A Winter Wedding: Strangers at the Altar / The Warrior's Winter Bride

‘Never mind.’ Mrs McBrayne shook her head and picked up her glass, swirled the contents, then replaced it without drinking. ‘I beg your pardon. I did not mean to become so emotional. I have made my bed, as they say, and now I must lie on it. Or not, for it is to be sold.’ She smiled tightly. ‘Like all sorry tales, this one comes with a moral. Whatever happens, I shall never again allow anyone to make my decisions for me. For good or ill, my fate will be of my own determination in the future. And now that is quite enough of me. It is your turn.’

He had a hundred questions, but she had folded her hands and her lips together, and was making a great show of listening. Innes was not fooled. Her eyes were overbright, her fingers too tightly clasped. She had taken quite a battering, one way or another. A lesser woman would have cried, or flung herself on some man’s mercy. He could not imagine Mrs McBrayne doing either. He wanted to cheer her. He wanted to tell her she would be fine, absolutely fine. He was very tempted to offer her money, but she would be mortified, to say nothing of the fact that he was pretty certain she’d also see it merely as a transfer of obligation, and he didn’t want her to feel beholden. What he wanted was for her to be free. It wasn’t so much that he felt sorry for her, though he railed at the injustice of it all, but he felt—yes, that was it—an affinity.

‘What have I said to make you smile?’

‘Your situation, Mrs McBrayne, has struck a great many chords.’

‘I do not see how. I don’t know you, but you have told me yourself you’re a self-made man and a success. Men such as you will never brook any interference in your life.’

‘Actually, that’s not true. Unfortunately, I know very well indeed what it’s like to have someone else try to bind you to their rules, to dictate your life without you having a say.’

He was pleased to see that he had surprised her. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Did I not say at the outset that we are both the victims of fathers and trusts?’ Innes replied. ‘It’s a strange coincidence, but I while you were consulting Thomson on the finer points of your father’s will, I was consulting Ballard on the very same thing. I too have been left the victim of a trust fund, only my father’s intention was not to protect me but to call me to heel, and unlike your trust, mine can be broken, though only in a very particular way.’

‘What way, Mr Drummond?’

Innes smiled thinly. ‘Marriage, Mrs McBrayne. An institution that I assure you, I abhor every bit as much as you do yourself.’

Chapter Two (#u9fb7ab2a-420a-57fd-8a18-126f472776c9)

Ainsley stared at him in astonishment. ‘Your father’s will sets up a trust that requires you to marry?’

‘No, it establishes a trust to control the family lands that will remain in effect until I marry,’ Innes replied.

‘Lands?’ She only just managed to prevent her jaw dropping. ‘As in—what, a country estate?’

‘A little more than that. I’m not sure what the total acreage is, but there are about twenty tenanted farms as well as the home farm and the castle.’

‘Good heavens, Mr Drummond—a castle! And about twenty farms. Is there a title, too?’

He shook his head. ‘My father was known as the laird of Strone Bridge, but it was just a courtesy.’

Laird. The title conjured up a fierce Highland patriarch. Ainsley eyed the impeccably dressed gentleman opposite her and discovered it was surprisingly easy to imagine him in a plaid, carrying a claymore. Though without the customary beard. She didn’t like beards. ‘And these lands, they are in Argyll, did you say?’

When he nodded Ainsley frowned in puzzlement. ‘Forgive me, Mr Drummond, but did you not tell me you had spent most of your life in England? Surely as the heir to such a substantial property—I know nothing of such things, mind you—but I thought it would have been customary for you to have lived on the estate?’

His countenance hardened. ‘I was not the heir.’

‘Oh?’

She waited, unwilling to prompt him further, for he looked quite forbidding. Innes Drummond took a sip of whisky, grimaced and put the glass back down on the table. ‘Dutch courage,’ he said, with a shadow of her own words and her own grim little smile. ‘I had a brother. Malcolm. He was the heir. It is as you said—he lived on the estate. Lived and breathed it, more like, for he loved the place. Strone Bridge was his world.’

He stared down at his glass, his mouth turned down in sorrow. ‘But it was not your world?’ Ainsley asked gently.

‘It was never meant for me. I was the second son. As far as my father was concerned, that meant second best, and while Malcolm was alive, next to useless, Mrs McBrayne.’

He stared down at his glass, such a bleak look on his face that she leaned over to press his hand. ‘My name is Ainsley.’

‘I don’t think I’ve heard that before.’

‘An old family name,’ she said.

He gave her a very fleeting smile as his fingers curled around hers. ‘Then you must call me Innes,’ he said. ‘Another old family name, though it is not usually that of the laird. One condition I have been spared. My father did not specify that I change my name to Malcolm. Even he must have realised that would have been a step too far. Though, then again, it may simply have been that he thought me as unworthy of the name as the lands.’

He spoke viciously enough to make Ainsley recoil. ‘You sound as though you hate him.’

‘Rather, the boot was on the other foot.’ He said it jeeringly. She wondered what hurt lay behind those words, but Innes was already retreating, patently regretting what he had revealed. ‘We did not see eye to eye,’ he tempered. ‘Some would call him a traditionalist. Everyone had a place in his world. I did not take to the one he allotted me. When I finally decided to forge my own way, we fell out.’

Ainsley could well imagine it. Innes was obviously a man with a very strong will, a modern man and an independent one who clearly thrived in the industrial world. It would be like two stags clashing. She wondered what the circumstances had been that had caused what was obviously a split, but curious as she was, she had no wish to rile him further. ‘Tell me about the trust,’ she said. ‘Why must you marry, and what happens if you do not?’

Innes stared down at his hand, the one she had so abruptly released, his eyes still dark with pain. ‘As to why, that is obvious. The Strone Bridge estate has been passed through the direct line back as far as records exist, and I am the last of the line. He wanted an heir.’

‘But he only specified that you must take a wife? That seems rather odd.’

‘We Drummonds have proved ourselves potent over the generations. My father no doubt assumed that even such an undeserving son as I would not fail in that most basic of tasks,’ Innes said sarcastically.

‘You don’t want children?’

‘I don’t want a wife, and in my book, one must necessarily precede the other.’

This time Ainsley’s curiosity overcame her caution. ‘Why are you so against marriage?’ she asked. ‘You don’t strike me as a man who hates my sex.’

‘You don’t strike me as a woman who hates men, yet you don’t want to get married again.’

‘It is a case of once bitten with me.’

‘While I have no intentions of being bitten for a first time,’ Innes retorted. ‘I don’t need anyone other than myself to order my life, and I certainly don’t want to rely on anyone else to make me happy.’

He spoke with some vehemence. He spoke as if there was bitter experience behind his words. As there was, too, behind hers. ‘Your father’s will has put you in an impossible situation, then,’ Ainsley said.

‘As has yours,’ Innes replied tersely. ‘What happens to your trust if you have no children?’

‘It reverts to me when I am forty and presumably deemed to be saying my prayers.’ She could not keep the bitterness from her voice. She had loved her father, but his unwitting condemnation of her was still difficult to take. ‘I have only to discover a way of avoiding my husband’s creditors and surviving without either a roof over my head or food in my belly for the next ten years in order to inherit, since I have no intentions of marrying again.’

‘Nor any intention of producing a child out of wedlock, I take it? No need to look so shocked,’ Innes said, ‘it was a joke.’

‘A poor one.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She forced a smile. ‘I do not really intend to sell myself down the Cowgate, you know.’

Innes covered her hand. ‘Are your debts really so bad?’

‘There will certainly still be sufficient of them to pay off when I finally do come into my inheritance,’ she said.

His fingers tightened around hers. ‘I wish I could be of some help to you.’