Marrying Winterborne Read online

  “How can I trust that you would do the right thing afterward?” she asked.

  Mr. Winterborne’s expression darkened. “Questions of my character aside, how long do you think Trenear would let me live if I tried something like that? Before nightfall, he’d have me hunted and felled like a carted deer.”

  “He might anyway,” Helen said glumly.

  He ignored that. “I would never abandon you. If I took you to my bed, you would be mine, as sure if we vowed it on an oathing stone.”

  “What is that?”

  “A wedding ritual in my part of Wales. A man and woman exchange vows with a stone held between their joined hands. After the ceremony, they go together to cast the stone into a lake, and the earth itself becomes part of their oath. From then on, they are bound to each other for as long as the world exists.” His gaze locked with hers. “Give me what I ask, and you’ll never want for anything.”

  He was overwhelming her again. Helen felt a light perspiration breaking out from her scalp to the soles of her feet. “I need time to consider it,” she said.

  Mr. Winterborne’s determination seemed to feed from her distress. “I’ll give you money and property of your own. A stable of thoroughbreds. A palace, and the market town around it, and scores of servants to wait on you hand and foot. No price is too high. All you have to do is come to my bed.”

  Helen reached up to rub her throbbing temples, hoping that another migraine wasn’t coming on. “Couldn’t we just say that I’ve been ruined? Devon would have to take my word for it.”

  Mr. Winterborne shook his head before she had even finished the question. “I’ll need an earnest payment. That’s how a deal is bound in business.”

  “This isn’t a business negotiation,” she protested.

  He was adamant. “I want insurance in case you change your mind before the wedding.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Aye. But I’ll trust you more after we sleep together.”

  The man was impossible. Helen floundered for another solution, some means of countering him, but she could sense him becoming more intractable with every passing second.

  “This is about your pride,” she said indignantly. “You were hurt and angry because you thought I’d rejected you, and now you want to punish me even though it wasn’t my fault.”

  “A punishment?” His black brows lifted mockingly. “Not five minutes ago you were enthusiastic about my kisses.”

  “Your proposition involves far more than kissing.”

  “It’s not a proposition,” he informed her in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s an ultimatum.”

  Helen stared at him in disbelief.

  Her only choice was to refuse. Someday she would meet an eligible man her family would approve of. A member of the landed gentry, bland and reserved, with a very tall forehead. He would expect her to make his opinions and wishes her own. And her life would be planned out for her, every year the same as the last.

  Marrying Winterborne, on the other hand . . .

  There was still so much she didn’t understand about him. What would be expected of a woman whose husband owned the largest department store in the world? What people would she become acquainted with, and what activities would fill her days? And Winterborne himself, who so often wore the look of someone who’d had more than a few quarrels with the world and had forgiven nothing . . . what would it be like, to live as his wife? His life was so large that she could easily imagine becoming lost in it.

  Realizing that he was watching her closely, alert to every nuance of her expression, she turned her back to him. Rows of books confronted her, catalogues, manuals, ledgers. But lower down, amid a row of utilitarian volumes, she saw a collection of what appeared to be botanical titles. She blinked and looked at them more closely: Bromeliads; Being a Concise Treatise on the Management of the Hothouse; Orchidaceae Genera and Species: An Enumeration of Known Orchids; and Orchid Cultivation.

  These books on orchids weren’t in his office by happenstance.

  Cultivating orchids had been a keen interest and hobby of Helen’s ever since her mother had passed away five years ago, leaving a collection of approximately two hundred potted orchids. Since no one else in the family had been inclined to care for them, Helen had taken it upon herself. Orchids were demanding, troublesome plants, each with its own temperament. At first Helen had found no enjoyment in her self-appointed responsibility, but over time, she had become devoted to the orchids.

  As she had once told Kathleen, sometimes one had to love something before it became lovable.

  She touched the gilded book bindings with a hesitant fingertip, tracing the edge of a hand-painted flower. “When did you acquire these?” she asked.

  Mr. Winterborne’s voice came from close behind her. “After you gave me the potted orchid. I needed to know how to take care of it.”

  A few weeks earlier, he had come for dinner at Ravenel House, and Helen had impulsively given one of her orchids to him. A rare Blue Vanda, her most prized and temperamental plant. Although he hadn’t seemed especially enthused about the gift, he had thanked her and taken it dutifully. But the moment their engagement had been broken, he had sent it back.

  To Helen’s amazement, she had discovered that the sensitive plant had thrived in his care.

  “You looked after it yourself, then,” she said. “I wondered about that.”

  “Of course I did. I had no intention of failing your test.”

  “It wasn’t a test, it was a gift.”

  “If you say so.”

  Exasperated, Helen turned to face him. “I fully expected you to kill it, and I intended to marry you regardless.”

  His lips twitched. “But I didn’t.”

  Helen was silent, trying to balance all her thoughts and feelings before making the most difficult decision of her life. But was it really that complicated? Marriage was always a risk.

  One never knew what kind of husband a man might turn into.

  For one last time, Helen allowed herself to consider the option of leaving. She imagined walking out of his office, entering the family carriage, and riding back to Ravenel House on South Audley. And it would be well and truly over. Her future would be identical to that of any young woman in her position. She would have a London Season and scores of dances and dinners with civilized suitors, all of it leading to marriage with a man who would never understand her nearly as well as she understood him. She would do her utmost never to look back on this moment and wonder what would have happened, or what she might have become, if she’d said yes.

  She thought of the conversation she’d had with the housekeeper, Mrs. Abbott, before leaving this morning. The housekeeper a plump and neat silver-haired woman who had served in the Ravenel’s employ for four decades, had objected strongly upon hearing that Helen intended to go out in the daytime with no companion. “The Master will sack the lot of us,” she had exclaimed.

  “I’ll tell Lord Trenear that I slipped away without anyone’s knowledge,” Helen had told her. “And I’ll say that I gave the driver no choice but to take me to Winterborne’s or I threatened to go on foot.”

  “My lady, nothing can be worth such a risk!”

  However, when Helen had explained that she intended to visit Rhys Winterborne in the hopes of renewing their engagement, it seemed to have given the housekeeper cause for second thought.

  “I can’t fault you,” Mrs. Abbot had admitted. “A man such as that . . .”

  Helen had stared at her curiously, noticing the way her face had softened with dreamy pensiveness. “You hold Mr. Winterborne in esteem, then?”

  “I do, my lady. Oh, I know he’s called an upstart by his social betters. But to the real London—the hundreds of thousands who work every blessed day and scrape by as best we can—Winterborne is a legend. He’s done what most people don’t dare dream of. A shop boy, he was, and now everyone from the queen down to any common beggar knows his name. It gives people reason
to hope they might rise above their circumstances.” Smiling slightly, the housekeeper had added, “And none can deny he’s a handsome, well-made chap, for all that he’s as brown as a gypsy. Any woman, highborn or low, would be tempted.”

  Helen couldn’t deny that Mr. Winterborne’s personal attractions were high on her list of considerations. A man in his prime, radiating that remarkable energy, a kind of animal vitality that she found both frightening and irresistible.

  But there was something else about him . . . a lure more potent than any other. It happened during his rare moments of tenderness with her, when it seemed as if the deep, tightly locked cache of sadness in her heart was about to break open. He was the only person who had ever approached that trapped place, who might someday be able to shatter the loneliness that had always held fast inside her.

  If she married Mr. Winterborne, she might come to regret it. But not nearly as much as she would regret it if she didn’t take the chance.

  Almost miraculously, everything sorted itself out in her brain. A feeling of calmness settled over her as her path became clear.

  Taking a deep breath, she looked up at him. “Very well,” she said. “I agree to your ultimatum.”

  Chapter 4

  FOR SEVERAL SECONDS, RHYS couldn’t manage a response. Either Helen hadn’t understood what she was saying, or he hadn’t heard correctly.

  “Here and now,” he clarified. “You’ll let me”—he tried to think of a decent word—“take you,” he continued, “as a man takes a wife.”

  “Yes,” Helen said calmly, shocking him all over again. Her face was very pale, with red banners of color emblazoned at the crests of her cheeks. But she didn’t look at all uncertain. She meant it.

  There had to be a drawback, some pitfall that would be discovered later, but he couldn’t fathom what it might be. She had said yes. Within a matter of minutes, she would be in his bed. Naked. The thought set every internal rhythm off-kilter, his heart and lungs battling for room inside his constricted chest.

  It occurred to him that his usual vigorous rutting wasn’t going to work at all in this situation. Helen was vulnerable and innocent.

  It would have to be lovemaking, not fucking.

  He knew nothing about lovemaking.

  Bloody buggering hell.

  On the rare occasion when he’d enjoyed the favors of an upper-class lady, she had wanted to be taken roughly, as if he were a simple brute who was incapable of gentleness. Rhys had appreciated being spared any pretense of intimacy. He was no Byron, no poetry-spouting connoisseur of seduction. He was a Welshman with stamina. As for techniques and romance—well, obviously that was best left to the French.

  But Helen was a virgin. There would be blood. Pain. Likely tears. What if he couldn’t be gentle enough? What if she became overwrought? What if—

  “I have two conditions,” Helen ventured. “First, I should like to return home before dinnertime. And second . . .” She turned the color of a beetroot. “I wish to exchange this ring for a different one.”

  His gaze dropped to her left hand. The night he had proposed, he had given her a flawless rose-cut diamond the size of a quail egg. The priceless stone had been discovered in the Kimberley mines of South Africa, cut by a famed gemologist in Paris, and set in a platinum filigree mounting by Winterborne’s master jeweler, Paul Sauveterre.

  Seeing his confounded expression, Helen explained bashfully, “I don’t like it.”

  “You told me you did when I gave it to you.”

  “To be precise, I didn’t actually say that. It’s only that I didn’t say I disliked it. But I have resolved to be outspoken with you from now on, to avoid future misunderstandings.”

  Rhys was chagrined to realize that Helen had never liked the ring he’d chosen for her. But he understood that she was trying to be straightforward with him now, even though she found the effort excruciating.

  In the past, Helen’s opinions had been ignored or trampled by her family. And perhaps, he reflected, by him as well. He might have asked her what kind of stones and settings she preferred, instead of deciding what he’d wanted her to have.

  Reaching for her hand, he lifted it for a closer look at the glittering ring. “I’ll buy you a diamond the size of a Christmas pudding.”

  “My goodness, no,” Helen said hastily, surprising him yet again. “Just the opposite. This one sits very tall on my finger, you see? It slips from side to side, and makes it difficult to play the piano or write a letter. I would prefer a much smaller stone.” She paused. “Something other than a diamond.”

  “Why not a diamond?”

  “I’m not fond of them, actually. I suppose I don’t mind the small ones that look like raindrops or little stars. But the large ones are so cold and hard.”

  “Aye, because they’re diamonds.” Rhys sent her a sardonic glance. “I’ll have a tray of rings brought up at once.”

  A smile illuminated her face. “Thank you.”

  “What else would you like?” he asked. “A carriage and team of four? A necklace? Furs?”

  She shook her head.

  “There must be something.” He wanted to inundate her with lavish gifts, make her understand what he was prepared to do for her.

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  “A piano?” As he felt the involuntary tightening of her fingers, he continued, “A Brinsmead grand concert piano, with patented check repeater action and a Chippendale mahogany case.”

  She gave a breathless laugh. “What a mind for detail you have. Yes. I would love to have a piano. After we’re married, I’ll play for you whenever you like.”

  The idea seized him. He would relax in the evenings and watch her at the piano. Afterward he would take her to his room and undress her slowly, and kiss every inch of her. It didn’t seem possible that this creature of moonlight and music would really be his. He felt himself at the edge of panic, needing to ensure that she wouldn’t be stolen from him.

  Carefully he worked the diamond ring from her finger and drew his thumb over the faint indentation left by the gold band. It felt too good to touch her, the awareness of her softness, her sweetness, coursing through him. He made himself let go before he ended up ravishing her there in the office. He had to think. Arrangements had to be made.

  “Where is your driver waiting?” he asked.

  “At the mews behind the store.”

  “An unmarked carriage?”

  “No, the family carriage,” came her innocent reply.

  So much for discretion, Rhys thought ruefully, and gestured for her to precede him to his desk. “Write a note and I’ll have it taken to him.”

  Helen allowed him to seat her. “When shall I have him return?”

  “Tell him he won’t be needed for the rest of the day. I’ll see to it that you’re delivered home safely.”

  “May I also send a message to my sisters, to keep them from worrying?”

  “Aye. Do they know where you’ve gone?”

  “Yes, and they were quite pleased. They’re both fond of you.”

  “Or at least of my store,” he said.

  Helen struggled with a smile as she drew a sheet of writing paper from a silver tray.

  At his invitation, the Ravenel family had visited Winterborne’s one evening, after hours. Since they were still in mourning for the late earl, their activities in public were restricted. For the space of two hours, the twins, Cassandra and Pandora, had managed to cover an impressive amount of territory. They had been beside themselves with excitement over the displays of the newest, most fashionable merchandise, the glass cases and counters filled with accessories, cosmetics, and trimmings.

  He noticed that Helen was staring in perplexity at the fountain pen on his desk.

  “There’s an ink reservoir inside the pen casing,” he said, walking around the desk to her. “Apply light pressure to the tip as you write.”

  Picking up the pen cautiously, she made a mark with it, and paused in surprise as the pen c
reated a smooth line across the paper.

  “Haven’t you seen one of those before?” he asked.

  Helen shook her head. “Lord Trenear prefers an ordinary pen and inkwell. He says this kind is prone to leak.”

  “They often do,” he said. “But this is a new design, with a needle to regulate the flow.”

  He watched as she experimented with the pen, writing her name in careful script. When she finished, she studied it for a moment, and crossed out the surname. Rhys leaned over her from behind, his hands braced on either side of her as she wrote again. Together they stared down at the paper.

  Lady Helen Winterborne

  “It’s a lovely name,” he heard Helen murmur.

  “Not quite so exalted as Ravenel.”

  Helen twisted in the chair to look up at him. “I’ll be honored to take it as mine.”

  Rhys was accustomed to being flattered all the time, by a multitude of people who wanted things from him. Usually he could read their motives as easily as if they’d been written in the air above their heads. But Helen’s eyes were clear and guileless, as if she meant it. She knew nothing of the world, or what kind of man she should marry, and she would only realize her mistake when it was too late to rectify it. If he had any decency, he would send her away this very moment.

  But his gaze fell to the name she had written . . . Lady Helen Winterborne . . . and that sealed her fate.

  “We’ll have a grand wedding,” he said. “So that all of London will know.”

  Helen didn’t seem especially taken with the idea, but she offered no objection.

  Still staring at the name, he absently stroked her cheek with a gentle fingertip. “Think of our children, cariad. Sturdy Welsh stock with a Ravenel strain. They’ll conquer the world.”

  “I rather think you’ll conquer it before they have a chance,” Helen said, reaching for a fresh sheet of paper.

  After she had written and sealed two notes, Rhys took them to the threshold of the office and called for Mrs. Fernsby.

  The secretary answered the summons with unusual haste. Although her manner was professional as usual, the hazel eyes behind her round spectacles were bright with curiosity. Her gaze flickered to the room behind him, but his shoulders blocked her view.