- -
- 100%
- +
“I’d rather this whole mess hadn’t happened.” To her horror, she felt tears pool in her eyes. She blinked hard, but two droplets escaped down her cheeks.
Although she dashed them away furiously, Eduard noticed. He stood up, looking distressed. “Cris, please don’t.”
He had never been comfortable with emotions, she reminded herself, determined not to burden him with hers any longer. She got up. “I’ll start packing right away.”
Eduard stayed her with a sharp command. “Don’t go, not like this. I’d like to help if I can.”
Remembering how he had trampled on her feelings once before, she shook her head. “I got myself into this and I’ll get myself out again. I don’t need charity.”
“I’m not offering any, but I have an idea that may help.” He paused, then said, “Haven’t you wondered why I have the title of marquis, theoretically outranking my older brother?”
Her confusion increased. “I assumed it’s a Carramer tradition.” But she sat down again.
Eduard laced his fingers together on the desk. “In a way, it is. The Merrisand title traditionally passes down my mother’s line to the youngest child. One of her ancestors, also a youngest child, managed to offend a past ruler of Carramer and was given the title as an insult.”
What did this have to do with her? Still, she couldn’t resist asking, “Why was it an insult?”
“In Carramer mythology, Merrisand is a place that doesn’t exist except in imagination, what you might call a fool’s paradise.”
She bristled. “I know I’ve been living in one since I got here, but I don’t think…”
“I wasn’t referring to you,” he said before she could finish. “My forebear turned the title into an honorable one by setting up a charitable trust in that name. He built Merrisand Castle which still stands as a tourist attraction, the income going to the trust. With the title, I inherited responsibility for the trust. When Prince Henry left me the lodge, I decided to make it into a tourist facility to aid the trust, not unlike your plans for it.”
“The difference being you own it, I don’t.”
He gave her a wry smile. “Did you own the hotels you worked in?”
She stared at him, perplexed. “Are you offering me a job?”
“You have the skills and experience to run such an establishment, more than I do, come to that. You could set the lodge up and operate it until I finalize my tour with the navy in the next few months.”
“You have staff coming out of your ears.”
Her turn of phrase provoked another smile. “Staff, yes. People accustomed to running palaces and royal tours. It’s hardly comparable to looking after tourists.”
“True.” She quelled the expectancy rising inside her. Could this possibly answer her prayers? “What would I have to do?”
“Help me set up and run the best tourist facility in Carramer in aid of the Merrisand Trust.”
“What happens after you leave the navy?”
“We can discuss that when the time comes.”
By then she would be noticeably pregnant. Her original plan had been to work steadily on the refurbishing for as long as she could, then take the time she needed to have her baby and recover before opening the place to visitors. Eduard was hardly likely to want to wait that long. She found it hard to say, “Thank you, but I don’t think so.”
“Why? It’s not as if you have competing offers.”
She made a face. “You really should stop boosting my ego, or I’ll end up with a swollen head.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“Let’s face it, you don’t really want me around. You’re only offering me a job to ease your conscience, but there’s no need. I’ll be fine.” She was probably flouting protocol by not letting him finish. She didn’t care. She only wanted this over with. His job offer tempted her more than she wanted to admit, but her pregnancy made it impossible.
Overseeing the lodge for someone as demanding as Eduard would entail stress she didn’t need right now. And soon her condition would begin to show. How long would Eduard want her on his payroll then? Better to leave with dignity while she still could.
“My conscience is clear,” he surprised her by saying. “I didn’t con you into buying a pig in a poke.”
She hitched her fists onto her hips. “So you’re saying I’m stupid?”
“How do you figure that?”
“Well, I must be, mustn’t I? Any woman with half a brain would have seen through that smooth operator, instead of trusting him with every cent she had in the world.”
This time she did break down, unable to stem the tears cascading down her cheeks. Eduard was at her side in an instant, his arms enfolding her as he murmured to her in the lilting Carramer tongue.
Twelve years had banished much of the language she’d picked up, but the comfort in his tone reached her, his consideration making her feel worse. She dragged in a lungful of air, trying to stop the sobs welling up from her depths.
“Don’t fight it, let the tears come,” he said in English. “You’ll feel better afterward.”
She didn’t want to feel better. She didn’t want to be in his arms, fighting a war with herself over whether to ask him to kiss her again. Hadn’t she learned anything from her experience with her baby’s father, and from the cold way Eduard himself had rejected her? Suddenly she didn’t know if she was crying because of the lousy hand she’d been dealt, or because she knew Eduard wasn’t for her.
Both were excuses to feel thoroughly miserable, she thought sniffing hard. Pregnancy must be playing havoc with her hormones to make her come apart so completely.
Eduard offered her a fine lawn handkerchief with his crest embroidered in one corner, a reminder if she needed one, of his status relative to hers. She blew her nose and dabbed at her streaming eyes. “I’m not usually this much of a wimp.”
“Neither are you entirely well. Maybe we should have this discussion again when you’re fully recovered.”
He began to rub the small of her back. The circular movement of his hand against her back felt so comforting that she wanted to purr. All the more reason to put some distance between them. Why was she finding it so hard to do?
“Eduard,” she began diffidently.
His face was buried in her hair. “Mmmm.”
“You can let me go now. I’m all cried out.”
“Maybe I don’t want to let you go.”
He had been ready enough to do so when she was a teenager. “You can’t make me take the job,” she said.
“Who said anything about the job? You feel fine right where you are.”
Heaven help her, she agreed. After her father had died, and then Mark had rejected their child, she’d felt more lonely than she’d thought possible. She wasn’t usually given to self-pity but the realization that she was officially an orphan had created a chasm inside her that seemed impossible to fill. Her father had been an only child, and hadn’t heard from his parents in England in years. He had lost touch with her mother’s family after she’d died. So, apart from her brother, Carissa had no close family. No wonder her desire for a child of her own had overwhelmed her common sense.
She told herself the surge of pleasure she felt in Eduard’s arms was only because she was lonely. Unable to resist, she lifted her head and looked at him. He must have read the naked need in her gaze, because he bent his head and claimed her mouth, filling her with desire so wild it was like a bushfire tearing through her.
She tried ordering herself to relax. Hormones, only hormones, she told herself. She wasn’t going to give any man the chance to treat her badly again, remember? So who was that woman answering his kiss with so much passion?
Her mind reeled as his tongue met hers in an unbelievably seductive dance. She placed her hands on his chest, thinking to push him away, but he trapped her hands against the fiery heat of his body, right where his heart pounded under her fingers. She could feel hers keeping time.
Heat flickered through her, making nonsense of her attempt to remain aloof. When had she been able to do any such thing around Eduard de Marigny? As a boy, he had enchanted her with his darkly handsome looks and challenging air of reserve. As a man he was even more handsome, but with a strength and self-assurance that had been missing from the boy. The result was breathtaking, literally.
“I can’t do this,” she said, all but suffocated by sensation.
“You’re doing remarkably well,” he murmured.
She persisted, pressing her palms against him to signal her seriousness. “Everything’s moving too fast. First I thought the lodge was mine, now I find it’s yours.”
“No reason you can’t be part of the package,” he said.
“No!” This time she made sure he understood her rejection of this notion.
He created a heartbeat of space between them and looked down at her, his gaze puzzled. “What’s the matter, Cris? To me, this feels pretty right.”
“You could have fooled me.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.
A frown etched a deep V in his forehead. “What do you mean?”
She hadn’t intended to remind him, but she was committed now. “When I was fifteen, I kissed you and you treated me as if I’d just crawled out from under a rock.”
He released her. “I was only eighteen myself. I didn’t have much skill at dealing with women.”
And now he did. The thought wasn’t as comforting as she knew he meant it to be. A wave of something very like jealousy overcame her. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I thought you were attracted to me.”
Eduard let out a long breath. “I was.”
She hadn’t expected this. “Then why did you go out of your way to avoid me until you left for university?”
“I didn’t know any other way to handle a lovestruck fifteen-year-old. I obviously couldn’t encourage your attention.”
“Because I’m not royal like you?”
He crooked a finger under her chin and tilted her face up. “Because you were still a child.”
She wasn’t a child any longer, and his closeness threatened to overwhelm her defenses. “Just as well it was only a crush. I got over it.”
“Did you, Cris?”
“Of course.” The shakiness in her voice made the lie obvious.
Evidently not to Eduard. “Then all I can say is I’m sorry. I thought you wanted me to kiss you.”
If he only knew. “People change,” she said with a lightness that didn’t quite come off.
“I haven’t. Not where my affection for you is concerned.”
“Don’t, Eduard, please.” To find that he had cared about her after all was almost more than she could bear.
“Is there someone in your life?”
“Yes.” She didn’t tell him the someone was her unborn child.
“I see.” He turned away and paced to the window. “Is he planning to join you here?”
“We haven’t worked out the details.”
Eduard spun around. “Then why not stay and manage the lodge? There’s a caretaker’s cottage that could be made into a separate home.”
Dare she say yes? She knew he meant that she and the man he believed she was involved with could use the caretaker’s cottage, while she helped him get the lodge ready to open. Did it matter if the other person in her life turned out to be a baby? Of course it did, she accepted. Look at the damage one misunderstanding between them had done. Who knew what harm could come of starting out with another?
“Don’t give me your answer yet,” he urged before she could say anything. “I’d like to look around the estate first, get a feel for what might be done with it. Will you stay while we work up a plan of action?”
The pleasure shafting through her was out of all proportion to his suggestion. But it meant she could stay for a few more days. And she would be gone before he found out about the baby, so he need never feel disappointed in her. Now she knew that he had been attracted to her, she didn’t think she could cope with that.
“I’ll stay. Once we report what happened with the con man, I’ll need to be available for the police to interview me,” she said, knowing the excuse sounded lame. She could be interviewed equally well at the hotel in Tricot.
“You should.” He matched the seriousness of her tone.
She laughed nervously. “You said they would want to.”
“And your con man might have left the country by now.”
His comment plunged her into gloom, emphasizing that she stayed by Eduard’s grace and favor. The thought took some of the gloss off the idea. She was tempted to change her mind. Playing house in what she had thought of as her home only postponed the inevitable. She still had to make a life for herself and the baby. With only the money she had set aside to redecorate the lodge, it wouldn’t be easy. Why not face it now and get it over with?
Her expression must have telegraphed her intention, because Eduard said, “I mean to put our arrangement on a business footing, starting now.”
“What?”
“I intend to pay you a salary while you’re assisting me.”
She studied him suspiciously. “You wouldn’t be trying to make up for my losses, would you, your lordship?”
He lifted his hands, flattening his palms. “When we were younger, you called me that when you thought I was getting high and mighty. Offering to pay you isn’t in that class.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Putting you on my staff would serve to defuse any gossip that might arise out of your presence here.”
“It’s okay for you to have a female under your roof, as long as she’s a servant?” She knew she sounded angry and couldn’t make herself care. She felt as if she was fifteen again, being put in her place. “I think it’s best if I leave now.”
He touched her arm. “Cris, I didn’t ask to be royal. Things are simpler this way, trust me.”
His statement took the wind out of her sails. “I know, and I shouldn’t overreact. But if I’m to be paid for working for you, I want to do a real job.”
He looked relieved. “I can turn into a slave driver if you prefer. Some of the men under my command already think of me as one.”
“I don’t doubt it.” She had seen firsthand how autocratic he could be when he wanted. Catching sight of the twinkle in his dark gaze, she realized he was joking.
“Do we have a deal?”
Her sigh gusted out. She had known what she would say the moment he offered her the job. She wanted to stay with him. “Deal.”
He smiled and her heart turned over. “I’ll brush up on my slave-driving skills just for you.”
He wouldn’t have to, she knew. This was familiar territory. Challenged by his offer, her mind was already racing ahead as she ticked off requirements on her fingers. “We’ll need a business and financial plan for the lodge. That would be your department.” She took a breath. “As soon as the financials and decorating theme are in place, I can draw up a schedule for trades-people to do the work, and a program for hiring and training staff, starting with a house manager, catering manager, executive housekeeper and front office staff.”
He looked slightly bemused. “Agreed. Right after you put your feet up for a while.”
Shock jolted through her. Had he guessed her secret already? “Excuse me?”
“You’re still recovering from the flu. No feudal lord worth his salt makes his serfs work when they’re ill. Serfs are expensive to replace,” he added when she shot him a quizzical look.
“You’re the boss,” she admitted.
His gaze glimmered with satisfaction. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Chapter Three
Despite his promise to be a slave driver, Carissa could hardly complain that Eduard was too hard on her in the days that followed. His presence made it easier for her to give her statement to the police, although it couldn’t have been every day that someone tried to buy a royal lodge. They promised to do everything they could to catch the con man, mainly because of Eduard’s involvement, she assumed. The officers held out little hope of catching up with Mr. Hass, or whatever his real name was. Like Eduard, they believed he had probably left Carramer as soon as he had his hands on her money.
Unable to do anything more for the moment, she threw herself into the challenge of recreating the lodge as a tourist venture. Eduard was enthusiastic about her ideas for turning the lodge into an environmentally friendly place to stay, adding suggestions she had discarded as being beyond her limited budget.
She was amazed that someone with his background, accustomed to having servants to do his bidding, could be so practical. He crawled around loft spaces, had her hold a tape measure while he measured rooms and showed a knack for seeing not what was, but what could be. He credited the navy with making him so efficient, but privately she thought that Eduard gave his own resourcefulness too little credit.
She immersed herself in lists. Since she wasn’t familiar with the local tradespeople, she decided to search out an agency to do the actual hiring, based on the skills the lodge would need.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.