Bronwyn Scott - Tempted By His Secret Cinderella

Elidh laughed up at him. ‘Well, if we’re about to view your ancestors , you should call me Chiara.’ She would take the middle ground and enjoy this interlude now and worry about it later.

He led her through the gallery, narrating with dry humour as they went. ‘Shall we start with my uncle, the man who’s caused this whole mad tangle? That’s him right there just to the left, Sir Leland Keynes, my father’s brother. He was knighted for establishing a British presence in the extremely lucrative Soojam Valley of Kashmir, a place noted for its sapphires. Too bad he hadn’t found some more. He might have been made baron and this whole fiasco could have been avoided.’

Elidh furrowed her brow. ‘How so?’

He looked surprised for a moment and she worried over a misstep. Should she have known? Was the reason obvious to anyone but her? ‘Because everything would have been entailed,’ he explained, ‘Nothing could have stopped my cousin from getting his hands on it. Not even if I married the Queen herself.’ The bitterness was self-evident in his tone. She didn’t understand entirely why. The gossip column had only provided so much detail.

They started to stroll again, moving on to the next portrait, this one of a great-grandfather on his mother’s side. ‘You make it sound as if you don’t want the money.’ Elidh slid him a sideways glance. She couldn’t imagine not wanting that much money or the security that came with it. ‘Or is it the marrying you’re opposed to?’

‘Both, I suppose, but especially the latter. I doubt any one of those women in there is interested in me. I am just the living embodiment of British pound notes.’ He chuckled drily, but she could see the admission bothered him. ‘I am sure you understand.’ He sighed, his blue eyes seeking hers, two sombre flames. Oh, how that gaze seared her with its attention, its intensity, a slice of his soul on display. His voice was quiet, thoughtful. ‘It’s ironic. You are a stranger to me, entirely. But you are the only one here I can confess that to who would know how it feels to lose their humanity, to become a representation of something other than who they truly are.’

Elidh was silent. For a moment, she mistook his meaning and thought he’d somehow guessed her ruse and seen through the disguise. Then she understood and the knife of guilt twisted a little deeper. She’d not come here to mislead this man. She hadn’t her father’s nerves for deep schemes. She tried to push the guilt away. An attractive man was showering her with attention. But that only made it worse. He was showering the Principessa with attention. Sutton Keynes would never look twice at plain, twiggy Elidh Easton, a girl who knew nothing about titles and fortunes, who was, in fact, the embodiment of what he professed to hate: a representation of something other than her true self.

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