Jenni Fletcher - Captain Amberton's Inherited Bride

‘Just that she knew what she had to do. I thought she was talking about the will.’

‘She didn’t say she’d be here?’

‘Not specifically, no.’

He’d stormed away, seething with anger. Whatever arrangements Miss Harper had made, they clearly hadn’t been for their wedding. The idea that she might run away had never even occurred to him. He’d never imagined that she’d have either the nerve or the spirit for it, but any burgeoning admiration he might have felt had been overwhelmed by anger. She’d jilted him without even seeing him first, as if the idea of marriage to him was so abhorrent that she’d rather flee and be penniless than so much as look at him. As if his injured leg was so objectionable to her!

The insult was too great to be borne. Bad enough that he couldn’t walk more than a hundred paces without needing to rest. He wasn’t going to let some minuscule mouse of a woman make a fool of him, too! Her running away only made him doubly determined to go ahead.

Not that it had been easy to find her. She’d done an impressive job of leaving clues, but he’d learned enough about tracking in Canada to recognise a false trail when he saw one. She hadn’t taken the train, that much he’d been certain of, and to his relief no merchant vessels had left Whitby harbour that morning. After a few pointed enquiries, he’d finally taken a gamble on the moorland road, riding so furiously that Martin had eventually told him to slow down or risk laming his horse. Since his former batman only spoke when it was absolutely necessary to do so, he’d listened, then done his best to calm down and look at the situation objectively.

In retrospect, he supposed he hadn’t helped his own cause. He ought to have visited her as soon as he’d found out about the will. He’d intended to, but then his injury had flared up again, putting riding out of the question for a few days. He ought to have ordered the carriage and suffered the bumpy roads anyway, but his mind had shied away from that idea. If he were honest, his injury had been a good excuse. He hadn’t wanted to see her again. No matter how intriguing he’d found her at the ball five years ago, any attraction had long since crystallised into resentment. Aside from the way she’d taken offence—the reasons for which he still wasn’t able to fathom—that night was inextricably bound up with too many other painful memories.

That had been the last time that he’d seen either his father or Arthur, the night that he’d been banished from his home for ever, and it had all been her fault! If she hadn’t been so ridiculously oversensitive over a perfectly innocent comment about suitors, then he might never have got into an argument with his father in the first place, might have made it through the whole week of his leave without any fighting at all! Then he might have listened to Arthur, really listened, might have found a way to help him, too...

So he’d kept away from Miss Violet Harper, reluctant to face any reminder of that night, the very worst of his life until seven months ago, hoping that his mind might somehow adapt to the idea of seeing her again. It hadn’t. Whatever his first impressions had been, they’d long since been replaced by the image of an ice maiden with white hair and piercing blue eyes, cold and casually destructive—Arthur’s unwanted bride, now his.

And now he’d found her, in the midst of a snowstorm of all things! He’d hoped that reality wouldn’t match up to his fears, but the instant he’d glimpsed her—her skirts anyway, just visible beneath the horse’s flanks—he’d felt all the emotions he’d striven so hard to forget come rushing back to the surface. He’d been glad that the wheel of the cart had come loose. It had given him a task to do, something to distract his mind while he’d wrestled with a near-overwhelming feeling of grief. Anger had come next, as he’d known it would, followed by guilt. Most of all guilt. Which led back to anger again.

At last he’d steeled himself to confront her. Not that he’d been able to see much of her, with her hood pulled so low over her face as to make it well nigh invisible. Only her distinctive size had given her identity away, not to mention her voice, that same breathless purr he remembered, the one he’d found so alluring until she’d shown her true colours.

He’d striven to keep a rein on his temper. So much so that his jaw was now aching from the effort. He’d remained calm even when she’d mentioned Arthur, even when she’d flatly stated that she didn’t want to marry him—as if he wanted to marry her! The thought was just as abhorrent now as it had been when Rowlinson had informed him about the terms of the will, but it was still his father’s agreement, one he couldn’t renege on without condemning her to a life of poverty, and he couldn’t do that, no matter how much he was tempted to walk away. He’d been made responsible for her and there was one unlooked-for benefit after all. He might not want the woman, but the money... The money he could definitely do something with.

He was relieved when the trail descended at last into a valley and the imposing, snow-capped turrets of Amberton Castle appeared out of the wintry vista ahead of them. In an ironical twist that had surprised him more than anyone, his father had never actually got around to legally disinheriting him, so that after his death both the title and lands had come to him, informally at least. Returning to claim them, however, had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. After declaring that he’d never set foot in the place again, he’d never thought to return, had initially done so only because he’d had nowhere else to go.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that Arthur’s body had never been found. Without proof of his brother’s demise, the title and estate were effectively frozen, his to look after, but not to legally possess for a period of seven years. Under normal circumstances, his marriage to Violet would never have gone ahead until the legal situation was resolved, but the time limit on her father’s will made it imperative that it did so. He’d already procured a special licence. She had to marry him within one month, whether he were the heir to Amberton Castle or not.

Despite its many negative associations, however, he’d retained a genuine affection for the house itself. Probably because it had been built with his mother’s money and according to her own medieval-inspired designs. She’d been the one who’d insisted on turrets and crenellations and even a few faux arrow slits, all intended to make a thirty-five-year-old building look as if it had stood for centuries. She’d even called it a castle.

That part at least his father had approved of. Anything to bolster the family name, to make the world believe that the Ambertons were still a force to be reckoned with, not just the burnt-out, impoverished end of an ancient family, even if their depleted fortunes were entirely due to the fact that his father had never actually done anything.

Back in their heyday, Ambertons had been soldiers and adventurers, men who’d won their fortunes and titles through action. His father, by contrast, had been content to sit in his study, watching the last of his wife’s money trickle away rather than sully his hands with anything so distasteful as work or, even worse, trade. He’d never let Arthur do anything either. It was no wonder his brother had been depressed, he thought bitterly, trapped inside the house like some kind of museum exhibit. Arthur had never been rebellious enough to defy their father and when he’d asked Lance for help...

He forced the memory away, although the bitter sting of it remained. He didn’t want to think about Arthur, but he was going to honour his family’s promise anyway. He wouldn’t have chosen to shackle himself to Miss Harper either, not by a long chalk, but he was going to go ahead with the marriage, for all the same cynical reasons as his father, and simply because his father had wanted it. At long last, he was going to be the son his father had wanted him to be, with one notable difference. He wasn’t going to simply exist on the money and do nothing. He was going to restore the family fortunes, no matter what anyone might think of an Amberton going into business.