Strangers at the Altar

‘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.’

‘You have been, simply by listening,’ Ainsley replied, flustered by the sympathy in his look. She no longer expected sympathy. She had come to believe she did not deserve it. ‘A problem shared and all that,’ she said with a small smile.

‘It’s a damnable situation.’

He seemed much bigger, this close. There was something terribly comforting in those broad shoulders, in the way his hand enveloped hers, in the way he was looking at her, not with pity at all but with understanding. Close-up, his irises were ringed with a very dark blue. She had never seen eyes quite that colour.

Realising her thoughts were once more straying down a most inappropriate path, Ainsley dropped her gaze. ‘If my father had not left my money in trust, my husband would have spent it by now, and I’d have nothing to look forward to in what he clearly thought of as my forty-year-old dotage. The money might have postponed my husband’s demise, but I doubt very much it would have been for more than a few years, and frankly I don’t think I could have borne a few more years married to him.’

‘I confess, at one point I thought you were going to tell me you had killed him yourself,’ Innes said.

Ainsley laughed. ‘I may not be the timid wee mouse he married, but I don’t think I’ve become a monster.’

‘I think you are a wonder.’ She looked up, surprised by the warmth in his tone, and her pulses began to race as he lifted her hand to his mouth, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. There was no mistaking it for one of those polite, social, nothing kisses. His mouth lingered on her skin, his lips warm, his eyes looking deep into hers for long, long seconds. ‘You are a most remarkable woman, Ainsley McBrayne.’

‘Thank you. I— Thank you.’

‘I really do wish there was some way that I could help you, but I know better than to offer you money.’

‘I really do wish there was a way I could accept it, but—well, there we are, I cannot, so there is no point in discussing it. In fact, we have talked far more about me than you. I’m still not clear about what happens to your lands if you remain unmarried. What does this trust entail?’

She was pleased with how she sounded. Not a tremor to betray the quickening of desire his lips had stirred, and she hoped the flush she could feel blooming had not reached her cheeks.

However Innes Drummond felt, and she would have dearly liked to have known, he took his cue from her. ‘A trustee appointed by that lawyer, Ballard, to manage them, and all monies associated with them banked. I can’t touch a penny of it without a wife,’ he replied, ‘and even with a wife, I must also commit to living for a year on Strone Bridge.’