The Inconvenient Elmswood Marriage (Penniless Brides 0f Convenience Book 4) Read online

  Their marriage was a solution...

  Until passion turns it into a problem!

  Part of Penniless Brides of Convenience. Lord and Lady Elmswood’s convenient marriage has allowed them to live separate lives for years. Until larger-than-life Daniel almost dies and Kate must nurse the husband she barely knows back to health...and discovers how maddeningly attractive he is! With the clock ticking on his departure, they disagree on everything—except the impossibility of resisting each other!

  Penniless Brides of Convenience

  Four Regency Cinderellas say, “I do”

  Orphaned sisters Eloise, Phoebe and Estelle Brannagh grew up in the shadow of their parents’ tumultuous passion. They are now making their own way in the world, penniless but proud. They are looking for freedom and security—definitely not love!

  Inspired by the experience of their close friend Kate, Lady Elmswood, they have decided marriages of convenience are the answer. But all four of them are about to discover that sometimes love is found where you least expect it...

  Read Eloise’s story in

  The Earl’s Countess of Convenience

  Read Phoebe’s story in

  A Wife Worth Investing In

  Read Estelle’s story in

  The Truth Behind Their Practical Marriage

  Read Kate’s story in

  The Inconvenient Elmswood Marriage

  Marguerite Kaye

  The Inconvenient

  Elmswood Marriage

  Marguerite Kaye writes hot historical romances featuring Regency rakes, Highlanders and sheikhs from her home in cold and usually rainy Scotland. She has published over fifty books and novellas. When she’s not writing, she enjoys walking, cycling (but only on the level), gardening (but only what she can eat) and cooking. She also likes to knit and occasionally drink martinis (though not at the same time). Find out more on her website, margueritekaye.com.

  Books by Marguerite Kaye

  Harlequin Historical

  Scandal at the Midsummer Ball

  “The Officer’s Temptation”

  Scandal at the Christmas Ball

  “A Governess for Christmas”

  Invitation to a Cornish Christmas

  “The Captain’s Christmas Proposal”

  Penniless Brides of Convenience

  The Earl’s Countess of Convenience

  A Wife Worth Investing In

  The Truth Behind Their Practical Marriage

  The Inconvenient Elmswood Marriage

  Matches Made in Scandal

  From Governess to Countess

  From Courtesan to Convenient Wife

  His Rags-to-Riches Contessa

  A Scandalous Winter Wedding

  Visit the Author Profile page

  at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Excerpt from Mr. Fairclough’s Inherited Bride by Georgie Lee

  Prologue

  Elmswood Manor, Shropshire, April 1820

  Kate glanced nervously at the tarnished mantel clock. Like everything else around here it had seen better days. It told her that it was fifteen minutes to the allotted start time of what she hoped would be her life-changing appointment. One minute less than when she had last checked.

  She adjusted the blotter so that it sat perfectly in the middle of the desk, then straightened the ledger so that it sat square on the blotter. Next, she placed the annual accounts summary she had drawn up on top of the ledger. Finally, she ran a hand nervously over her hair, which she had pinned tightly up in an attempt to project a mature, businesslike demeanour, though her bedroom mirror had reflected something more reminiscent of a frightened rabbit. Then she glanced over at the clock again.

  It didn’t seem to have moved. Had it stopped? But she’d wound it up yesterday evening, as she did at the same time every night, as Papa had been in the habit of doing, and she could hear it ticking slowly and softly, just as it had always done.

  She felt sick. Was she really going to put her outrageous proposition to a virtual stranger? No, not outrageous. She mustn’t think of it in those terms or she’d come over as an irrational fantasist. It was actually a common-sense suggestion rooted in practicality, one she had evaluated from every angle in the long weeks spent awaiting this much-heralded return, while her future, her father’s security and the fate of every one of the estate’s tenants and those few staff that remained were left hanging in the balance.

  Pushing back the worn leather wing-backed chair, Kate edged out from behind the huge desk that dominated the Estate Office to risk a glance out of the window. The office was located at the far end of a row of outbuildings, behind what had once been the kitchen gardens, with an excellent view in all directions. If he was coming from the stables, walking around from the front entrance or any of the rooms that opened onto the terrace at the rear, she’d see him approach.

  And he would turn up, she reassured herself, he had asked for the appointment himself, hadn’t he?

  Though the appointment had actually been made with her father—for the new Lord Elmswood seemed to be uniquely unaware that his lands were being managed by his estate manager’s daughter.

  Kate returned to the desk and retrieved the note from under the blotter, but the brief informal scrawl told her nothing more than she already knew or had surmised.

  Sir,

  With regard to the settling of my late father’s estate, which I have perforce returned to England to oversee, I anticipate that I will have completed all necessary business with my lawyer in London by the sixteenth of this month. I will then travel to Shropshire, arriving at Elmswood on the seventeenth.

  I assume it will be convenient for you to meet with me on the eighteenth in the Estate Office at ten o’clock that morning, with a view to formally resolving the issue of your continued stewardship and any residual outstanding business.

  I would appreciate it if you could do everything possible to expedite matters, as I am extremely eager to return to my own pressing business abroad.

  Yours respectfully,

  Daniel Fairfax

  Fairfax, she noted. He didn’t use his new title. He had clearly returned reluctantly, for the briefest period possible. How would he feel, knowing he would never see his father again? There was no trace of any emotion in that note save impatience. Her own dear papa’s slow decline over the last few years had forced her to face the reality of his mortality, but she didn’t for a moment imagine that when the time came it would be anything other than a terrible blow to lose him. It seemed to be a very different matter for Daniel Fairfax, who could probably count on one hand the number of weeks he’d spent as an adult in his father’s company.

  He was twenty-eight years old. She’d known him—or of him—all her life, for, like him, she had been born on the estate, though, unlike him, she had never had any desire to live anywhere else. He was six years her senior. Though she knew from her father that he
had been a sickly child, and educated at home as a little boy, by the time she’d been old enough to perch in front of Papa in the saddle as he rode around the estates on his regular inspections, or sit here in this office, drawing happily while he attended to estate business, Daniel Fairfax had been a boarder at a prestigious school.

  As a result, for most of the year, Kate had been able to pretend that the grounds of Elmswood Manor belonged exclusively to her. When he came home for the school holidays she would catch the occasional glimpse of him, swimming in the lake or setting out on his pony from the stables, but those encounters had been rare. She’d had no idea what he did all day, or where he went, and his awareness of her had been confined to an absent, uninterested nod as he’d passed purposefully in the opposite direction. Though he was, in effect, like her, an only child, he’d seemed perfectly content in his own company. She couldn’t recall him ever having friends to stay, save once, and that hadn’t been a school friend but some sort of tutor.

  During the last school holiday he had spent at Elmswood he’d left, before it was over, when he was sixteen to Kate’s ten, not to return to school but to go to London to take up a position at the Admiralty. When he’d next returned, on reaching his majority, after an absence of five years, he had left both the Admiralty and his youth behind. The deeply tanned young man she had encountered one morning, staring grim-faced at the lake, had been a rather intimidating and fiercely attractive stranger who’d left Kate embarrassingly tongue-tied.

  Where he had been in the intervening years not even Papa knew, and it had only been after he’d left—a long time after he’d left—that Lord Elmswood had revealed his son was off ‘exploring the world’. And, the world being a very big place, it had seemed unlikely that he would return any time soon.

  ‘Any time soon’ had turned into never. If there had been letters, old Lord Elmswood had kept the contents to himself. On his death, it had seemed like a minor miracle when his lawyer had revealed that he knew how to contact the heir, and a miracle of considerably larger proportions when he’d sent word to Elmswood to inform Papa that the man himself had actually arrived in London.

  But, regardless of the fact that he’d inherited an estate and an earldom, Kate was willing to stake her life on Daniel Fairfax, nomadic explorer, heading back to his life of wandering the far-flung corners of the world as soon as he possibly could.

  In fact, she thought wryly, she was banking on him doing exactly that, even though she knew almost nothing of him. She was taking a leap of faith, but he was Lord Elmswood’s son, after all, and she’d heard nothing to suggest he was in any way of dubious character or unsavoury temperament. In any event, if her plan came to fruition she wouldn’t have to put that assumption to the test, since she was unlikely to see hide nor hair of him for the foreseeable future.

  ‘Excuse me, I have an appointment to meet Mr Wilson.’

  ‘Lord Elmswood!’ Kate scrabbled to her feet.

  Daniel Fairfax, for it was unmistakably he, stood in the doorway, eyeing her quizzically. ‘This is still the Estate Office, I assume?’

  ‘Yes, you are in the right place. I am Mr Wilson’s daughter, I—’

  Kate broke off, blushing. Dammit! Cool, calm and collected was what she needed to be, not a simpering miss! Daniel Fairfax might be a self-confident man of the world, and she might be a country hick, but she was a country hick who knew his estates like the back of her hand, and he needed her—even though he didn’t know it yet.

  ‘Lord Elmswood. You clearly don’t remember me. I am Kate Wilson. How do you do?’

  ‘Miss Wilson? Well, I never! The last time I clapped eyes on you, I’m sure you had pigtails and freckles.’

  ‘I was almost fifteen the last time you were home, and I have not worn my hair in pigtails since I was ten.’

  ‘Really? Good Lord, that makes you—what?—twenty-two? How did that happen?’

  ‘By the simple process of aging. It affects us all, unfortunately.’

  ‘Well, the passing years have certainly done you no harm, if you don’t mind my saying so. I hardly recognised you.’

  ‘Since you have, in all the years I’ve lived here, barely acknowledged me,’ Kate retorted, flustered, ‘that is not really surprising. I’ve not changed so very much in seven years.’

  ‘You’re quite wrong. But I can see I’ve touched a nerve. I hadn’t thought myself rude, not even as a sulky youth, but clearly I was. Please accept my belated apologies.’

  ‘You were not rude. It’s not surprising that I barely registered with you, given that you were six years older than me and—’

  ‘I still am.’

  ‘The gap is more of a chasm when one is younger.’

  ‘True, but I apologise for my ill-mannered younger self all the same.’ Daniel Fairfax glanced at the clock. ‘I thought your father was expecting me? Didn’t he receive my note?’

  ‘He did,’ Kate said, belatedly remembering her carefully rehearsed plan for this meeting. ‘On behalf of my father and myself, Lord Elmswood, may I offer our condolences on your loss?’

  ‘You’ve already done so—or your father has, in a letter. I understand I have him to thank for organising the funeral too. I’m told it was very well-attended. I’m sorry I wasn’t here, but by the time I had word of my father’s accident he was already dead and buried, and it took me the best part of six weeks to get myself back to England. Is Mr Wilson intending to meet me this morning or not?’

  ‘I’m afraid he is indisposed, but I believe I can settle all the necessary business on his behalf.’

  ‘Without wishing to be rude, Miss Wilson, my business is with Elmswood’s estate manager. Perhaps it would be better for me to return when your father is feeling better—tomorrow, perhaps?’

  ‘Lord Elmswood, when I said my father was indisposed, I’m afraid I did not mean he was afflicted with some minor ailment. Would that it were so! Unfortunately his condition is both long-standing and irreversible. I take it you are unaware that I have been acting in my father’s stead? Clearly you are,’ Kate continued, in response to his blank look. ‘In fact I’ve been helping out for some years now, but in the last eighteen months or so I have been obliged to take on almost all of my father’s duties as his health has failed.’

  ‘I am deeply sorry to hear that. But, with respect, I am surprised to learn that he delegated the management of the estates to you. No matter how competent you are, you are a female, and that alone, in my father’s book, would make you quite ineligible. Your father must have known that.’

  ‘The arrangement was of an—an informal nature.’

  ‘Ah. So my father was blissfully ignorant of the fact that his estate manager’s daughter was running things.’

  Kate bristled. ‘I was born and raised here, and have been helping my father ever since I was old enough to ride a horse. With the greatest of respect, and with no offence intended, my lord, I know your estates a great deal better than you do.’

  ‘That would not be difficult, for even the cows in the fields could claim that.’

  ‘I love this place, my lord, even if you do not.’

  ‘There’s no need for those raised hackles. I am not questioning your competency. In this, as in everything else, I have nothing in common with my father, and I have no issue at all with having a female estate manager.’

  ‘In that case, perhaps you would care to take a look at the summary of accounts.’

  Kate pushed the ledger forward, but Daniel Fairfax gave it only a cursory glance. ‘I won’t pretend to have any grasp of the financial ins and outs, but I know from that London lawyer fellow that the lands are in good hands.’

  ‘Relatively, all things considered. Unfortunately your father was reluctant to invest either his time or his money. Frankly, he seemed uninterested in his estates.’

  But once again Daniel Fairfax seemed to have no interest in pursuing t
he subject of his lands. ‘I really am sorry to hear that your father is so gravely ill. If there is anything I can do...’

  ‘As a matter of fact, there is.’ Kate wondered fleetingly what he would say if she simply blurted out the outrageous proposition she had for him, and was so amused by the idea that it calmed her. ‘If you would care to take a seat, Lord Elmswood...’

  ‘I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.’

  ‘It’s your name now.’

  ‘No, it’s not. I don’t plan on making use of any of it—the lands, the title, or indeed the house, which my father seems to have allowed to go to rack and ruin.’

  ‘Yes, that is one of the topics I wish to discuss with you.’

  ‘Only one? I have a list of my own, you know, and a limited amount of time.’

  ‘Of that I am perfectly well aware.’ She hadn’t meant to snap, but her nerves were stretched to breaking point. ‘Please, if you will sit down I will explain everything.’

  Kate indicated the seat on the opposite side of the desk from her own and to her utter relief he did as she’d asked. The legs of the chair had been shortened by some shrewd previous estate manager, intent on ensuring that he loomed over whoever sat opposite, but Daniel Fairfax was very tall and her own stature so diminutive that when she sat down she was still looking up at him.

  She straightened her back. He stretched his long legs out in front of him. His hair was cut very close to his head, as if he had taken a razor to it, showing off a slight widow’s peak. His face was tanned to the point of swarthiness, strong-featured, with sharp cheekbones and jaw, a nose bordering on the assertive. Despite the fullness of his lips it was a very masculine face, and one that bore testament to a life lived in a very different climate. The grooves which ran from his nose to his mouth, the fan of lines at the corners of his slate-grey eyes, spoke of a life lived at a pace that made hers seem positively sedentary.

  Those eyes were now focused intently on her. She resisted the impulse to check her hair for any escaped locks.

  ‘How long had my father been living as a virtual recluse?’ he asked. ‘From what I’ve seen of the house, he seems to have been living in two rooms, with only his manservant and a couple of kitchen staff to look after him.’