Louise Allen - Contracted As His Countess

Under her left hand the stack of deeds felt as substantial as a pile of bricks. Under her right, the unfolded parchment crackled betrayingly and she forced her fingers to stillness. ‘Be grateful,’ he had told her. ‘I have found you a man free from his family’s vices and I have the shackles to bind him to you.’ She had known better than to protest that she did not want a husband who had to be coerced and shackled.

‘Your mother and brother died six years ago,’ Jack Ransome said blankly. ‘Six—I was twenty-one when he started looking, twenty-three when Roderick died. How did he know I would not marry someone else?’

‘Then your lost lands would remain in here.’ She gestured towards the chest. ‘They would be an incentive for whomever I did eventually marry. Collected together the Dersington properties make an impressive dower.’

It was an effort to keep her voice level and dispassionate, but Madelyn thought she was managing well enough. It was what she was required to do as a dutiful daughter, she reminded herself, yet again. As Jack Ransome was keeping his temper, she found her courage rising a little. ‘Look.’ She opened out the stiff folds and slid forward the large parchment under her right hand, her fingers spread, pinning it down at the centre. ‘The deeds to Dersington Mote and its estates.’

The document was more than five hundred years old, made from the skin of an entire young sheep. Battered seals hung from faded ribbons at the bottom, thick black writing covered it with legal Latin. The Ransomes had held the manor of Dersington since the time of the Conqueror, but their right to castellate—to build a defensible castle—had been granted by Edward II with this document. It gave them no title, not then, but it set out the boundaries and the extent of the land they held, their rights and obligations as lords of the seven manors that it comprised. It was the heart of Jack Ransome’s lost estates.

He stared down at it, his face unreadable. Then he put out his own right hand, laid it palm down on the parchment and drew it towards him.

Madelyn flattened her hand as she resisted the pull and his fingers slid between hers until they meshed. ‘It is quite genuine,’ she said.

‘I know. I can see the seals.’

She had studied them, translated the motto embossed on them. Quid enim meus fidelis . Faithful to what is mine.

There was a long pause. She had time to register that his hands were warm, to feel the very faintest tremor and the tension as he tried to control it, to hear the deep even breaths he took and guessed at the control he was having to exert not to tear it from her grasp.

‘Sell it to me.’

‘No. You could not afford it.’ Madelyn’s voice was almost steady. ‘Besides, I would sell all the lands and properties together, not just this one estate.’

His hands were shaking, try as he might to control it, and he suspected she could feel that also. Jack lifted his fingers from the parchment, away from contact with her cold touch, even though it felt as though the document would rip as he moved them. Just an illusion, of course. This was shock, he realised. A total, complete, unexpected shock, as though the massive stones beneath his feet had shifted.

‘So, you want to buy a husband, Miss Aylmer?’ he said, wanting to shake her poise, wanting to hit back in response to the thunderbolt she had just thrown at him.

‘Are not all marriages between people of breeding a matter of exchange?’ Madelyn Aylmer asked, so coolly that it was an effort to keep the masking smile on his lips. ‘They always have been, right down the ages. Titles for wealth, alliances for land, property for position. If this was the fourteenth century I would have been married off as a child for just those reasons. I cannot believe that the motives for aristocratic marriages are so different today. Or are you so resigned to your lost lands and status that you are hoping to make a love match?’

She was not used to fighting, Jack realised, pulling himself together with what felt like a physical effort. Under all that careful control, those pricking questions, Madelyn Aylmer was nervous and that was probably the only thing stopping him from losing his temper. Perhaps she was not even used to talking to men who were not her father or her own staff. If that was the case, then she had guts dealing with this alone, he had to admire her for that. She could have had no idea how he would react to her revelations. Somewhere at the back of his mind was a feeling of surprise that he was not shouting, was not overturning this great slab of a table in sheer shock and frustration.

He put his hands on the old oak, not touching the document, and let what had just happened sink in. He had been offered the chance to regain everything his father and brother Roderick had squandered, everything his sick, confused grandfather had allowed them to snatch. Everything . Land, property, status. The title. Pride.

No, that was wrong, he told himself as the words buzzed and rang through his brain. His pride, his self-esteem, did not rest on what he owned, but on what he did. He had fought that battle with himself in the months following his brother’s death in a drunken fall down the front steps of his club as he celebrated inheriting the title. It had taken almost a week to come to terms with what he had inherited: an empty title and a mountain of debts.

At the end of that painful struggle with reality he knew he had made the right decision—he was not going to be Lord Dersington, pitied for his vanished inheritance, sneered at for pretending to a standing he could no longer support. He would be his own man, a new man. It had not stopped the sneers, of course, it had only increased them. If there was one thing his class hated, it was someone turning their back on inherited status. It devalued the entire concept.

Now he was being offered his birthright back and he could feel the weight of the generations it represented pressing down on him. As he stared at the parchment, something stirred deep in his soul, the flick of a dragon’s tail of possessiveness, of desire. This is mine by right.

Jack looked at the woman opposite him. He could say Yes , pick up those papers, live a new life. The life he had been destined to live. All that was required of him was to sacrifice his pride and to accept being a bought man. But there were two people in this equation.

What if Madelyn Aylmer was as eccentric as her father? She seemed to have lived cloistered in this place for years. What if she could not cope with the outside world that she had called a world of steam and speed and cities, of poverty and ugliness ? But it was an exciting world, his world, full of scientific and technical advances, full of discoveries and possibilities. He was not going to turn his back on that to pander to the bizarre fancies of this woman. If she married him, then she was marrying a man of the nineteenth century and she was going to have to change and conform to his world, his time, not drag him back into her fantasies.

Every instinct screamed at him to snatch at what was being offered, but even so… He could not take advantage of a woman who, not to put too fine a point upon it, might not be in her right mind. ‘You are doing this because it is what your father wanted,’ Jack said, before common sense and self-interest could assert themselves. ‘Is it what you truly desire, to marry a man you do not know? You must forgive my frankness, Miss Aylmer, but I want children, an heir, and that involves, shall we say, intimacy.’

‘I want that, too.’ She was blushing now for the first time and with her pale skin he thought the effect was like a winter sunrise staining the snow pink. ‘I mean, I want children and I am quite well aware what that entails. I am not ignorant.’