The Earl's Convenient Wife (Harlequin Romance)

by Marion Lennox

  ‘This is nothing like that.’ He was on his feet now, angry. That she would compare him to his cousin...

  ‘I know you’re not.’ Her voice softened. ‘I know you’re nothing like Alan. But you have your demons, too. You’ve let me close enough to see them, but, Alasdair, whether I see them or not is irrelevant. You won’t share.’

  ‘I want to be married. This can work.’

  ‘You don’t want to be married.’ She shook her head, as if trying to work it out for herself. ‘The thing is that I have a different definition of marriage from you. Marriage is supposed to be the joining together of two people—isn’t it? That’s what I want, Alasdair. That’s what I dream of. But you...you see marriage as the joining together of the little bits you want to share.’

  ‘You don’t want to know about my business.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t,’ she said slowly. ‘But that’s not what I’m talking about. You don’t want to trust. You don’t want to share because it’ll make you somehow more exposed. And I don’t want that sort of semi-commitment. More, I’ll run a mile before I risk it. I’m sorry, Alasdair, but it has to end. The vows we took were only mock. You say you love me. It’s a wonderful compliment but that’s all it is—a compliment. We need to work out a way forward but the little loving we’ve been sharing isn’t the way to go. It has to end and it will. Right now.’

  * * *

  He looked ill but she wouldn’t allow herself to care. She mustn’t. Something inside was dying but she couldn’t let herself examine it. Like a wounded creature of the wild, she needed to be left alone. She wanted to find a place where she could hide.

  To recover? How did she recover? She felt dead inside. Hopeless.

  ‘Alasdair, you’re too tired to take this in.’ She forced herself to sound gentle—to play the concerned wife? No. She was a concerned friend now, she told herself. Nothing more. ‘How long since you slept?’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Remember? Go up and sleep. We’ll talk later.’

  ‘We’ll talk now.’ It was a possessive growl and instinctively she backed away.

  ‘Not now. There’s nothing to say until you’ve thought it through.’

  ‘You won’t leave while I sleep?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘We’ll talk tomorrow. Go to bed.’

  ‘Jeanie...’

  ‘Alasdair, I have guests arriving in half an hour and I have work to do. Please...leave me be.’ She turned to put trays of her shortbread into the oven.

  If he came up behind her, she thought, if he touched her, how could she keep control? She was so close to the edge...

  But he didn’t come. She waited, every nerve in her body, every sense tuned to the man behind her. If he touched her...

  She’d break. She’d said what she had to say. She’d meant it but her body didn’t mean it. Her body wanted him.

  She wanted him, but the cost was too high. The cycle had to be broken, right here, right now.

  Please... It was a silent prayer and in the end she didn’t know whether it was for him to leave or for him to stay. Please...

  And in the end who knew whether the prayer was answered?

  He left.

  * * *

  He was too tired to think straight. He was too tired to fight for what he wanted.

  The mess in Edinburgh had needed a week to sort, but, with only twenty-eight nights away from the castle permissible under the terms of the will, he’d had to get home. So he’d worked through, forty-eight hours straight.

  His head was doing weird things. It was as if Jeanie’s words had been a battering ram, and he’d been left concussed.

  It must be exhaustion, he told himself. He should have stayed another night in Edinburgh—he could have managed it in his schedule—but he’d wanted to get home.

  To Jeanie.

  She was downstairs and she wasn’t coming up. She intended to sleep in her own apartment. He’d be going to bed alone.

  Maybe it was just as well. He needed time to think. He had to get it sorted.

  Maybe she was talking sense. Maybe the type of relationship she was demanding wasn’t something he could give?

  His head hurt.

  He showered and his head didn’t clear. The night was closing in. All he saw was fog.

  He headed for his bedroom and there was a bowl of soup and toast and tea by his bed.

  ‘Try to eat,’ the note beside it said. ‘Things will look better in the morning.’

  How could they look better?

  Was she talking about Don? About the betrayal?

  He hadn’t told her about Don. He hadn’t let her close.

  He stared down at the simple meal, thinking he wanted her to be here while he ate it.

  He wanted her as an accessory to his life?

  It was too hard. He couldn’t make his mind work any more. He managed half the meal. He put his head on the pillow and slept.

  * * *

  She shouldn’t have cooked for him. The little wife preparing supper for her businessman husband, home after a frantic two days at the office? Ha.

  But this much was okay, she told herself. She’d waited until she heard the sound of his shower and then slipped his meal in unseen, as she’d done a hundred times for guests who’d arrived late, who hadn’t been able to find a meal in town or who were ill or in trouble.

  He was a guest, she told herself. That was the way it was now. He was a guest in the bed and breakfast she worked in. Nothing more.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HE WAS TROUBLED by dreams but still he slept, his body demanding the rest it so badly needed. He hadn’t set his alarm and when he woke it was nine o’clock and he could hear the sound of guests departing downstairs.

  He lay and let the events of the past two days seep back into his consciousness. He allowed them in piece by piece, assessing, figuring out what had gone wrong, how he could have handled things better.

  The financial and legal mess Don had left would have ramifications into the future. He should let his mind dwell on that as a priority. Instead his brain skipped right over and moved on...

  To Jeanie.

  There was a scratch at the door. The dogs. He rose to let them in and found an envelope had been slipped under the door. Like a checkout slip from a hotel? Thank you for your patronage—here’s the cost?

  He snagged the envelope, let the dogs in and went back to bed. Abbot and Costello hit the covers with joy. He patted them but his pat was perfunctory.

  ‘Nice to see you, too, guys. Settle.’

  And they did settle, as if they, too, knew the contents of the envelope were important.

  He lay back on the bed, reluctant to open it but it had to be done. It contained two pages of what looked like...a contract?

  Note first.

  Dear Alasdair,

  You’ll be worried by now that I’m going to leave. If I do, then of course things revert to their former disaster. I won’t do that to you. Just because my emotional needs don’t match yours, there’s no need to bring down the Duncairn Empire.

  Alasdair, your grandmother’s will was fanciful—an old lady’s wish born out of fondness for me. But she’s already done so much for me—more than enough—so this is how it will be.

  I’ll stay until the end of the twelve months, as your housekeeper. I’ll accept a decent wage, but that’s all. At the end of the year I’ll walk away and I’ll take nothing. The following contract, signed by me and witnessed by the guy who delivered this morning’s groceries, grants you every right to the castle.

  I know Alan’s creditors will still claim it, but you can then pay them out if you wish. Or not. It’s nothing to do with me. All I want—and I do want this—is the dogs. Oh, an
d what’s left of my whisky. I’ve given up the idea of selling it online so I’ll be making awesome Christmas cakes for generations. That’s my own little Duncairn Legacy.

  Meanwhile, if you sign the contract, that’s what it says and that’s where we’ll leave it. It’s as professional as I can make it.

  It’s been lovely, Alasdair, but we should never have mixed business with pleasure. You’re right—our lives are separate.

  Oh, and your ring is in the safe in your grandmother’s room. I have no right to it, and it’s too precious to lose.

  Yours back to being formal.

  Jeanie

  * * *

  He lay and stared at the ceiling while the dogs settled, draped themselves over him, slept.

  Our lives are separate.

  Downstairs he heard Jeanie start to hoover. In a while she started to hum and then to sing.

  If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was happy. She wasn’t. He’d lived in the same castle as this woman for almost two months. He could hear the note of determined cheerfulness. The courage.

  She had a great voice, he thought inconsequentially. With the hoover in the background it was the best...

  Jeanie...

  Too precious to lose?

  Hell.

  The dogs were letting him go nowhere—or maybe it was his mind letting him go nowhere. What he’d learned in a crisis was to get all the facts before he made a move and he didn’t have all the facts before him yet. Or he did, but they weren’t in the proper order. He needed to marshal them, set them in a line, examine them.

  But they wouldn’t stay in line. They were jumping at him from every which way, and overriding all of them was the sound of Jeanie singing.

  The contract fell off the coverlet, onto the floor. He let it lie.

  Done. Dusted. Sorted. Jeanie had told him the end of this particular story. Move on.

  It’d been all right when he’d thought he’d been buying her out, he thought savagely. Why wasn’t it okay now?

  His phone interrupted. It was his chief lawyer, calling to talk about Don. Listening to what the man was telling him, he felt some relief—but suddenly the lawyer was talking about something else. Jeanie’s bankruptcy?

  What he told him made Alasdair pay more attention than all the details of Don’s betrayal.

  Why tell him this now? he demanded, but it had only been after a long examination of all the contracts that the lawyers had felt sure.

  He disconnected feeling...discombobulated. Talk about complications! What was he going to do with this?

  He needed to walk. He needed to get his mind clear before he talked to her.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ he told the dogs, tossing back the covers. ‘Let’s go discuss this with the otters.’

  * * *

  She hoovered every inch of the castle and then some. Halfway through the hoovering she heard Alasdair come down the stairs, the dogs clattering after him. She held her breath but she heard them head straight for the wet room. The back door slammed and then she heard silence.

  He’d taken the dogs for a walk? Good.

  ‘But I’m taking the dogs when I go,’ she muttered and she tried to make herself sound angry but in the end all she felt like was crying.

  But she would not cry. Not again. Not over a man—even if he was Alasdair. She had to keep it together and get the next ten months over with. For ten months she had to live in the castle so their mock marriage could stay intact. She had to stay sane.

  She would.

  She sniffed and sniffed again, and then walked determinedly to the back door. Alasdair and the dogs were over the brow of the first hill. Out of earshot? Excellent. She took a deep breath, stood on the top step and let fly.

  ‘Don’t you dare get attached to those dogs,’ she yelled, to the departing Alasdair, to the world in general. ‘They’re mine. I don’t have a right to your castle, but your grandma’s dopey dogs are mine, and I’ll fight for them.’

  And the whisky?

  ‘And the whisky, too,’ she yelled but he was long gone and nobody heard.

  She wouldn’t cry. She would not.

  Instead she went back inside and returned to her hoovering. ‘Back to being the char,’ she told herself and then she forced a mocking smile. ‘But back to being your own woman as well. It’s about time you learned how.’

  * * *

  He headed along the cliffs, to Craigie Burn, to the place where he and Jeanie had watched the otters. The dogs were wild with excitement, but then they were always wild with excitement. They raced deliriously around him but finally settled to his gentle amble, keeping him in sight but leaving him to himself. When he paused at the point where the burn cut him off from wild woods beyond, the dogs found a rabbit warren and started digging. Next stop China, he thought, as he watched the dirt flying. Any Duncairn rabbit was safe from this pair. They were closer to burying each other than catching anything.

  He left them be. He headed for the cottage, sat on the rock above the water and stared at nothing in particular. He had things to be thinking, things to be working out, but his mind seemed to have gone into shutdown.

  Jeanie had given him what he wanted—hadn’t she? It was selfish to want more.

  The dogs were yapping in the distance and he found himself smiling. Stupid dogs.

  At the end of the year he wouldn’t have them.

  He could buy others. He could find dogs with a bit more intelligence.

  He could find...another woman?

  And there his thoughts stopped.

  Another woman?

  A wife?

  He didn’t want a wife. He wanted Jeanie.

  Two different things.

  But he’d treated her as...just a wife, he conceded, thinking of the past few weeks. A housewife. He’d played the businessman, and Jeanie was his appendage. Each had their clear delineation of responsibility. Each only interacted on a need-to-know basis.

  Except Jeanie hadn’t treated their marriage like that, he thought. She hadn’t compartmentalised as he had. She’d welcomed him into her kitchen, into her bed, into her life.

  She’d told him everything he wanted to know about this business, this island, her life. She’d opened herself to him, whereas he...

  He’d done what would work. He’d resisted the temptation to trust because trust only led to trouble.

  A movement by the water’s edge caught his eye. Welcoming the diversion from thoughts that were taking him nowhere, he let himself be distracted. The pocket of his hiking jacket always held a pair of field glasses. He hauled them out and focused.

  A pair of sea otters were at the water’s edge beneath him, devouring the end of what looked like the remains of a rather large fish. He watched, caught by their beauty and their activity, welcoming the diversion.

  What was a group of sea otters called? A raft? He found himself wondering why.

  And then he found out. The fish finished, the otters slipped back into the water and drifted lazily out midstream. They stayed hard up against each other and he focused his glasses to see more clearly.

  They were linked. Hand in hand? Paw in paw? They floated on the surface, their faces soaking up the rays of the weak autumn sun, replete, relaxed, ready for sleep? Together they made a raft of two otters. Their eyes were closed. They were only two, but their raft was complete.

  Jeanie would like to see this.

  And then he thought: I can show her—but at the end of the year she’ll walk away.

  Because he couldn’t trust? No, because he didn’t want to trust. He didn’t want to risk...

  Risk what? Losing his business? She’d saved that for him. This estate? It’d survive as well.

  What, then?

  Did trust have to mean betrayal?
>
  In his world, it did. His parents had shown him no loyalty whatsoever. They’d dumped him whenever they could. He’d had one disastrous engagement, which had ended in betrayal. He’d been humiliated to the core. And now Don... An old family friend. A man his grandparents had trusted completely.

  He’d lost through betrayal. His parents. His fiancée. Don. The hurt from his parents was ongoing. His father had died without ever showing him affection. His mother...she was with someone in the US. Someone fabulous, someone rich, someone who didn’t want anything to do with her past.

  And now... If his grandmother had known about Don, it would have broken her heart, he thought. Oh, Eileen, you should have learned. Counter betrayal by not trusting. Don’t leave yourself open to that devastation.

  Eileen had loved Jeanie. She’d trusted her completely.

  Was that why she’d engineered this marriage—because she’d trusted Jeanie to love her grandson? What an ask.

  The otters were drifting further downstream, seemingly asleep, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings. Were they pups? he wondered. A mother and her offspring? A mating pair?

  Did otters mate and stay mated? He needed to find out.

  He watched them float and found himself thinking that what he was seeing was perfect trust. They were together and that seemed all that mattered.

  But...they were floating towards the point where the burn met the incoming sea.

  The burn was running gently, but the sea was not so gentle. There must have been a storm out in the Atlantic not long since, because the sea was wild. The breakers were huge and the point where the waves washed into the mouth of the burn was a mass of white water.

  The otters were almost there.

  Were they pups? Didn’t they know? Dumb or not, he found himself on his feet, staring helplessly at them, wanting to yell...

  His glasses were still trained on their heads. Just as they reached the point where the wash of surf could have sucked them in, he saw one stir and open its eyes...

  What followed was a swift movement—a nudge? They were both awake then, diving together straight into the wash, surfacing on a wave, cruising on its face across the surf—then back into the safety and relative calm of the burn.