The Inconvenient Elmswood Marriage. Marguerite Kaye

She’d been a beauty. A selfish, utterly self-centred beauty, with no interest in anyone, and especially not her much younger brother.

      He’d gleaned enough from Kate’s letters to know that her daughters had not inherited her capricious nature. Kate’s doing, no doubt. They were Kate’s girls, and that was how they must remain. He couldn’t risk acquiring any fresh emotional attachment. Recent events had provided a bitter lesson in the folly of displaying that weakness.

      ‘What would be the point?’ he said, more gently. ‘They won’t see me again, and it would be cruel to risk any sort of attachment or raise expectations. Best I remain faceless to them.’

      ‘You mean it’s best that they remain faceless to you,’ she snapped. ‘You’ve never given a damn about them, have you? When we married you told me you had a nephew, but you didn’t think to mention that your long-lost sister had already given birth to three girls.’

      ‘I didn’t think they were relevant. I certainly did not envisage that within two years they’d be orphaned and homeless, and I don’t know what the hell I’d have done about either if you hadn’t been here to step into the breach.’

      ‘I’m eternally grateful that I was in a position to do so.’

      ‘I believe you—though at the time I confess I had serious misgivings about burdening you with them.’

      ‘I remember. You said that you’d get your lawyer to find someone to take them on. As if I would dream of doing anything other than taking them in. I’ve often said if we had not already been married I would have married you for that reason alone. And I have never,’ Kate said vehemently, ‘told the girls that you considered any other outcome.’

      ‘Thus awarding me a great deal more credit than I deserve. I am sorry, Kate, but I won’t be swayed.’

      ‘Aren’t you even curious to see how the marriage you arranged turned out? You say you know nothing of the girls, but you gleaned enough from my letters to know that Alexander and Eloise would suit very well.’

      ‘I don’t respond to emotional blackmail, you know.’

      Kate flinched. ‘You’re right, that was unworthy of me.’

      ‘You care a great deal for them. You think it’s in their interests to know me. I’m telling you it’s not. You need to trust me to know best.’

      Her throat worked as she mulled this over. ‘Your work is a great deal more dangerous than you ever led me to believe, isn’t it?’

      Until the recent debacle, from which he was still recovering, Daniel had never considered his own mortality, but he wasn’t a man who needed to be taught anything twice. He had come close to death. The next time—and he was bloody well determined to be given the chance of a next time—he might not be so lucky.

      Which reminded him—whatever else he did while he was in England he must sort out the provisions of his last will and testament. Now that he no longer had a nephew to inherit Elmswood, he had no clue as to who would currently be his next of kin. Some distant cousin, no doubt. But he was damned if Elmswood would be taken from Kate if he had anything to do with it.

      ‘Kate…’

      ‘Was it always dangerous? Even when we first married?’

      ‘Kate, I can’t—’

      ‘Can’t answer that. Except you already have. I wonder that you suggest we get to know one another better. You’re not afraid that I’ll become too attached, I take it? Are you imagining that I’m longing to be a merry widow?’

      ‘I think the last nine months have proved rather conclusively otherwise, don’t you?’

      She sighed, her shoulders sagging. ‘I’m not usually such a shrew, you know. I’m sorry you don’t want to meet the girls, for their sake, but I can’t force you, and I do understand, though I’m not looking forward to explaining it to them.’

      ‘I’ll likely be gone before you see them.’

      She got to her feet. ‘Then I suggest you utilise the time you have to recuperate. I’m heading over to the Estate Office to make a start on catching up. I’ll have Cook send up some soup for you—or is there something else you’d prefer? What do you like to eat?’

      ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not hungry.’

      ‘You should go to bed and rest. No…what I should say is don’t go to bed, I suppose, and then you will.’

      He surprised them both by taking her hand in his. ‘This situation is as strange and awkward for me as it is for you.’

      ‘But, as you have pointed out several times, at least I’m on home turf and, unlike you, happy to be here,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘Your hand is freezing. I really do think you should go back to bed and try to get some rest, Daniel.’

      And get out of her way. She was right. There was as little point in him getting to know his wife as his nieces. Yet he was strangely reluctant to let her hand go.

      ‘I’d better not detain you any longer.’

      She hesitated, her wide-spaced blue eyes scanning his face as if she was trying to read his mind, before giving him a brief nod, disentangling her hand, and quitting the room.

      He listened out for the oddly familiar scrape of the front door on the flagstones—one thing in the house she hadn’t remedied—before sinking back into the fireside chair, closing his eyes, and falling into a sudden deep sleep.