A Paper Marriage

Jonah eyed her steadily. “Anything?” he questioned. “You said anything?”

Of course, anything. He had saved her parents from having to move out from Beamhurst Court. “Anything,” she agreed. But added quickly, “Anything legal, that is.”

His mouth picked up at the corners, involuntarily, she rather thought. But he sobered, and asked, “How old are you?”

She was sure he knew how old she was, but answered, “Twenty-three. Why?”

He shrugged. “Just making sure that anything I propose is quite legal—amongst consenting adults.”

Jessica Steele’s latest novel is part of a brand-new miniseries from Harlequin Romance®

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A Paper Marriage

Jessica Steele

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER ONE

LYDIE was in worried mood as she drove her car in the direction of Buckinghamshire to her family home. Something was wrong, very wrong. She had known it the moment she had heard her mother’s voice over the telephone.

Her mother never rang her. It was always she who rang her mother. Lydie had held back from asking what was wrong—her mother would tell her soon enough. ‘I want you to come home straight away,’ Hilary Pearson had said almost before their greeting was over.

‘I’m coming next Tuesday for Oliver’s wedding on Saturday,’ Lydie reminded her.

‘I want you here before then,’ her mother stated sharply.

‘You need my help in some way?’

‘Yes, I do!’

‘Oliver…’ Lydie began.

‘It has nothing to do with your brother or his wedding!’ her mother snapped sharply. ‘The Ward-Watsons are more than capable of seeing to it that their only daughter gets married in style.’

‘Dad!’ Lydie cried in alarm. ‘He’s not ill?’ She thought the world of her father. She occasionally felt that fate had dealt him a raw deal when it had selected her sometimes acid-tongued mother for the mild-mannered man.

‘Physically he’s as fit as he always has been.’

‘You’re saying he has a mental health problem?’ Lydie asked in alarm.

‘Good heavens, no! He’s just worried, not sleeping well, he’s…’

‘What’s he worried about?’

There was a moment or two of silence. ‘I’ll tell you that when you get here,’ her mother eventually replied.

‘Why can’t you tell me now?’ Lydie pressed.

‘When you get here.’

‘You can’t leave it there!’ Lydie protested.

‘I’m certainly not going to discuss it over the phone.’

Oh, for heaven’s sake! Who did her mother think was listening in? ‘I’ll ring Dad at his office,’ Lydie decided.

‘Don’t you dare! He’s not to know I’ve been in touch with you.’

‘But…’

‘And anyway, your father no longer has an office.’

‘He…’ What the Dickens was going on?

‘Come home,’ her mother demanded crisply—and put down the phone.

Lydie’s initial reaction was to dial her mother straight back. A second later, though, and she accepted that to ring her would be a waste of time. If her mother had made up her mind to tell her nothing, Lydie knew from experience that she would get nothing more from her until her mother was ready.

Despite her mother’s ‘Don’t you dare’ Lydie dialled her father’s business number. She need not tell him anything of her mother’s call, just say she’d called to say hello prior to seeing him again when she arrived at her lovely old home next week.

A few minutes later and Lydie began to feel seriously worried herself. There was no ringing out tone from her father’s firm; his number was a ceased number. ‘…your father no longer has an office’ her mother had said.

At that point Lydie put down the phone and went in search of the woman whose employ she was due to leave next week. Though Donna was more like the sister she had never had than an employer. She found her in the sitting room with one-year-old Sofia and three-year-old Thomas. They looked such a contented family and Lydie knew she was going to feel quite a pang when she left the family she had been nanny to for the past three years.

Donna looked up. ‘Did I hear the phone?’ she asked with a smile.

‘My mother rang.’

‘Everything all right at home?’

‘How would you feel if I left a week earlier than we said?’

‘Today?’ Donna queried, her smile disappearing. ‘I’d hate it.’

‘You’ll be fine on your own; I know you will,’ Lydie assured her bracingly.

That had been some hours ago. Lydie drove into her home village and realised she had been an infrequent visitor just lately to the home she so loved. Beamhurst Court was in her blood, and it had been a dreadful wrench to leave Beamhurst five years ago when at the age of eighteen she had gone to begin her career as a nanny.

Her first job had not worked out when the husband had started to get ideas about his children’s nanny that had not been in her terms of employment. She had left to go and look after Thomas, Donna and Nick Cooper’s first child, while they followed their careers.

Donna had suffered a quite terrible bout of the baby-blues following the birth of her second child, Sofia. While she was surfacing from that she had started to get very depressed at the thought of returning to work. It had been her husband Nick who had suggested that unless she desperately wanted to keep on with her career, given that they would not be able to afford a nanny and would have to let Lydie go, they could otherwise manage quite adequately without her income.

‘What do you think?’ Donna had asked Lydie.

‘Which would make you happier?’

Donna thought, but not for very long. ‘I’ve always felt a bit of a pang at missing out on Thomas’s first couple of years,’ she answered. That, simply, decided the matter.

Lydie had been due to leave next Tuesday, when she went home for her brother’s wedding the following Saturday. She knew it would not be long before she found another job but, having been so happy with the Coopers, and on edge most of the time with her previous employers, she was in no rush to accept the first job offered.

She turned her car in through the gates of Beamhurst Court and love for the place welled up in her. She stopped for a brief while just to sit and look her fill. Beamhurst would one day be handed down to her brother, she had always known that, but that did not stop the feeling of joy she felt each time she came back.

But her mother was waiting for her, and Lydie started up her car again and proceeded slowly up the drive, starting to get anxious again about what it was that worried her father so, and what it was that caused his business telephone line to be unobtainable.

She left her car on the drive, knowing that her father was her first priority. She would not be looking for a new job until she knew what was happening here. Using her house key, she let herself in and went in search of her parents.

She did not have to look far; her mother was in the hall talking to Mrs Ross, their housekeeper. Lydie kissed her mother and passed a few pleasantries with Mrs Ross, whereupon her mother said they would have afternoon tea in the drawing room.

While Mrs Ross went kitchenwards Lydie followed her slim stiff-backed mother into the drawing room. ‘You took your time getting here!’ her mother complained tartly, turning to close the door behind them.

‘I had to pack. Since I was leaving anyway there didn’t seem much point in going back next week to collect my belongings,’ Lydie answered, but had more important matters on her mind. ‘What’s going on? I rang Dad’s office and—’

‘I specifically told you not to!’ her mother interrupted her waspishly.

‘I wouldn’t have mentioned you’d phoned me! If I’d had the chance! His number’s unobtainable. Where’s Dad now? You said he no longer has an office. But that’s impossible. For years—’

‘Your father no longer has an office because he no longer has a business!’ Hilary Pearson cut her off.

Lydie’s lovely green eyes widened in amazement. ‘He no longer…!’ she gasped, and wanted to protest, to believe that her mother was joking, but the tight-lipped look on her parent’s face showed that her mother saw no humour in the situation. ‘He’s sold the business?’ Lydie questioned.

‘Sold it! It was taken away from him!’

‘Taken! You mean—stolen?’ Lydie asked, reeling.

‘As good as. The bank wanted their pound of flesh—they took everything. They’re after this house too!’

‘After Beamhurst!’ Lydie whispered, horrified.

‘Oh, we all know you’re besotted with the place; you always have been. But unless you can do something about it, they’ll force us to sell it to pay them their dues!’

‘Unless I…’ Already Lydie’s head was starting to spin.

‘Your father paid out enough for your expensive education—totally wasted! It’s time for you to pay him something back.’

Lydie was well aware that she was a big disappointment to her mother. Without bothering to take into account her daughter’s extremely shy disposition, Hilary Pearson had been exceedingly exasperated that, when Lydie’s exam results were little short of excellent, she should take on what her mother considered the menial work of a nanny. Lydie still had moments of shyness, and was still a little reserved, but she had overcome that awful shyness to a very large extent.

She stared at her mother incredulously. Pay back! She hadn’t asked to be sent to an expensive boarding school. That had been her mother’s idea. ‘There’s that few thousand pounds that Grandmother left me. Dad can have that, of course, but…’

‘You can’t touch that until you’re twenty-five. And in any case we need far more than that if we’re not to be thrown out like paupers.’ Thrown out! Of Beamhurst! No! Lydie could not believe that. Could not believe that things were as bad as that. Beamhurst Court had been in the Pearson family for generations. It was unthinkable that they should let it go out of the family. But her mother was going angrily on, ‘I’ve told your father that if the house has to go, then so shall I!’

‘Mother!’ Lydie exclaimed, on the instant angry too that when, by the look of it, her father should need his wife’s support most, she should threaten to walk out on him. Anything else Lydie might have added, however, remained unsaid when Mrs Ross brought in a tray of tea and set it down.

While Hilary Pearson presided over the delicate tea cups, Lydie made herself calm down. Her last visit home had been four months ago now, she realised with surprise. Though with Donna only then starting to get better, but still feeling down and unable to cope a lot of the time, she had wanted her near at hand should everything became too much for her.

Taking the cup and saucer her mother handed to her, Lydie sat down opposite her, and then quietly asked, ‘What has been happening? Everything was fine the last time I was home.’

‘Six months ago,’ her mother could not resist, seemingly oblivious that she was out by a couple of months. ‘And everything was far from fine, as you call it.’

‘I didn’t see any sign…’

‘Because your father didn’t want you to. He said there was no need for you to know. That it would only worry you unnecessarily, and that he’d think of something.’

It had been going on all this while? And she had known nothing about it! She tried to concentrate on the matter in hand. ‘But he hasn’t been able to think of anything?’

Her mother gave her a sour look. ‘The business is gone. And the bank is baying for its money.’

Lydie was having a hard time taking it all in. By the sound of it, things had been falling apart when she’d been home four months ago—but no one had seen fit to tell her. They had always had money! How could things have become so bad and she not know of it? She could perhaps understand her father keeping quiet; he was a very proud man. But—her mother? She was proud too, but…

‘But where has all our money gone?’ she asked. ‘And why didn’t Oliver…?’

‘Well, naturally Oliver’s business needed a little help.’ Hilary Pearson bridled, just as if Lydie was laying some blame at her prized son’s door. ‘And why shouldn’t your father invest heavily in him? You can’t start a business from scratch and expect it to succeed in its first years. Besides, Madeline’s family, the Ward-Watsons, are monied people. We couldn’t let Oliver go around looking as though he hadn’t a penny to his name!’

Which meant that he would take Madeline to only the very best restaurants and entertainment establishments, regardless of cost, Lydie realised. ‘I didn’t mean Oliver had—er—taken the money,’ Lydie endeavoured to explain, knowing that her brother had started his own business five years ago and that, her father’s firm doing well then, he had put up the money to set his son up in his own business. ‘I meant why didn’t Oliver say something to me?’

‘If you cast your mind back, you’ll recall that Oliver and Madeline were on holiday in South America the last time you were home. Poor Oliver works so hard; he needed that month’s break.’

‘His business is doing all right, is it?’ Lydie enquired—and received another of her mother’s sour looks for her trouble.

‘As a matter of fact, he’s decided to—um—cease trading.’

‘You’re saying that he’s gone bust too?’

‘Must you be so vulgar? Was all that expensive education lavished on you completely for nothing?’ her mother grumbled. Though she did concede, ‘All companies work on an overdraft basis—Oliver found it just too much of a struggle. When he and Madeline come back from their honeymoon, Oliver will go and work in the Ward-Watson business.’ She allowed herself the first smile Lydie had so far seen as she added, half to herself, ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Oliver isn’t made a director of the Ward-Watson conglomerate before he’s much older.’

All of which was very pleasing, but this wasn’t getting them anywhere. ‘There won’t be any money coming back to Dad from Oliver, I take it?’

‘He’ll need all the money he can lay his hands on to support his wife. Madeline is used to the finer things in life, you know.’

‘Where’s Dad now?’ Lydie asked, her heart aching for the proud man who had always worked so hard. ‘Is he down at the works?’

‘Little point. Your father has already sold the works to pay off some debts—he’s out of a job, and at his age nobody’s going to employ him. Not that he would deign to work for anyone but himself.’

Oh, heavens, Lydie mused helplessly, it sounded as though things were even worse than she had started to imagine. ‘Is he out in the grounds somewhere?’

‘What grounds? Any spare ground has been sold. Not that, since it’s arable land only, it made a lot.’ And, starting to build up a fine head of steam, ‘Apart from the house—which the bank wants a slice of, which means we have to leave—your father has sold everything else that he can. I’ve told him I’m not moving!’ Her mother went vitriolically on in the same vein for another five minutes. Going on from talk of how they were on their beam-ends to state that if they had only a half of the amount the Ward-Watsons were forking out for their only daughter’s fairy-tale wedding, the bank would be satisfied.

‘Dad doesn’t owe the bank very much, then?’ Lydie asked, but before she could start to feel in any small way relieved, her mother was giving her a snappy reply.

‘They’re his one remaining creditor—he’s managed to scrape enough together to pay off everybody else, plus most of his overdraft. But—today’s Tuesday, and the bank say they have given him long enough. If they aren’t in receipt of fifty thousand pounds by the end of banking on Friday—they move. And so do we! Can you imagine it? The disgrace? A fine thing it’s going to look in Oliver’s wedding announcement. Not “Oliver Pearson of Beamhurst Court”, but “Oliver Pearson of No Fixed Abode”. How shall we ever—?’

Her mother would have gone on, but Lydie interrupted. ‘Fifty thousand doesn’t sound such a fearfully large amount.’

‘It does when you haven’t got it. Nor any way of finding it either. Apart from the house, we’re out of collateral. How can we borrow money with no way of repaying it? Nobody’s going to loan us anything. Not that your father would ask in the circumstances. No, your father overextended himself, the bank won’t wait any longer—and now I have to pay!’

Lydie thought hard. ‘The pictures!’ she exclaimed after a moment. ‘We could sell some of the family—’

‘Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said? Haven’t I just finished telling you that everything, everything that isn’t in trust for Oliver, has been sold? There’s nothing left to sell. Nothing, absolutely nothing!’

Her mother looked closer to tears than Lydie had ever seen her, and suddenly her heart went out to her. For all her mother had never been the warmest mother in the world to her, Oliver being her pride and joy, Lydie loved her.

Lydie went impulsively over to her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said gently, taking a seat next to her on the sofa. ‘I’m so very sorry.’ And, remembering her mother saying only a short while ago that it was time she paid something back for the expensive education she had received, ‘What can I do?’ she asked. While the amount of her inheritance was small, and nowhere near enough, Lydie was thinking in terms of asking to have that money released now and not two years hence, when she would attain the age of twenty-five, but her mother’s reply shook her into speechlessness.

‘You can go and see Jonah Marriott,’ she said clearly. ‘That’s what you can do.’

Lydie stared at her, her green eyes huge. ‘Jonah Marriott?’ she managed faintly. She had only ever seen him once, and that was some seven years ago, but she had never forgotten the tall, good looking man.

‘You remember him?’

‘He came here one time. Didn’t Dad lend him some money?’

‘He did,’ Hilary Pearson replied sharply. ‘And now it’s his turn to pay that money back.’

‘He never repaid that money?’ Lydie asked, feeling just a touch disappointed. He had seemed to her sixteen-year-old eyes such an honourable man—and she knew he had prospered greatly in the seven years that had elapsed.

‘Coincidentally, the money he borrowed from your father is the same amount we need to stay on in this house.’

‘Fifty thousand pounds?’

‘Exactly the same. I can’t impress on you enough that if the bank don’t have their money by Friday, come Monday they’ll be making representation to have us evicted. I’d go and see him myself, but when I mentioned it to your father he hit the roof and forbade me to do anything of the sort.’

Lydie could not imagine her mild-mannered father hitting the roof, especially to the wife he adored. But he must be under a tremendous amount of strain at the moment. No doubt he himself had previously asked Jonah Marriott to make some kind of payment off that loan. There was no way her father’s pride would allow him to ask more than once. But to…

Her thoughts faded when just then the drawing room door opened and her father walked into the room. At least the man was tall, like her father, white-haired, like her father, but Lydie was shocked by the haggard look of him.

‘Daddy!’ she whispered involuntarily, and went hurriedly over to him. There was a dejected kind of slump to his shoulders which she found heartbreaking, and as she looked into his worn, tired face, she could not bear it. She put her arms round him and hugged him.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, putting her aside and sending her mother a suspicious look.

‘I—thought I’d give Donna a chance to see how she’ll cope without me,’ Lydie invented, quickly hiding her shocked feelings. ‘I’ll give her a ring later. If she’s okay I’ll stay on, if that’s all right with you?’

‘Of course it’s all right,’ he replied with assumed joviality. ‘This is your h…’ He turned away and Lydie’s heart ached afresh. She just knew he had been thinking that this was her home, but would not be for very much longer. ‘Your mother been bringing you up to date with everything?’ he enquired, his tone casual, but pride there, ready to be up in arms if his wife had breathed a word of his troubles.

‘This wedding of Oliver’s sounds a bit top-drawer. Are they going to have a marquee—you didn’t finish telling me, Mother?’

Over the next half-hour Lydie observed at first hand the proud façade her father was putting up in front of her, and her heart went out to him. Looking at him, seeing the strain, the worry that seemed to be weighing him down, to go and see Jonah Marriott and ask him to repay the money he had borrowed from her father seven years ago did not seem such a hard task. Particularly as, if memory served, that money had only been loaned for a period of five years anyway.

‘Your room’s all ready for you.’ Her mother took the conversation away from the wedding. ‘If you want to go and freshen up,’ she hinted.

‘I’ve things to attend to in my study,’ Wilmot Pearson commented before Lydie had answered. ‘It’s good to see you, Lydie. Let’s hope you’ll be able to stay.’

No sooner had he gone from the room than her mother was back to the forbidden subject. ‘Well?’ she questioned. ‘Will you?’

Lydie knew what she was asking, just as she knew that she did not want to go and see Jonah Marriott. ‘You’re quite sure he hasn’t paid that loan back?’ she hedged. Her mother gave her a vinegary look. ‘Perhaps he can’t afford to pay it back,’ Lydie commented. ‘All firms work on an overdraft basis, you recently said so,’ she reminded her mother, but, still shaken by the haggard look of her father, wondered why she was prevaricating about going to see Jonah Marriott.

Her mother chose to ignore her comments, instead scorning, ‘Of course he can afford to pay it back—many times over. His father made a packet when he sold his department stores. Ambrose Marriott might be one tough operator but I can’t see him giving to one son and not the other—and the younger Marriott boy hasn’t done a day’s work since the deal was done. They’re all sitting on Easy Street,’ her mother said with a heartfelt sigh, ‘and just look at us!’

Lydie glanced at her parent, and while the last thing she wanted to do was to go and ask Jonah Marriott for the money he owed to her father, she knew that the time for prevaricating was over. She looked at her watch. Half past four. She had better get a move on. ‘Do you have his number?’

‘You can’t discuss this with him over the telephone!’ her mother snorted. ‘You need to be there, face to face. You need to impress on him how—’