Helena was unconcerned. “I should like to see the Abbey for myself.”
“Yes, yes. All in good time.”
“And I should like to meet Mr. Thornhill.”
“Undoubtedly.” Mr. Boothroyd shuffled through his papers again. To her surprise, a rising color crept into the elderly man’s face. “There are just one or two more points at issue, Miss Reynolds.” He cleared his throat. “You’re aware, I presume… That is, I do hope Mr. Finchley explained…this marriage is to be a real marriage in every sense of the word.”
She looked at him, brows knit in confusion. “What other kind of marriage would it be?”
“And you’re agreeable?”
“Of course.”
He made no attempt to disguise his skepticism. “There are many ladies who would find such an arrangement singularly lacking in romance.”
Helena didn’t doubt it. She’d have balked at the prospect herself once. But much had changed in the past year—and in the past months, especially. Any girlish fantasies she’d harbored about true love were dead. In their place was a rather ruthless pragmatism.
“I don’t seek romance, Mr. Boothroyd. Only kindness. And Mr. Finchley said that Mr. Thornhill was a kind man.”
Mr. Boothroyd appeared to be surprised by this. “Did he indeed,” he murmured. “What else did he tell you, pray?”
She hesitated before repeating the words that Mr. Finchley had spoken. Words that had convinced her once and for all to travel to a remote coastal town in Devon, to meet and marry a complete stranger. “He told me that Mr. Thornhill had been a soldier, and that he knew how to keep a woman safe.”
Justin Thornhill cast another brooding glance at the pale, dark-haired beauty sitting across from Boothroyd. She was slight but shapely, her modest traveling gown doing nothing to disguise the high curve of her breasts and the narrow lines of her small waist. When first he’d seen her in the taproom, he thought she was a fashionable traveler on her way to Abbot’s Holcombe, the resort town farther up the coast. He had no reason to think otherwise. The Miss Reynolds he’d been expecting—the plain, sensible spinster who’d responded to his matrimonial advertisement—had never arrived.
This Miss Reynolds was a different class of woman altogether.
She sat across from Boothroyd, her back ramrod straight, and her elegant, gloved hands folded neatly on her lap in a pretty attitude. She regarded the curmudgeonly steward with wide, doelike hazel eyes and when she spoke, she did so in the smooth, cultured tones of a gentlewoman. No, Justin amended. Not a gentlewoman. A lady.
She was nothing like the two sturdy widows Boothroyd had interviewed earlier for the position of housekeeper. Those women had, ironically, been more in line with Justin’s original specifications—the specifications he had barked at his aging steward those many months ago when Boothroyd had first broached the idea of his advertising for a wife.
“I have no interest in courtship,” he’d said, “nor in weeping young ladies who take to their bed with megrims. What I need is a woman. A woman who is bound by law and duty to see to the running of this godforsaken mausoleum. A woman I can bed on occasion. Damnation, Boothroyd, I didn’t survive six years in India so I could live like a bloody monk when I returned home.”
They were words spoken in frustration after the last in a long line of housekeepers had quit without notice. Words that owed a great deal to physical loneliness and far too many glasses of strong spirits.
The literal-minded Boothroyd had taken them as his marching orders.
The next morning, before Justin had even arisen from his alcohol-induced slumber, his ever-efficient steward had arranged for an advertisement to be placed in the London papers. It had been brief and to the point:
MATRIMONY: Retired army officer, thirty-two, of moderate means and quiet disposition wishes to marry a spinster or widow of the same age. Suitable lady will be sensible, compassionate, and capable of managing the household of remote country property. Independent fortune unimportant. Letters to be addressed, postpaid, to Mr. T. Finchley, Esq., Fleet Street.
Justin had initially been angry. He’d even threatened to give Boothroyd the sack. However, within a few days he’d found himself warming to the idea of acquiring a wife by advertisement. It was modern and efficient. As straightforward as any other business transaction. The prospective candidates would simply write to Thomas Finchley, Justin’s London attorney, and Finchley would negotiate the rest, just as competently as he’d negotiated the purchase of Greyfriar’s Abbey or those shares Justin had recently acquired in the North Devon Railway.
Still, he had no intention of making the process easy. He’d informed both Boothroyd and Finchley that he would not bestir himself on any account. If a prospective bride wanted to meet, she would have to do so at a location within easy driving distance of the Abbey.
He’d thought such a condition would act as a deterrent.
It hadn’t occurred to him that women routinely traveled such distances to take up employment. And what was his matrimonial advertisement if not an offer for a position in his household?
In due time, Finchley had managed to find a woman for whom an isolated existence in a remote region of coastal Devon sounded agreeable. Justin had even exchanged a few brief letters with her. Miss Reynolds hadn’t written enough for him to form a definite picture of her personality, nor of her beauty—or lack thereof. Nevertheless, he’d come to imagine her as a levelheaded spinster. The sort of spinster who would endure his conjugal attentions with subdued dignity. A spinster who wouldn’t burst into tears at the sight of his burns.
The very idea that anything like this lovely young creature would grace his table and his bed was frankly laughable.
Not but that she wasn’t determined.
Though that was easily remedied. Folding his paper, Justin rose from his chair. “I’ll take it from here, Boothroyd.”
Miss Reynold’s eyes lifted to his. He could see the exact moment when she realized who he was. To her credit, she didn’t cry or faint or spring from her chair and bolt out of the room. She merely looked at him in that same odd way she had in the taproom when first she beheld his burns.
“Miss Reynolds,” Mr. Boothroyd said, “may I present Mr. Thornhill?”
She did rise then and offered him her hand. It was small and slim, encased in a fine dark kid glove. “Mr. Thornhill.”
“Miss Reynolds.” His fingers briefly engulfed hers. “Sit down, if you please.” He took Boothroyd’s chair, waiting until his loyal retainer had removed himself to the other side of the parlor before fixing his gaze on his prospective bride.
Her face was a flawless, creamy porcelain oval, framed by dark brown hair swept back into an oversized roll at the nape of her neck. Her nose was straight—neither too short, nor too long—and her gently rounded chin was firm to the point of stubbornness. If not for the velvety softness of those doe eyes, she might have appeared prideful or even haughty. And perhaps she was, if her clothing was anything by which to judge.
Granted, he knew nothing of women’s fashion—aside from the fact that the hooks, laces, and miles of skirts were dashed inconvenient when one was in an amorous frame of mind. But one didn’t have to know the difference between a petticoat and a paletot to recognize that everything Miss Reynolds wore was of the finest quality. Even the tiny buttons on her bodice and the fashionable belt and buckle that encircled her waist appeared to have been crafted by a master.
Next to her, the suit of clothes he’d chosen to wear that morning to meet his intended bride felt rather shabby and third rate. Far worse, he was beginning to feel a little shabby and third rate himself.
“You’ll forgive the deception,” he said. “As you can see, I’m not the sort of man a woman would wish to find at the other end of a matrimonial advertisement.”
“Aren’t you?” She tilted her head. The small movement brought her hair
in the path of a shaft of sunlight filtering in through the parlor window. It glittered for an instant in her fashionable coiffure, revealing threads of red and gold among the brown. “Why do you say so? Is it because of your burns?”
He was hard-pressed to conceal a flinch. Damn, but she was blunt. He wouldn’t have expected such plain speaking from a decorative little female. “You can’t claim the sight doesn’t offend you. I saw your reaction in the taproom.”
Her brows drew together in an elegant line. “I had no reaction, sir.”
“No?”
“I was, perhaps, a little surprised. But not because of your burns.” Her cheeks flushed a delicate shade of rose. “You are…very tall.”
His chest tightened. He was uncertain what to make of her blushes—or of her personal remark. She was such a finely made little creature. He wondered if she thought him too big. Good God, he was too big. And too rough, too coarse, and too common and a host of other negative traits, the distastefulness of which he had not fully appreciated until being in her presence.
“You were expecting someone shorter?”
“No, I…I didn’t know what to expect. How could I have? You never mentioned anything of that sort in your letters.”
Justin recalled the polite and wholly impersonal letters he’d written to her over the past months. He’d described Greyfriar’s Abbey, the seasons and the weather and the sound of the waves hitting the rocks beneath the cliffs. He’d mentioned the repairs to the roof, the new outbuildings, and the persistent trouble with keeping servants.
His own appearance hadn’t merited a single line.
“Would you still have come, had you known?” he asked.
“About your burns, do you mean?” She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I think so. But there’s no way to prove it now, is there? You shall have to take my word for it.”
He allowed his gaze to drift over her face, taking in every feature, from the dark mahogany brows winging over her wide-set eyes, to the gentle curve of her cheekbones, and down to the impossibly sensual bow of her upper lip. It was not the face of a woman who had to answer a matrimonial advertisement in order to find a husband.
Take her word for it? “I suppose I must,” he said.
“Did it happen while you were in India?”
He nodded once. “During the uprising.”
“I didn’t like to assume.” She paused. “I know something of soldiers from my brother. He often wrote to me about the exploits of his regiment and the hardships of friends who’d been injured in battle. He was a soldier himself, you see.”
“Was he, indeed?” Justin regarded her with a thoughtful expression. “I understood that you had no family.”
“I don’t. Not any longer. My brother was lost last year at the siege of Jhansi.” Her bosom rose and fell on an unsteady breath. He noticed for the first time that she was trembling. “Is that where you were hurt, Mr. Thornhill?”
It wasn’t a subject he enjoyed discussing, but there was no point in dissembling. She would find out soon enough. “No, at Cawnpore in ’57.”
Something flickered briefly in the velvet depths of her eyes. Everyone in England knew what had happened in Cawnpore during the uprising, but as the sister of a soldier, she’d have a better understanding than most.
“Were you serving under Major General Sir Hugh Wheeler?” she asked very quietly. “Or did you arrive later, with Brigadier General Neill?”
“The former.” His mouth curved into a mocking half smile. “You may rest easy, Miss Reynolds. I had no part in the raping and pillaging engaged in by the relieving forces. I was safely tucked away in an enemy prison at the time, being flayed alive by rebel sepoys.” She blanched, but he didn’t spare her. “The burns and scars you see here are nothing. The ones beneath my clothing are much, much worse, I assure you.”
“I am very sorry for it.”
“Are you?” He felt an unreasonable surge of anger toward her. “You may not feel quite so much Christian charity toward my scarred body when it’s covering you in our marriage bed.”
From his place across the room, Boothroyd emitted a strangled groan.
Justin ignored him. His attention was fixed on the scalding blush that swept from the slender column of Miss Reynold’s porcelain throat all the way up to her hairline. Doubtless he’d shocked her virginal soul to its very core. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she leapt up and slapped his face. He certainly deserved it.
But she did not strike him.
Instead, she met his insolent gaze and held it, unflinching.
“You’re purposefully offensive, sir. I believe you’re trying to scare me off. I cannot think why.”
Because if you don’t leave of your own accord, very soon I won’t let you leave at all.
And where would he be then?
Stuck at Greyfriar’s Abbey, among the crumbling stone and cracked plaster, with a very unhappy lady. A lady reduced to drudgery in a drafty, damp, understaffed ruin. A lady whom he could never hope to satisfy, not if he lived to be one hundred.
“Perhaps,” he said finally, “because it seems to me that you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
“Nonsense. I know exactly what I’ll get out of this arrangement. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. If you don’t wish to marry me, Mr. Thornhill, you need only say so.”
“I wonder that you wish to marry me.” He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair, surveying the neat little figure hidden beneath her gown. “I hope you’re not in trouble, Miss Reynolds.”
He heard her catch her breath. The sound was unmistakable.
His heart sank. There was no other way to describe it. The disappointment he felt was that exquisitely painful.
And then, just as swiftly, his temper flared.
“I may be acquiring a wife in a somewhat unconventional way, madam,” he informed her in the same frigid accents he’d often employed with disrespectful subordinates in India, “but I have no desire to take on another man’s bastard in the bargain.”
Her mouth fell open. “What?”
“I believe you heard me.” He moved to rise.
“You think I’m carrying a child?”
Something in her voice stopped him where he stood. He searched her face. “Do you deny it?”
“Yes!” She was blushing furiously now. “The suggestion is patently absurd. As well as being utterly impossible.”
Absurd as well as impossible? His conscience twinged. So, she was an innocent after all. Either that or the finest actress he’d ever encountered in his life. “Ah,” he said as he resumed his seat. “I see.”
She raised a hand to brush a loose strand of hair from her face. She was trembling again.
“What kind of trouble is it, then?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Something has plainly driven you to answer my advertisement. If not an unwanted child, then what?”
She dropped her gaze. Her long, thick lashes were black as soot against the creamy curve of her cheek. “You are mistaken, sir.”
“And you are trembling, madam.”
She immediately clasped her hands in her lap. “I always tremble when I’m nervous. I can’t help it.”
“Is that all that’s wrong, Miss Reynolds? Nerves?”
Her lashes lifted and she met his eyes. “Does it really matter, Mr. Thornhill?”
He considered. “That depends. Have you broken the law?”
“Of course not. I simply wish to be married. It’s why I answered your matrimonial advertisement. It’s why I’ve come all this way. If you’ve decided I don’t suit you—”
“You suit me.” The words were out before he could call them back.
Try as he might, he could not regret them. It was the truth, by God. She was an uncommonly beautiful woman. He’d been physically attrac
ted to her from the moment she came to stand beside him in the taproom.
On its own that wouldn’t have been enough. He was no callow youth to have his head turned by a pretty face. But there was something else about her. Something lost and vulnerable and oddly courageous. It roused more than his ardor. It roused his protective instincts. It made him want to shield her from harm.
Is that why Finchley had sent her to him?
The very idea unsettled Justin deeply. He was no hero. Indeed, his own past conduct fairly disqualified him as a man capable of protecting a woman. Finchley knew that.
But if Justin had any lingering doubts about his decision, Miss Reynold’s reaction to his pronouncement temporarily banished them from his mind.
Her face suffused with relief. Her soft hazel eyes glistened with what he very much feared were tears of gratitude. “You suit me as well,” she said.
“Undoubtedly. Your requirements are not very exacting.” He tugged at his collar. It felt damnably tight all of a sudden. “Security and a little kindness, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that I keep you safe.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “That most of all.”
“I can’t think what Finchley meant by sending her,” Boothroyd said. “If I’d had any inkling, I would’ve put a stop to it.” He gathered up his papers and thrust them back into his leather briefcase, grumbling all the while. “Not at all the thing. A lady like that. A catastrophe in the making. Mark my words.”
Justin paced the confines of the private parlor, only half listening to the rantings of his unhappy steward.
Miss Reynolds was gone. Boothroyd had arranged a room for her at the inn. He’d even ordered a meal sent up. She was probably eating it now. Or sleeping. Or perhaps she’d changed her mind? Perhaps she’d already managed to escape back to London or wherever it was she came from?
The possibility sent a bolt of apprehension through him. And it was no mystery why.
He wanted her badly. He wasn’t too proud to admit it. He wanted her as his wife. He wanted her in his home and in his bed. He’d been far too long without a woman. And Helena Reynolds, with her doelike eyes and softly curved body, had triggered an overpowering ache inside of him. Good God, he could still smell the faint scent of her perfume lingering in the air. It was delicate, sweet, and disturbingly exotic. Jasmine. It reminded him of balmy nights spent in India.
The Matrimonial Advertisement Page 2