in this window and watched him, unable to do or say anything without making it much, much worse. Torn between her grandfather and the boy she loved. She would have defied her grandpa, just as her mother had defied him, but there had been Saffy. And Adam. And she’d kept the promise that had been wrung from her even though her heart was breaking.
She didn’t owe him a thing. She’d paid and paid and paid…
‘I can’t,’ she said, getting up, putting distance between them. ‘I told you, I know no more than you do about looking after a baby.’
‘I think we both know that your experience as a rescuer of lame ducks puts you streets ahead of me.’
‘Nancie is not a duck,’ she said a touch desperately. Why wouldn’t he just take no for an answer? There must a dozen women who’d fall over themselves to help him out. Why pick on her? ‘And, even if she were,’ she added, ‘I still couldn’t help.’
She couldn’t help anyone. That was another problem she was going to have to face. Finding homes for her family of strays.
There wasn’t much call for a three-legged cat or a blind duck. And then there were the chickens, Jack and Dolly, the bees. She very much doubted if the Crown would consider a donkey and a superannuated nanny goat an asset to the nation’s coffers.
‘Why not, May?’ he insisted. He got to his feet too, but he’d kept his distance. She didn’t have to turn to know that his brows would be drawn down in that slightly perplexed look that was so familiar. ‘Tell me. Maybe I can help.’
‘Trust me,’ she said. Nancie had caught hold of her finger and she lifted the little hand to her lips, kissed it. ‘You can’t help me. No one can.’
Then, since it was obvious that, unless she explained the situation, Adam wasn’t going to give up, she told him why.
Why she couldn’t help him or Saffy.
Why he couldn’t help her.
For a moment he didn’t say anything and she knew he would be repeating her words over in his head, exactly as she had done this morning when Freddie had apologetically explained the situation in words of one syllable.
Adam had assumed financial worries to be the problem. Inheritance tax. Despite the downturn in the market, the house was worth a great deal of money and it was going to take a lot of cash to keep the Inland Revenue happy.
‘You have to be married by the end of the month or you’ll lose the house?’ he repeated, just to be certain that he’d understood.
She swallowed, nodded.
She would never have told him if he hadn’t been so persistent, he realised. She’d told him that she couldn’t help but, instead of asking her why, something he would have done if it had been a work-related problem, he’d been so tied up with his immediate problem that he hadn’t been listening.
He was listening now. And there was only one thought in his head. That fate had dropped her into his lap. That the boy who hadn’t been good enough to touch Coleridge flesh, who’d shivered as he’d waited for her to defy her grandfather, prove that her hot kisses had been true, now held her future in the palm of his hand.
That he would crack the ice in May Coleridge’s body between the fine linen sheets of her grandfather’s four-poster bed and listen to the old man spin in his grave as did it.
‘What’s so important about the end of the month?’ he asked. Quietly, calmly. He’d learned not to show his thoughts, or his feelings.
‘My birthday. It’s on the second of December.’
She’d kept her back to him while she’d told him her problems, but now she turned and looked up at him. She’d looked up at him before, her huge amber eyes making him burn, her soft lips quivering with uncertainty. The taste of them still haunted him.
He’d liked her. Really liked her. She had guts, grit and, despite the wide gulf in their lives, they had a lot in common. And he’d loved being in the quiet, ordered peace of the lovely gardens of Coleridge House, the stables where she’d kept her animals. Everything so clean and well organised.
He’d loved the fact that she had her own kettle to make coffee. That there was always homemade cake in a tin. The shared secrecy. That no one but she knew he was there. Not her grandfather, not his family. It had all been so different from the nightmare of his home life.
But taking her injured animals, helping her look after them was one thing. She wasn’t the kind of girl any guy—even one with no pretensions to street cred—wanted to be seen with at the school disco.
But their meetings weren’t as secret as he’d thought. His sister had got curious, followed him and blackmailed him into asking May to go as his date to the school disco.
It had been as bad as he could have imagined. While all the other girls had been wearing boob tubes and skirts that barely covered their backsides, she’d been wearing something embarrassingly sedate, scarcely any make-up. He was embarrassed to be seen with her and, ashamed of his embarrassment, had asked her to dance.
That was bad, too. She didn’t have a clue and he’d caught hold of her and held her and that had been better. Up close, her hair had smelled like flowers after rain. She felt wonderful, her softness against his thin, hard body had roused him, brought to the surface all those feelings that he’d kept battened down. This was why he’d gone back time after time to the stables. Risked being caught by the gardener. Or, worse, the housekeeper.
Her skin was so beautiful that he’d wanted to touch it, touch her, kiss her. And her eyes, liquid black in the dim lights of the school gym, had told him that she wanted it too. But not there. Not where anyone could see them, hoot with derision…
They had run home through the park. She’d unlocked the gate, they’d scrambled up to the stables loft and it was hard to say which of them had been trembling the most when he’d kissed her, neither of them doubting what they wanted.
That it was her first kiss was without doubt. It was very nearly his, too. His first real kiss. The taste of her lips, the sweetness, her uncertainty as she’d opened up to him had made him feel like a giant. All powerful. Invincible. And the memory of her melting softness in the darkness jolted through him like an electric charge…
‘You need a husband by the end of the month?’ he said, dragging himself back from the hot, dark thoughts that were raging through him.
‘There’s an entailment on Coleridge House,’ she said. ‘The legatee has to be married by the time he or she is thirty or the house goes to the Crown.’
‘He’s controlling you, even from the grave,’ he said.
She flushed angrily. ‘No one knew,’ she said.
‘No one?’
‘My grandfather lost great chunks of his memory when he had the stroke. And papers were lost when Jennings’ offices were flooded a few years ago…’
‘You’re saying you had no warning?’
She shook her head. ‘My mother was dead long before she was thirty, but she thought marriage was a
n outdated patriarchal institution…’ The words caught in her throat and she turned abruptly away again so that he shouldn’t see the tears turning her caramel-coloured eyes to liquid gold, just as they had that night when her grandfather had dragged her away from him, his coat thrown around her. ‘She’d have told them all to go to hell rather than compromise her principles.’
He tried to drown out the crowing triumph. That this girl, this woman, who from that day to this had crossed the road rather than pass him in the street, was about to lose everything. That her grandfather, that ‘impressive’ man who thought he was not fit to breathe the same air as his precious granddaughter, had left her at his mercy.
‘But before the stroke? He could have told you then.’
‘Why would he? I was engaged to Michael, the wedding date was set.’
‘Michael Linton.’ He didn’t need to search his memory. He’d seen the announcement and Saffy had been full of it, torn between envy and disgust.
Envy that May would be Lady Linton with some vast country estate and a house in London. Disgust that she was marrying a man nearly old enough to be her father. ‘Her grandfather’s arranged it all, of course,’ she’d insisted. ‘He’s desperate to marry her off to someone safe before she turns into her mother and runs off with some nobody who gets her up the duff.’ She’d been about to say more but had, for once, thought better of it.
Not that he’d had any argument with her conclusion. But then her grandfather had suffered a massive stroke and the wedding had at first been put off. Then Michael Linton had married someone else.
‘What happened? Why didn’t you marry him?’
‘Michael insisted that Grandpa would be better off in a nursing home. I said no, but he kept bringing me brochures, dragging me off to look at places. He wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t hear what I was saying, so in the end I gave him his ring back.’
‘And he took it?’
‘He wanted a wife, a hostess, someone who would fit into his life, run his home. He didn’t want to be burdened with an invalid.’
‘If he’d taken any notice of your lame duck zoo, he’d have known he was on a hiding to nothing.’
She shook her head and when she looked back over her shoulder at him her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks wet, but her lips were twisted into a smile.
‘Michael didn’t climb over the park gate when the gardener was looking the other way, Adam. He was a front door visitor.’
‘You mean you didn’t make him help you muck out the animals?’ he asked and was rewarded with a blush.
‘I didn’t believe he’d appreciate the honour. He’d have been horrified if he’d seen me shin up a tree to save a kitten. Luckily, the situation never arose when he was around.’ A tiny shuddering breath escaped her. ‘You don’t notice creatures in distress from the back seat of a Rolls-Royce.’
‘His loss,’ he said, his own throat thick as the memories of stolen hours rushed back at him.
‘And mine, it would seem.’
‘You’d have been utterly miserable married to him.’
She shook her head.
‘You aren’t going to take this lying down, are you?’ he asked. ‘I can’t believe it would stand up in a court of law and the tabloids would have a field day if the government took your home.’
‘A lot of people are much worse off than me, Adam. I’m not sure that a campaign to save a fifteen-room house for one spoilt woman and her housekeeper would be a popular cause.’
She had a point. She’d been born to privilege and her plight was not going to garner mass sympathy.
‘Is that what Freddie Jennings told you?’ he asked. ‘I assume you have taken legal advice?’
‘Freddie offered to take Counsel’s opinion but, since Grandpa had several opportunities to remove the Codicil but chose not to, I don’t have much of a case.’ She lifted her shoulders in a gesture of utter helplessness. ‘It makes no difference. The truth is that there’s no cash to spare for legal fees. As it is, I’m going to have to sell a load of stuff to meet the inheritance tax bill. Even if I won, the costs would be so high that I’d have to sell the house to pay them. And if I lost…’
If she lost it would mean financial ruin.
Well, that would offer a certain amount of satisfaction. But nowhere near as much as the alternative that gave him everything he wanted.
‘So you’re telling me that the only reason you can’t take care of Nancie is because you’re about to lose the house? If you were married, there would be no problem,’ he said. He didn’t wait for her answer—it hadn’t been a question. ‘And your birthday is on the second of December. Well, it’s tight, but it’s do-able.’
‘Do-able?’ she repeated, her forehead buckled in a frown. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘A quick trip to the register office, a simple “I do”, you get to keep your house and I’ll have somewhere safe for Nancie. As her aunt-in-law, I don’t imagine there would be any objection to you taking care of her?’
And he would be able to finally scratch the itch that was May Coleridge while dancing on the grave of the man who’d shamed and humiliated him.
But if he’d imagined that she’d fling her arms around him, proclaim him her saviour, well, nothing had changed there, either.
Her eyes went from blank to blazing, like lightning out of a clear blue sky.
‘That’s not even remotely funny, Adam. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a house full of guests who’ll be expecting lunch in a couple of hours.’
She was wearing shabby sweats but swept by him, head high, shoulders back. Despite her lack of inches, the fact that her puppy fat hadn’t melted away but had instead evolved into soft curves, she was every inch the lady.
‘Mouse…’ he protested, shaken out of his triumph by the fact that, even in extremis, she’d turn him down flat. As if he was still a nobody from the wrong side of the tracks. ‘May!’
She was at the door before she stopped, looked back at him.
‘I’m serious,’ he said, a touch more sharply than he’d intended.
She shook her head. ‘It’s impossible.’
In other words, he might wear hand stitched suits these days instead of the cheapest market jeans, live in an apartment that had cost telephone numbers, be able to buy and sell the Coleridge estate ten times over, but he could never wash off the stink of where he’d come from. That his sister had been a druggie, his mother was no better than she ought to be and his father had a record as long as his arm.
But times had changed. He wasn’t that kid any more. What he wanted, he took. And he wanted this.
‘It would be a purely temporary arrangement,’ he said. ‘A marriage of convenience.’
‘Are you saying that you wouldn’t expect…?’
She swallowed, colour flooding into her cheeks, and it occurred to him that if Michael Linton’s courtship had been choreographed by her grandfather it would have been a formal affair rather than a lust-fuelled romance. The thought sent the blood rushing to a very different part of his anatomy and he was grateful for the full stiff folds of the dressing gown he was wearing.
She cleared her throat. ‘Are you saying that you wouldn’t expect the full range of wifely duties?’
Not the full range. He wouldn’t expect her to cook or clean or keep house for him.
‘Just a twenty-four seven nanny,’ she continued, regaining her composure, assuming his silence was assent. ‘Only with more paperwork, a longer notice period and a serious crimp in your social life?’
‘I don’t have much time for a social life these days,’ he assured her before she could gather herself. ‘But there are formal business occasions where I would normally take a guest. Civic functions. But you usually attend those, anyway.’
Nancie, as if aware of the sudden tension, let out a wail and, using the distraction to escape the unexpected heat of May’s eyes, he picked her up, put her against his shoulder, turned to look at her.
‘Well? What do you
say?’
She shook her head, clearly speechless, and the band holding her hair slipped, allowing wisps to escape.
Backlit by the sun, they shone around her face like a butterscotch halo.
‘What have you got to lose?’ he persisted, determined to impose his will on her. Overwrite the Coleridge name with his own.
‘Marriage is a lot easier to get into than it is to get out of,’ she protested. Still, despite every advantage, resisting him. ‘There has to be an easier solution to baby care than marrying the first woman to cross your path.’
‘Not the first,’ he replied. ‘I passed several women in the park and I can assure you that it never crossed my mind to marry any of them.’
‘No?’
He’d managed to coax the suggestion of a smile from her.
‘Divorce is easy enough if both parties are in agreement,’ he assured her. ‘You’ll be giving up a year of your freedom in return for your ancestral home. It looks like a good deal to me.’
The smile did not materialise. ‘I can see the advantage from my point of view,’ she said. ‘But what’s in it for you? You can’t really be that desperate to offload Nancie.’
‘Who said anything about “offloading” Nancie?’ He allowed himself to sound just a little bit offended by her suggestion that he was doing that. ‘On the contrary, I’m doing my best to do what her mother asked. It’s not as if I intend to leave you to manage entirely on your own. I have to go away tomorrow, but I’ll pull my weight until then.’
‘Oh, right. And how do you intend to do that?’
‘I’ll take the night watch. The master bedroom is made up. I’ll pack a bag and move in there today.’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘WHAT?’
The word was shocked from her.
May swallowed again, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear in a nervous gesture that drew attention to her neck. It was long and smooth. She had the clearest ivory skin coloured only by the fading blush…