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She must be as shocked as he was about the will’s contents. She’d get nothing unless they married...
That could be used to his advantage. His mind was racing. The only cost would be the castle.
And a year of his life...
The lawyer had risen, eager to depart. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I understand I’m leaving you in a quandary but my task here was purely as messenger. I can see the taxi approaching. Mrs McBride has been efficient as always. Will you bid her farewell for me? Meanwhile, if there’s anything else myself or my partners can do...’
‘Tear up the will?’
‘You and I both know that we can’t do that. The will is watertight. From now on there’s only a decision to be made, and I have no place here while you make it. Good luck, sir, and goodbye.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ubfca6f34-cc34-5c4c-abb8-086e8bbe32c9)
THERE WAS TOO much to get his head around.
Alasdair paced the library, and when that wasn’t big enough he took himself outdoors, through the great, grand castle entrance, across the manicured lawns, down the ha-ha and to the rough pastures beyond.
The shaggy highland cattle were still where they’d been while the lawyer had been making his pronouncements. The day had been warm and they were feeling the heat. If it got any hotter, they’d be wandering down to the sea and standing belly deep in the water, but for now they were lying on the rich summer grass, grazing where they could reach.
He loved the cattle. More, he loved this whole estate. His grandparents had made one small section of the castle liveable when his grandfather inherited, and they’d brought him here as a boy. He’d wandered the place at will, free from the demands his socialite parents put on him, free of the restrictions of being known as a rich kid. He’d fished, climbed, roamed, and when his grandmother had decided on restoration he’d been delighted.
Only that restoration had brought Jeanie into their lives.
If it hadn’t been Jeanie, it would have been someone else, he thought grimly, striding down the line of battered fencing towards the bay. His grandmother’s two dogs, Abbot and Costello, elegant spaniels, beautiful, fast and dumb, had loped out to join him. The smell of rabbits would be everywhere, and the dogs were going nuts trying to find them.
Alan’s wife...Jeanie...
His grandmother had said she’d loved her.
He’d thought his grandmother had loved him.
‘So why treat us like this?’ he demanded of his departed grandmother. ‘If we don’t marry, we’ll have nothing.’
It was blackmail. Marry... The thing was nonsense.
But the knot of shock and anger was starting to untwist. Jeanie’s assessment was right—his grandmother was a conniving, Machiavellian matriarch—so he might have expected something like this. Marriage to Alan’s widow... Of all the dumb...
Eileen had loved reading romance novels. He should have confiscated every one and burned them before it was too late.
He reached the bay and set himself down on a great smooth rock, a foundation stone of an ancient fortress. He gazed out to sea but his mind was racing. Option one, no inheritance. Nothing. Walk away. The thought made him feel ill.
He turned and gazed back at the castle. He’d hardly been here these past years but it had always been in his mind. In his heart?
There’d been McBrides at Duncairn Castle since almost before the dinosaurs. Would he be the one to let it go?
The woodchip industry would move in, he thought. The pastures included with the castle title were mostly wild. The castle was heritage-listed, but not the land.
There were deer watching cautiously just above the horizon, but money was in woodchips, not deer. The land would go.
Which led—sickeningly—to option two.
Marriage. To a woman he couldn’t stand, but who also stood to gain by the inheritance.
He gazed around again at the cattle, at the distant deer, at the water lapping the shores, the dogs barking in the distance, the eagles...
His land. Duncairn.
Was the thing impossible?
And the more he calmed down, the more he saw it wasn’t. His apartment in Edinburgh was large, with separate living quarters for a housekeeper. 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. She told herself that, but as she did she felt a queer jump inside.
No, he wasn’t Alan. He was nothing like him. They’d been cousins but where Alan had been out for a good time, this man was rock solid. Judgemental, yes. ‘Harsh’ and ‘condemnatory’ were two adjectives that described him well—and yet, gazing at the man in the doorway, she felt the weird inside flutter that she’d felt in the library.
Attraction? She had to be joking.
He was her feudal lord, she told herself harshly. She was a peasant. And when peasantry met gentry—run!
But for now she was the cook in this man’s castle. She was forced to stay and she was forced to listen.
‘Jeanie, my grandmother’s treated us both badly,’ he said and his tone was one of conciliation. ‘I don’t know what you wanted but you surely can’t have expected this.’
She started at that. The anger she’d heard from him had disappeared. What came through now was reason and caution, as if he wasn’t sure how to proceed.
That made two of them.
‘She hasn’t treated me badly.’ She made herself say it lightly but she knew it was true. Eileen had had no cause to offer her a job and a livelihood in this castle. There’d been no obligation. Eileen’s action had been pure generosity.
‘Your grandmother has been very, very good to me,’ she added, chopping butter and starting to rub it into the new lot of flour. The action was soothing—an age-old task that calmed something deep within—and almost took her mind off the sex-on-legs image standing in the doorway. Almost. ‘I’ve loved living and working here but jobs don’t last forever. I don’t have any right to be here.’
‘You were married to Alan. You were... You are family.’
It was as if he was forcing himself to say it, she thought. He was forcing himself to be nice?
‘The marriage was brief and it was a disaster,’ she said curtly. ‘I’m no longer your family—I’m your grandmother’s ex-employee. I’m happy to keep running the castle until it’s sold but then... Then I’m happy to go.’ Liar, liar, pants on fire, she added silently to herself. It’d break her heart to leave; it’d break her heart to see the castle sold to the highest bidder. She had so little money to go anywhere, but there was no way she was baring her heart to this man.
Right now she was almost afraid of him. He was leaning against the doorjamb, watching her. He looked a warrior, as fierce and as ruthless as the reputation of the great lineage of Duncairn chieftains preceding him.
He was no such thing, she told herself fiercely. He was just a McBride, another one, and she needed to get away from here fast.
‘But if we married, you could keep the castle.’
Jeanie’s hands stilled. She stood motionless. In truth, she was counting breaths, or lack of them.
He’d said it as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. If you give me a penny, I’ll give you an apple. It was that sort of statement.
Ten, eleven, twelve... She’d have to breathe soon.
‘Maybe it’s reasonable,’ Alasdair continued while she wondered if her breathing intended starting again. ‘Maybe it’s the only sensible course of action.’ He’d taken his jacket off and rolled his sleeves. His arms were folded. They were great, brawny arms, arms that gave the lie to the fact that he was a city financier. His kilt made him seem even more a warrior.
He was watching her—as a panther watched its prey?
‘It’d get us both what we want,’ he said, still watchful. ‘Alone, we walk away from everything we’ve worked for. Eileen’s will is a nightmare but it doesn’t have to be a total disaster. We need to work around it.’
