The Billionaire's Convenient Bride Read online

  Her great-grandfather had gone a little further, opening to the public on half a dozen days in the year when for a small sum—all in aid of charity—the castle servants would serve you with a cream tea in the Orangery.

  It was what a gentleman did.

  Her grandfather had needed hard cash and by then there wasn’t a duke, marquis or earl who wasn’t opening up his stately home to the public to help pay for the upkeep of their ancestral piles.

  He’d opened up the gardens to the public for five days a week in the summer. It was, however, special flowers—the snowdrops, bluebells, azaleas—that drew the crowds in the spring. And then, in summer, Lady Anne’s rose garden, planted in the early nineteenth century with roses brought back by a plant-hunting cousin from Persia, filled the air with scent and drew the crowds.

  In the early days her grandmother had offered cream teas in the garden in good weather, in the Orangery in the colder, wetter months. Darjeeling, Orange Pekoe and Earl Grey, served in bone china. Scones, baked in the castle kitchen by the under cook, served with jams made from fruit grown in the kitchen garden.

  Some people had come just for the tea.

  Now they took in B & B guests, and lunches and afternoon tea in the Orangery were self-service from a counter. More practical, maybe, and no one walked off with the plastic spoons, but no one came just for the tea, either.

  Aware that it would be colder under the trees, Agnès grabbed a jacket and scarf and paused at the door to breath in the fresh, damp air of an April morning.

  Rainwater was dripping from guttering that needed replacing, but the sun had finally burned off the mist, a blackbird was singing in an oak tree and the sky was a clear pale blue. It was one of those perfect moments that needed savouring and Agnès closed her eyes and lifted her face to the light.

  ‘Don’t you have more important things to do than walk your grandmother’s dog?’

  Kam’s caustic remark didn’t faze her. He might have grown, become a man, but his footsteps were an echo through time. She’d heard him coming across the polished oak floor and steeled herself not to react as he came to a halt beside her.

  The scent was new, though.

  As a boy, Kam had been all about grass and newly caught fish in the summer, bonfires, sawn wood and wet dog in the winter. This Kam was a man, the scent still masculine but more sophisticated. Leather, good soap and something unfamiliar that stirred the butterflies back into life, sending a frisson of awareness across her skin.

  She gave herself a mental shake. It was all memory, it wasn’t real...

  ‘I’m going to check the bluebell woods,’ she said, briskly. ‘Why don’t you join me?’

  ‘It’s a bit early if you’re hoping for a rush of visitors to pay for a new boiler.’

  ‘It would take more than a rush,’ she said. ‘It would take an invasion.’

  She risked a glance at him but he was looking out over the woods, his jaw set, his mouth a straight line. Whatever he was remembering it wasn’t a recollection that brought him joy.

  If that was how he felt, there was no point in putting it off until lunch. He might as well know the situation right now so that he could leave.

  She cleared her throat and he turned to look at her. ‘You wanted to say something?’

  ‘Only that if you’ve come hoping to claim compensation from the estate for your mother, Kam, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.’

  His face remained stony, only the barest tightening of jaw muscles suggesting that she’d hit a nerve.

  ‘We’ll talk about why I’m here over lunch, Agnès.’

  Then he looked at her and the butterflies stilled as she felt all his pent-up anger coming at her in waves. She didn’t flinch. Years of living with her grandfather’s temper had taught her to stand her ground and she was simply being honest with him.

  ‘Why wait?’ Whatever was on his mind would be easier said in the quiet of the woods than over dull food in the Orangery. ‘If you come with me now you could at least avoid a mediocre lunch. You might even spot a badger.’

  Something flickered in those dark eyes as he glanced away towards the woods. But then his head snapped round so that he was looking straight ahead.

  ‘I have to meet someone.’

  Who? Where?

  ‘Maybe later,’ she said, as Dora tugged impatiently at the lead. ‘If you’re staying that long.’

  ‘I’m staying,’ he said, turning to look down at her, eyes dark as pitch, his expression unreadable. ‘I’m back for good.’

  Before she could answer, could begin to think what that might mean, he stepped down onto the drive. There was a dark blue sports car parked casually alongside the front door that hadn’t been there earlier and could only be his but he strode past it and headed down the drive.

  Agnès stared after him, remembering the jaunty walk, the cheeky smile of the boy she’d grown up with, the teenage Kam. There was nothing of that in Kam Faulkner’s expression or in his determined stride, straight back and broad shoulders.

  She wasn’t sure she liked the man who’d returned but swallowed down a sense of loss. He owed her no smile. The debt was all on one side, but she’d have to wait to find out what he wanted from her.

  Money?

  His car must have cost telephone numbers and the way he’d ignored the guest car park and left it at the door, as if he owned the place, spoke volumes. He’d booked the most expensive suite in the hotel, her grandfather’s old room, and the clothes he was wearing hadn’t come from a chain store.

  This wasn’t a man looking for a few thousand pounds for his mother.

  Maybe it was simply about returning to the scene of his banishment to show them all that the boy her grandfather had branded a half-Arab bastard had done more than survive. A lot more.

  And she was glad. Truly.

  That he was back for good, though, disturbed her.

  Was he planning to buy one of those expensive places with river frontage, a boathouse, fishing rights? Rub all their noses in his success?

  Everyone knew what had happened back then—you couldn’t keep gossip like that quiet in a small town.

  Would people remember, stop what they were saying when she went into the post office?

  Did he still play the guitar?

  The thought slipped into her mind without warning, a melancholy minor chord rippling through the woods at night as fresh in her memory as if she were leaning out of her bedroom window to catch the sound.

  Dora’s paws jiggled up and down in her eagerness to chase down the scents reaching her from the wood.

  ‘Patience,’ Agnès said, glancing back as she finally headed for the trees, but her disturbing visitor had vanished beyond the curve in the drive.

  Where was he going? There was nowhere down the lane... Except his old home.

  It had been empty for years. She’d suggested that her grandfather do it up as a holiday let to help with the running costs of the estate.

  Fat chance.

  Her grandfather had never listened to women and by the time he’d died there had been no money.

  No money to fix the boiler, repair the roof, replace the guttering which, as the castle was listed, would have to be specially made to match the existing elaborate hoppers. No money to flip the cottage so that they could turn it into a holiday let...

  She’d drawn up a five-year plan but it had ground to a halt. It was definitely time to look reality in the face and the woods had always been her favourite place to think.

  Sunlight was filtering through the fresh green of the canopy but there was barely a hint of blue to lift her spirits and, as she took the path leading down to a clearing where the first bluebells would open, her footsteps beat out the word trapped, trapped, trapped...

  * * *

  Kam strode down the lane, oddly unsettled by his exchanges with Agnès
. Her face, that last image of her, had been imprinted like a photograph on the hard drive of his memory.

  In his head he’d known that she would be older, known exactly what kind of trouble she was in and yet the reality had been a shock.

  In the few seconds when he’d watched her, before she’d known he was there, he’d seen the woman she had become. Her dark hair was still long and thick, tied back to keep it from her face.

  Her voice was a little deeper, her shoulders wider, her neck still long.

  But then she’d turned around to see who had invaded her privacy and he’d seen the dark shadows beneath eyes the exact grey of an osprey’s feather lit by sunlight, the strain of constantly flirting with the edge of disaster as she attempted to keep Priddy Castle ticking over.

  The heat of embarrassment at being overheard begging.

  In the millisecond of shock as she’d realised who he was, before the shutters had come down and she’d retreated behind the façade of businesswoman, he’d seen something else. A flash of some unreadable emotion as memory had flooded in.

  He would have given a lot to know what she’d been thinking at that moment, but she was no longer the girl whose every thought had been telegraphed in a look. She’d grown up and learned to hide her feelings.

  There had been a wish to see her suffer but, as he pushed open the gate of the house where he and his mother had had lived, it occurred to him that in taking the castle from her, he might be doing her a favour. That it would be something of a Pyrrhic victory.

  Except that he would own the castle and she would be the one pushed out into the world, having to reinvent herself, make a new life.

  That would be justice of a kind, he told himself as he walked around the outside of the cottage.

  There were more tiles missing from the rear of the roof, cracked window panes held together with tape, a broken downpipe.

  In the back garden, half buried in dead leaves and weeds, he found the stone under which he’d hidden his door key on the morning they’d left, because one day, he’d sworn, he would be back.

  He turned it over, woodlice panicked and ran in every direction, a fat slug shrank from the sudden exposure to light, but the key was still there, waiting for him.

  He picked it up, wiped it clean in the grass, dried it with his thumb. The lock was stiff but eventually turned and he stepped into the kitchen.

  Technically, he was trespassing, but it was obvious that no one had been here in a long time.

  Nothing had changed.

  The kitchen hadn’t been updated since the cottage had been built when Victoria was on the throne. There were shelves lined with paper that had rotted to shreds, a stone sink that was still fitted with a pump to the well, although mains water had been connected a century ago.

  What was new was the smell.

  Damp, mice, rot...

  Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, dried leaves had found their way in through the gaps under the doors, dead insects lay on the windowsills.

  There was the same threadbare carpet in the living room and on the stairs, only now it was damp and mouldy.

  He instinctively avoided the loose stair, the places that creaked as he walked upstairs.

  The old claw-footed bath, worn with age but once polished to a shine, was streaked with limescale where a tap had been left dripping until someone had had the sense to turn off the water. He knew it must have been Agnès.

  The brass fittings were green with verdigris and there were dead leaves and heaven knew what else clumped in a filthy mess in the bottom.

  The rose-patterned wallpaper in what had been his mother’s room was peeling from the wall, there was a puddle of water rotting the floorboards where a window no longer fitted and everywhere there were mouse droppings.

  It would all have to be ripped out, taken back to the bare bones. Or maybe he should just leave it and offer it to Agnès and her grandmother. They’d need somewhere to go, there would be a vacancy for a housekeeper and Agnès would need a job...

  They would be the ones begging him to fix the roof, the windows. Priddy pride brought low, he thought. Although it had been pretty low when she was offering the heating engineer lunch to come and fix her boiler and no doubt a bung his boss would know nothing about.

  There was a fly buzzing in the window. The wood was swollen; he had to bang on the frame with the heel of his hand to open it so that it could escape. Outside the air was fresh and he leaned on the sill to breathe in the scent of the woods. He could hear the birds, identifying their calls with ease, and in the distance the faint clang of rope against mast out on the creek.

  He could have been fifteen again. Foraging for mushrooms at dawn, his dog at his side. Catching a sea trout or two if the warden was safely out of the way to drop off at the chandler’s on his way to school. At dusk he’d be lying in wait by a badger’s sett, or watching foxes slinking through the undergrowth hunting for small mammals. He’d built a hide so that he could watch a pair of owls floating silently to and from their nest as they fed their young, Agnès holding her breath at his side.

  He’d caught fish for a young osprey he’d found with a broken wing and even when it was healed and she’d found a mate, had young to feed, she still came to his whistle, sure of a reward.

  He’d had that freedom snatched away from him to be replaced by the concrete confines of a city tower block.

  He took a step back from the window but as he reached for the catch a movement on the path through the woods caught his attention.

  Agnès with that ridiculous dachshund.

  She stopped for a moment to take a photograph with her phone, the dog dancing around her. She was looking down, untangling the lead from her legs and then, as if sensing him there, she looked up, lifting her hand to shade her eyes from a low shaft of sunlight that sliced through the trees and lit her face.

  How many times had he seen her do that? Make exactly that gesture, looking up at his window, hoping he’d be there, desperate for company, for freedom from the miserable atmosphere in the castle.

  A little girl racing through the woods, calling his name, hair flying, all legs and arms, her eyes and mouth too big for her face. Tripping over tree roots, grazing her knees, having to be taken home to have them cleaned up by his mother.

  A nuisance, a liability, a responsibility.

  But she’d stopped falling over, started to bring food with her. Sandwiches, pie, cake.

  She’d been lonely and he’d always been hungry so he’d tolerated her presence. More than tolerated—he’d made her his accomplice. He might have suspected, but the fish warden wouldn’t dare stop Sir Hugo Prideaux’s granddaughter to check her pink backpack for poached fish, not if he valued his job.

  He’d taught her to swim, but only because she’d followed him into the river and he would have got the blame if she’d drowned. She could climb trees, knew to keep quiet in a hide; he’d even trained Ozzie to come to her.

  He’d treated her like a boy. She was never girly, didn’t care about getting dirty, tearing her clothes. But then one summer she’d come home from school and everything was different. She still came to the woods but her hair was no longer an untidy tangle; it was a dark skein of silk that he wanted to touch. And under the baggy T-shirts and jeans there was no hiding the fact that she was a girl.

  He was older, but she was suddenly the grown-up and he felt awkward around her. Worse than awkward. Looking at her mouth made him feel weird, then interested, and he didn’t know what to do.

  His mother noticed—she noticed everything—and warned him to keep his distance. Agnès was growing up and Sir Hugo wouldn’t want his granddaughter being touched by the likes of him.

  Except she didn’t stay away. He closed his fist at the memory of the river water running off her skin, gleaming pale in the moonlight. His hand running over the sleek softness...


  For a moment their eyes met across the distance. Was she remembering that moment? That one forbidden touch?

  For a moment it was as if they were frozen in that look but then, as Dora barked, setting up a flurry of collared doves, she turned away and melted into the shade. And he was the one holding his breath. Responding to the memory like a green boy.

  He’d wanted to look her in the face as he took everything from her, but he should have left it to his lawyer. It wasn’t too late. This could wait. He could cancel the appointment with the architect he’d asked to meet him here and be gone before she returned from her walk.

  He shut the window and, phone in his hand, took one last glance around the room, the patch of damp beneath the window, the darker rectangles on the walls where he’d stuck up posters...

  He found the number but then hesitated.

  There were things he wanted to see, plans he needed to make, and he still wanted to look Agnès Prideaux in the eye when he told her that he would have her castle, one way or another. But he wouldn’t be indulging a need for pay-back by offering her the cottage.

  He’d thought he had what had happened slotted away tidily in the part of his brain labelled ‘The Past’. This was now, and he was the one in control.

  He should have remembered that the first casualty in any campaign was the plan. He’d planned to be cold, clinical, detached. Instead he’d been swamped by the rush of memories of a time when they had been friends, allies, accomplices; of that first explosion of sexual awareness.

  Agnès might not have a title but while she stayed here people would always think of her, treat her, as a lady. She might look worn down by the financial struggle she faced, broke, but that was the gentry for you.

  He paid his bills on time, but until he gave the estate a new purpose, new meaning, to the locals she would still be Miss Prideaux, while he would be the boy whose father had disappeared one day, without a word, leaving his mother to scrub the floors at Priddy Castle.