Читать книгу Unwanted Wedding - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 6

‘GUARD, will you marry me?’

Rosy paced the floor of her bedroom, a fixed, strained expression on her face, her hands gripped into two small fists at her side and her normally clear, guileless dark blue eyes shadowed as she repeated the same four words over and over again under her breath. Even now she still wasn’t sure she was actually going to be able to say them out loud.

‘Will you marry me? Will you marry me? Will you marry me? Will you marry me?’ There, she had said it and, even if the words hadn’t sounded quite as firm and assured as she would have liked, at least they had been spoken. She was over the first hurdle, she told herself bravely, and if she could manage that one, then she could surely manage the other.

She swallowed hard and looked at the telephone beside her bed. There was no point in shilly-shallying; she might as well get the whole thing over and done with.

But not up here. Not sitting here on her bed in the privacy of her bedroom while she…

Quickly, she averted her eyes from the pretty girlishness of her flower-sprigged bedcover, virginal white with a scattering of flower posies. She had been fourteen the year she had chosen it; she was almost twenty-two now.

Twenty-two, but as naïve and unworldly as a girl still—or so she had been told.

Her throat closed nervously. She didn’t need to remind herself exactly who it was who had said those words to her.

Quickly, she opened her bedroom door and hurried downstairs. She would use the phone in the room which had been her father’s study and, before that, her grandfather’s. To say those words in that room would be appropriate somehow, would lend them weight and dignity.

She picked up the receiver and punched in the numbers jerkily, her body tensing as she heard the ringing tone.

‘Guard Jamieson, please,’ she told the girl on the other end of the line. ‘It’s Rosy Wyndham.’

As she waited to be connected to Guard she nibbled nervously at her bottom lip—a childhood habit she had thought she had outgrown.

‘Only children do that,’ Guard had warned her the year she was eighteen. ‘Women…’

He had paused then and looked at her mockingly, causing her to ask him unthinkingly, ‘Women do what?’

‘Don’t you really know?’ he had quizzed her mockingly. ‘Women, my dear, innocent Rosy, only carry these kind of scars—’he had leaned forward then and slowly run the tip of his finger along her swollen bottom lip, with its two small tooth indentations, pausing to touch them in such a way that the sharp frisson of sensation that had run through her had actually become an open physical convulsion of her whole body ‘—when they’ve been left there by a lover… A very ardent lover…’

Of course he had laughed at the scorching colour that had stained her skin. Guard was like that. In the old days he would have been a freebooter, a pirate—a man who cared for no one and made his own laws, his own rules, so her grandfather had always claimed. Her grandfather, although he would never admit it, had always had something of a soft spot for Guard, Rosy suspected.

‘Rosy, what is it? What’s wrong?’

The sound of his voice reverberating roughly in her ear caused her to tighten her grip on the receiver as her body rebelled against the knowledge of how unsettling she still sometimes found him—even though, with maturity, she had learned to ignore the taunting, loaded comments with which he still sometimes liked to torment her.

He wasn’t like that with other women; with other women he was all sensual charm and warmth, but then, of course, he didn’t see her as a woman, only as—

‘Rosy are you still there?’

The irritation in his voice jerked her back to reality.

She took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I’m still here, Guard… Guard, there’s something I want to ask you. I…’

‘I can’t talk now, Rosy. I’ve got an important call waiting. Look, I’ll call round tonight and we can discuss whatever it is then.’

‘No.’ Rosy started to panic. What she had to ask him was something it would be far easier for her to say at a safe distance; she thought of asking him to marry her, of proposing to him face to face— She gave a small, worried gulp, but Guard had already replaced the receiver and it was too late for her to tell him now that she didn’t want to see him.

As she replaced her own receiver she stared sadly around the room.

Four hundred years of history were encapsulated in this room, this house. It had stood here since Elizabeth I had bestowed the land on Piers Wyndham, a gift, so the official story ran, for courtly services; a gift, so the unofficial one went, for something far more personal and intimate.

Piers had called the house he had built Queen’s Meadow, in acknowledgement of Elizabeth’s generosity. It wasn’t a very grand house, nor even a generously large one, but in Rosy’s view it was certainly far too extravagantly large for one person or even one family—especially when she knew from her work at the shelter how many people were homeless and in desperate need of a roof over their heads.

‘So what would you do, given free choice?’ Guard had taunted her the last time she had raised the subject. ‘Turn the place over to them? Watch them tear out the panelling and use it for firewood; watch them…?’

‘That’s unfair,’ she had protested angrily. ‘You’re being unfair…’

But even Ralph, who was in charge of the shelter, had commented on more than one occasion that she wasn’t streetwise enough; that she was too soft-hearted, too idealistic, her expectations and beliefs in others far too high. She suspected that Ralph was inclined to despise her, and at first he had certainly been antagonistic towards her, deriding her background and her accent, condemning her comparative wealth and lifestyle and comparing it to those of the people who used the shelter.

‘Makes you feel better, does it,’ he had jeered, ‘spending your time doing good works?’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Rosy had told him honestly. ‘But my money—my wealth, as you call it—is in trust and I can’t touch the capital even if I wanted to. If I found a “proper” job, paid work, I’d be taking that job away from someone who needs to earn their living.’

She and Ralph got on much better these days, although he and Guard loathed one another. Or rather Ralph loathed Guard; Guard wasn’t human enough to allow himself to feel that kind of emotion about anyone. In fact, she sometimes doubted that Guard had ever felt a human emotion in his entire life.

She knew how much Ralph resented having to go cap in hand to Guard for money towards running the shelter, but Guard was the wealthiest man in the area, his business the most profitable.

‘He’s a very rare combination,’ her father had once told her. ‘An entrepreneur—successfully so—and an honest man as well, highly principled.’

‘An arrogant bastard,’ was what Ralph called him.

‘Sexy,’ was what one of Rosy’s old school-friends had breathed enthusiastically when she had come down to pay Rosy a visit. Married, and bored with her husband already, apparently, she had eyed Guard with an open, hungry greed that Rosy had found not just embarrassing, but somehow humiliating as well. It was as though Sara, with the hot, burning looks she was constantly throwing Guard’s way, the none-too-subtle hints and sexual innuendoes, the physical contact of deliberately contrived touches, was somehow underlining her own sexual immaturity, and reinforcing all the taunts that Guard had ever made about her.

She was well aware that Guard thought her naïve and unawakened—but so what? All right, so his comments and taunts might fluster and sometimes even hurt her, but she had made a vow to herself a long time ago that she was not going to rush into a sexual relationship before she was ready for it; that she was not going to experiment with sex for sex’s sake; that when she finally explored the world of her own sexuality it would be with a partner who felt as she did, a man who loved her and who was not ashamed to acknowledge that fact and with whom she could let down her guard and reveal the vulnerable, romantic, loving side of her nature.

So far she had not met that man, but when she did, she would know him, and she was not, after all, in any hurry. She was only twenty-one. Twenty-one and still a virgin. Twenty-one and about to propose marriage to Guard, who was most definitely not anything of the kind and who—

She glanced at her watch. Four o’clock. She knew that Guard often didn’t leave his office until well after everyone else had gone, which meant it could be seven o’clock or even eight before he came round. All those hours to wait. All those hours nerving herself to deliver her proposal.

What would he say? Laugh himself silly, no doubt. Her face burned hotly with chagrin at the thought.

It was all her solicitor’s fault, she decided crossly. If Peter hadn’t suggested—

She walked over to the window, remembering Peter’s last words to her before he left: ‘Promise me that you’ll at least ask him, Rosy.’

‘Sacrifice myself to save this place? Why should I?’ she had demanded angrily. ‘It isn’t even as though I want the house. You know how I feel…’

‘You know what will happen if Edward inherits it,’ Peter had countered. ‘He’ll destroy this place simply for the pleasure it will give him.’

‘And to get back at Gramps. Yes, I know that,’ Rosy had agreed.

Edward was her father’s cousin; he and her grandfather had quarrelled long before Rosy was born—a bad quarrel over money and morals which had resulted in her grandfather’s banning Edward from ever setting foot inside the house again.

Every family had its black sheep; theirs was no exception. Even now, in middle age, despite his outward air of respectability, his marriage and his two sons at prep school, there was something unpleasant about Edward.

He might never have actually broken the law in his financial dealings, but he had certainly crossed over the line under cover of darkness on one or more occasions, her father had often stated.

Her father.

Rosy turned her attention away from the window and looked towards the desk. Her father’s photograph was still on it. The one he had had taken in uniform shortly before his older brother’s death.

He had left the army then and come home to be with his father—he had been no stranger to death himself since the death of Rosy’s mother.

Queen’s Meadow had meant everything to them, her father and her grandfather. She loved the house, of course—who could not do?—but she felt no sense of possessiveness towards it, far from it.

It wasn’t pride she felt as she walked through its rooms, but guilt.

If only things had been different. If only Edward had been different, she could have so happily and easily have walked away from here and bought or rented herself a small place in town and given all her time and attention to working at the shelter.

But how could she do that now?

‘Edward will destroy this place,’ Peter had warned her. ‘He’ll tear the heart out of it, sell off everything that’s worth selling, and then he’ll tear it down brick by brick and sell off the land to one of his cronies who’ll—’

‘No, he can’t do that,’ she had protested. ‘The house is listed and—’

‘And, knowing Edward, he won’t find it at all difficult to find someone who’s willing to claim that they misunderstood the instructions they were given. Just how long do you think this place could stay standing once it was assaulted by half a dozen determined men with bulldozers? And of course Edward would make sure that nothing could be connected with him. He hated your grandfather, Rosy, and he knew how much Queen’s Meadow meant to him and to your father.’

‘Too much,’ Rosy had sighed. ‘No, this place is an anachronism, Peter. No matter how beautiful it is, for one family to live in a house this size… Oh, why couldn’t Gramps have listened to me and deeded it to a charity? Why couldn’t he?’

‘So you don’t care what happens to the house? You don’t mind Edward inheriting it and destroying it, destroying four hundred years of history?’

‘Of course I mind,’ Rosy told him fretfully. ‘But what can I do? You know the terms of that idiotic will Gramps made as well as I do. In the event of both his sons predeceasing him, the house and his estate go to the closest of his blood relatives to be married within three months of his death and capable of producing an heir. He made that will years ago after Uncle Tom died, and if Dad hadn’t—’

She had broken off then, her throat choked with tears. Her father’s death so unexpectedly from a heart attack just weeks before her grandfather had slid from a coma and into death was something she still hadn’t fully come to terms with.

‘Edward fulfils all the terms of that will and he—’

‘You are your grandfather’s closest blood relative,’ Peter had reminded her quietly.

‘Yes, but I’m not married. And not likely to be, at least not within the next three months,’ Rosy had told him drily.

‘You could be,’ Peter had told her slowly, ‘with an arranged marriage. A marriage entered into specifically so that you could fulfil the terms of your grandfather’s will. A marriage which could be brought to an end very easily and quickly.’

‘An arranged marriage?’ Rosy had stared blankly at him. It sounded like something out of one of her favourite Georgette Heyer novels; fine as the theme for a piece of romantic froth, but totally implausible in reality.

‘No,’ she had told him impatiently, shaking her head so hard that her dark curls had bounced against her shoulders. Irritably she had pushed them off her face. Her hair was the bane of her life—thick, so dark it was almost black, and possessing of a life of its own.

A little gypsy, her grandfather had often fondly called her. But whenever she had tried to have her wild mane tamed, it had rebelled, and reverted to its tumbling mass of curls almost as soon as she had closed the hairdresser’s door behind her, so that eventually she had given up trying to control it.

‘It’s out of the question and, besides, it takes two to make a marriage—even an arranged one—and I can’t think of anyone who—’

‘I can.’ Peter had anticipated her quietly.

Was she imagining it, or did his words have a slightly ominous ring to them? She paused, shifting her gaze from the Grinling Gibbons carving on the staircase to her solicitor’s face, eyeing him suspiciously.

‘Who?’ she demanded warily.

‘Guard Jamieson,’ Peter told her. Rosy sat down abruptly on the stairs.

‘Oh, no,’ she announced firmly. ‘No, no, never.’

‘He would be the ideal person,’ Peter continued enthusiastically, as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘After all, he’s never made any secret of how much he wants this place.’

‘Never,’ Rosy agreed drily, remembering how often Guard had bombarded her grandfather with requests—demands, almost—that he sell Queen’s Meadow to him. ‘If Guard wants the house that badly, he can always try to persuade Edward to sell it to him,’ she pointed out.

Peter’s eyebrows rose. ‘Come on, Rosy. You know that Edward hates Guard almost as much as he did your grandfather.’

Rosy sighed.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. It was true. Guard and Edward were old business adversaries and, as her father had stated on more than one occasion, there hadn’t been a confrontation between the two men yet out of which Guard had not come the winner. ‘The mere fact that he knows how much Guard loves this place would only add to his pleasure in destroying it.’

‘We’re only talking about a business arrangement between the two of you, you know, some simple basic formalities which would enable you to fulfil the terms of the will. In time the marriage could be dissolved. You could sell the house to Guard and—’

‘In time? How much time?’ she had asked him suspiciously.

‘A year—a couple of years…’ Peter had shrugged, ignoring her dismayed gasp. ‘After all, it isn’t as though you want to marry someone else, is it? If you did, there wouldn’t be any problem, any need to involve Guard.’

‘I can’t do it,’ she told Peter positively. ‘The whole idea is completely ridiculous, repulsive.’

‘Well, then, I’m afraid you’ll have to resign yourself to the fact that Edward will inherit. Your grandfather’s already been dead for almost a month.’

‘I can’t do it,’ Rosy repeated, ignoring Peter’s comment. ‘I could never ask any man to marry me, but especially not Guard…’

Peter had laughed at her.

‘It’s a business proposal, that’s all. Think about it, Rosy. I know how ambivalent your feelings towards Queen’s Meadow are, but I can’t believe that you actually want to see Edward destroy it.’

‘No, of course I don’t,’ Rosy had agreed.

‘Then what have you got to lose?’

‘My freedom?’ she had suggested hollowly.

Peter had laughed again. ‘Oh, I doubt that Guard would interfere with that,’ he had assured her. ‘He’s much too busy to have time to worry about what you’ll be doing. Promise me that you’ll at least think about it, Rosy. It’s for your sake that I’m doing this,’ he had added. ‘If you let Edward destroy this place, you’re bound to feel guilty.’

‘The way you do for putting all this moral blackmail on me?’ Rosy had asked him drily.

He had had the grace to look slightly uncomfortable.

‘All right, I’ll think about it,’ she had agreed.

And ultimately she had done more than just think about it, Rosy acknowledged, as she dragged her thoughts back to the present.

‘The trouble with you is that you’re far too soft-hearted.’ How often had she heard that accusation over the years?

Too often.

But Peter was right. She couldn’t let Edward destroy Queen’s Meadow without at least making some attempt to save it. By sacrificing herself. A wicked smile curled her mouth, her eyes suddenly dancing with bright humour. Oh, how chagrined Guard would be if he could read her mind. How many women were there who would look upon marriage to him in that light? Not many. Not any, she admitted, at least not from what she heard.

Well, all right, so she was peculiar—an oddity who for some reason could not see anything attractive in that magnetic sexuality of his which seemed to obsess virtually every other female who set eyes on him. So she was immune to whatever it was about him that made other women go weak at the knees, their eyes glazing with awe as they started babbling about his sexy looks, his smouldering eyes, his mouth and its full, sensual bottom lip, his shoulders, his body, his awesome charismatic personality, his single state and the subtle aura not just of sexual experience, but of sexual expertise which clung to him like perfume to a woman’s body.

Oddly, the last thing that most of them mentioned about him was his wealth.

Well, she could see nothing remotely sexually attractive about him, Rosy decided crossly, and she never had. As far as she was concerned, he was an arrogant, sarcastic pig who enjoyed nothing more than making fun of her.

Only last month at a dinner party, when the hostess had been remarking to her that the male cousin she had had visiting her had begged her to seat him next to Rosy at dinner, Guard, who had overheard their hostess’s remark, had leaned over and said sardonically, ‘Well, if he’s hoping to find a woman somewhere under that mass of hair and that very unflattering outfit you’re wearing, Rosy, he’s going to be very disappointed, isn’t he?’

Since the ‘unflattering outfit’ he referred to had been a very carefully chosen collection of several different layers of softly toning shades of grey, all determinedly hunted down in a variety of charity shops, carried home triumphantly and repaired and laundered, Rosy had shot him an extremely bitter look.

‘Not all men judge a woman on how she performs in bed, Guard,’ she had told him through gritted teeth.

‘Luckily for you,’ he had responded, not in the least bit fazed by her retaliation. ‘Because, according to all the gossip, you wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do there.’

She had flushed, of course, the hot colour crawling betrayingly over her skin, not so much because of what he had said—after all, she was not ashamed of the fact that she was not prepared to jump into bed with every man who asked her—but because of the way Guard was watching her, because of the amusement and mockery in his eyes, because, oh, so shamingly and appallingly, just for a second, she could actually almost see him in bed with some anonymous woman, his body bare and brown, his hands stroking the woman’s paler, softer skin while she clung to him with small, pleading sounds of need…

She had blinked away the vision immediately, of course, telling herself that it must have had something to do with the sexy film she and a friend had been discussing earlier in the day.

She and Guard had continued their argument later in the evening, just before Guard had left with the extremely glamorous and elegant-looking blonde who was accompanying him.

‘Anyway,’ Rosy had told him, her small chin jutting out defiantly as she felt herself losing ground, ‘it makes sense these days not to have too many sexual partners.’

‘The present climate is certainly a convenient hedge to hide behind,’ Guard had agreed suavely. ‘Especially when…’

‘Especially when what?’ Rosy had challenged him.

‘Especially for you,’ he had told her blandly.

The return of his companion had prevented Rosy from saying anything else.

An arranged marriage with Guard. She must have been mad to let Peter talk her into such a crazy idea. But he had talked her into it and she couldn’t back out now. Did Guard want Queen’s Meadow enough to agree? Half of her hoped not. And the other half…

‘All right, Rosy, what’s this all about? And if you’re after another donation to that charity of yours, I’m warning you that right now I’m not feeling in the most generous of moods…’

Dumbly Rosy watched Guard walk into the hall. Her heart was beating so heavily it felt as though it was going to force its way through her chest wall.

She couldn’t remember ever, ever feeling so nervous before—not even when Gramps had found out about her sneaking out at night to go poaching with Clem Angers. She had had Guard to thank for that, of course, and—

Firmly, she brought her thoughts back to the present.

Guard was slightly earlier than she had expected, and if the sight of him wearing the expensively tailored dark suit with its equally expensive, crisp white cotton shirt had not been one that was already familiar to her, she suspected she would have found it extremely daunting.

But then Guard could be daunting, even when he was casually dressed, she acknowledged, and it wasn’t just because of his height, nor even because of those broad shoulders and that tautly muscular physique over which her female friends cooed and sighed so stupidly, either.

There was something about Guard himself—an air, a manner, a certain intangible something—that set him slightly apart from other men, made him stand out from other men, an aura of power and control, of…of sheer maleness, so potent that even she was acutely aware of it, she admitted. Aware of it, but not attracted by it, she reminded herself sharply. She could never be attracted by Guard; he was not her kind of man. She liked men who were softer, warmer—more approachable, more…more human, less…less sexual?

Nervously, she cleared her throat.

‘What’s wrong?’ Guard asked her drily. ‘You’re staring at me like a rabbit at a dog.’

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ Rosy retorted, stung.

‘I’m extremely glad to hear it. Look, I’m due to fly out to Brussels in the morning, Rosy, and I’ve got a briefcase full of documents to read before I do. Just tell me what you want, there’s a good girl, and don’t start backtracking now and telling me it isn’t important. We both know that there’s no way you’d get in touch with me if it weren’t.’

The irony in his voice made her frown slightly but he was watching her impatiently, unfastening his jacket, reaching up to loosen the knot in his tie.

As she focused on the movement of his hands, she could feel the knot in her stomach tightening.

‘Come on, Rosy, don’t start playing games. I’m not in the mood for it.’

The verbal warning was accompanied by a forbidding, hooded look that reminded her of former peccadilloes and his merciless punishment of them.

She swallowed nervously. It was too late to back out now.

Screwing up her courage, she took a deep breath.

‘Guard, I want you to marry me…’