The Earl's Convenient Wife. Marion Lennox
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He’d bought the place when he and Celia were planning marriage, and afterwards he’d never seen the point of moving. He worked fourteen-, fifteen-hour days, especially now. There were things happening within the company he didn’t understand. Nebulous but worrying. He needed to focus.
He still could. He could use the Edinburgh house simply to sleep. That could continue and the terms of the will would be met.
‘It could work,’ he reasoned. ‘The apartment’s big enough for us to keep out of each other’s way.’
But what will she do while you’re away every day? The question came from nowhere, and he briefly considered it.
‘She can shop, socialise, do what other wives do.’
Wives...
He’d have a wife. After Celia’s betrayal he’d sworn...
Eileen had known that he’d sworn. That was why she’d done this.
He needed to suppress his anger. What he’d learned, hard and early, was that emotion got you nowhere. Reason was everything.
‘It’s only for a year,’ he told himself. ‘There’s no choice. To walk away from everything is unthinkable.’
But walking away was still an option. He had money independent of Duncairn—of course he did. When he’d first started working in the firm, his grandmother had insisted on a salary commensurate with other executives of his standing. He was well-qualified, and even without this dubious inheritance he was wealthy. He could walk away.
But Duncairn...
He turned and looked back again at the castle, a great grey mass of imposing stone built by his ancestors to last for centuries. And the company... The financial empire had drawn him in since his teens. He’d worked to make it the best in the world, and to let it go...
‘I’d be able to buy the castle from her when the year’s up,’ he told himself. ‘You can’t tell me she’s not in for the main chance. If I’m the highest bidder, she’ll take the money and run.’
Decision made. He rose and stretched and called the dogs.
‘I’ll do this,’ he said out loud, addressing the ghost of his absent grandmother. ‘Fine, Grandmother, you win. I’ll talk to her and we’ll organise a wedding. But that’ll be it. It might be a wedding but it’s not a marriage. If you think I’ll ever be interested in Alan’s leavings...’
Don’t think of her like that.
But he couldn’t help himself. Alan’s betrayal, his gut-wrenching cruelty, was still raw after all these years and Jeanie was Alan’s widow. He’d stayed away from this castle because he’d wanted nothing to do with her, but now...
‘Now we’ll have to share the same front door in Edinburgh,’ he told himself. For a year. But a year’s not so long when what’s at stake is so important. You can do it, man. Go take yourself a wife.
* * *
She was in the kitchen. The kitchen was her solace, her joy. Cooks had been baking in this kitchen for hundreds of years. The great range took half the wall. The massive oak table, twenty feet long, was pocked and scratched from generations of chopping and rolling and kneading. The vast cobbled floor was worn from hundreds of servants, feeding thousands.
Eileen had restored the castle, making it truly sumptuous, but she’d had the sense to leave the kitchen free from modern grandeur. Jeanie had an electric oven tucked discreetly by the door. There was even a microwave and dishwasher in the vast, hall-like pantry, but the great stove was still lit as it seemed to have stayed lit forever. There was a sumptuous basket on each side for the dogs. The effect was old and warm and breathtaking.
Here was her place, Jeanie thought. She’d loved it the first time she’d seen it, and she’d found peace here.
She was having trouble finding peace now.
When in doubt, turn to scones, she told herself. After all these years she could cook them in her sleep. She didn’t provide dinner for the castle guests but she baked treats for occasional snacks or for when they wandered in after dinner. She usually baked slices or a cake but right now she needed something that required no thought.
She wasn’t thinking. She was not thinking.
Marriage...
She shouldn’t care. She hadn’t expected to inherit anything, but to tie the estate up as Eileen had... It didn’t matter how much she disliked Alasdair; this was cruel. Had Eileen really been thinking it could happen?
And even though her thoughts should be on Alasdair, on the injustice done to him, there was also a part of her that hurt. No, she hadn’t expected an inheritance, but she hadn’t expected this, either. That Eileen could possibly think she could organise her down that road again... Try one grandson, if that doesn’t work, try another?
‘What were you thinking?’ she demanded of the departed Eileen.
And then she thought: Eileen hadn’t been thinking. She’d been hoping.
Those last few months of her life, Eileen had stayed at the castle a lot. Her normally feisty personality had turned inward. She’d wept for Alan, but she’d also wept for Alasdair.
‘His parents and then that appalling woman he almost married...they killed something in him,’ she’d told Jeanie. ‘If only he could find a woman like you.’
This will was a fanciful dream, Jeanie thought, kneading her scone dough. The old lady might have been in full possession of her faculties, but her last will and testament was nothing more than a dream.
‘She mustn’t have thought it through,’ she said to herself. ‘She could never have thought we’d walk away from what she saw as irresistible temptation. She’d never believe we could resist.’
But Eileen hadn’t had all the facts. Jeanie thought of those facts now, of an appalling marriage and its consequences, and she felt ill. If Eileen knew what she’d done, it’d break her heart.
But what could she do about it now? Nothing. Nothing, nothing and nothing. Finally she stared down and realised what she’d been doing. Kneading scone dough? Was she out of her mind?
‘There’s nothing worse than tough scones,’ she told the world in general. ‘Except marriage.’
Two disastrous marriages... Could she risk a third?
‘Maybe I will,’ she told herself, searching desperately for the light side, the optimistic bit of Jeanie McBride that had never entirely been quenched. ‘Eventually. Maybe I might finally find myself a life. I could go to Paris—learn to cook French pastries. Could I find myself a sexy Parisian who enjoys a single malt?’
She almost smiled at that. All that whisky had to be useful for something. If she was honest, it wasn’t even her drink of choice.
But since when had she ever had a choice? There was still the overwhelming issue of her debt, she thought, and the urge to smile died. Alan’s debt. The bankruptcy hung over her like a massive, impenetrable cloud. How to be optimistic in the face of that?
She glanced out of the window, at the eagles who soared over the Duncairn castle as if they owned it.
‘That’s what I’d really like to do,’ she whispered. ‘Fly. But I’m dreaming. I’m stuck.’
And then a deep masculine response from the doorway made her almost jump out of her skin.
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’
Her head jerked from window to doorway and he was standing there. The Lord of Duncairn.
How long had he been watching? Listening? She didn’t know. She didn’t care, she told herself, fighting for composure as she tossed her dough into the waste and poured more flour into her bowl. McBrides...
But this man was not Alan.