Strangers at the Altar

‘You mean that by that time, your husband’s debts were unmanageable?’

‘I mean it was too late for me to persuade my husband that his debts were not only his business but mine, too,’ Mrs McBrayne responded wryly. ‘I think I will have another, if you don’t mind.’

She was pale despite the whisky, her mouth thinned, her eyes focused inwards. When she sipped her drink, her hand trembled. Noticing that, she placed the glass carefully down. It was a common enough tale, but the way she told it was not at all common. Her feelings ran very deep. Innes was struggling to understand why.

‘I told you you wouldn’t understand,’ she said, taking him aback by seeming to read his thoughts.

He made no attempt to deny it. ‘Explain it, then,’ Innes said.

‘Imagine how you would feel if someone else was given control of your business. Imagine how you’d feel if they could make decisions about it over your head, without consulting you. Decisions that had consequences for you, but that you had no say in. Now imagine that at first you don’t realise this is going on. Then when you do realise, and you challenge this person, they tell you that they’re only doing what is expected of them. Then they tell you that you’ve no right to challenge them. And then they simply turn a cold shoulder. As a businessman, you can do something about it. You can even take action in court, if that person’s been fraudulent. As a wife...’ Mrs McBrayne spread her hands and gave him another of those bitter smiles. ‘As a wife, you can choose to make both your lives a misery with constant nagging, or you can put up and shut up. What you can’t do is change a thing. Not a single damn thing.’

Innes felt slightly sick. Having sworn all those years ago never to marry, he had never actually considered the state of matrimony from any point of view. Mrs McBrayne’s perspective was horrible, and all the more so for the almost cool way she described it. Almost cool—for he was willing to bet that her fist was tightly clenched in the folds of her gown, and there was hurt in those hazel eyes as well as anger. He felt angry on her behalf, though he knew her husband had done nothing that society would condemn. In fact, more likely society would condone, for a man was expected to take care of his wife, and a wife—was it true, that a woman was expected simply to put up and shut up, as Mrs McBrayne so succinctly put it?

Innes put his glass down, and ran an agitated hand through his hair. ‘You’re right, if I were in such a situation— It sounds intolerable.’

‘And yet I bore it,’ she said bitterly. ‘I wonder if things would have been different had I not. I thought of leaving him, but lack of funds made that impractical, and I would not go to my father. Edinburgh might appear to be a large town, but in practice it is not much more than a village. My leaving my husband’s protection would have caused quite a scandal. Besides, I was— I was ashamed.’ She glared at him as she said this. ‘I was under the misapprehension that if I’d behaved differently I could have changed my husband,’ she said. ‘It took me some time to realise that since he would never change, then I must.’

She concluded with a small, satisfied smile that made Innes wonder how, exactly, she had changed and what, exactly, the effect had been on her spendthrift husband, but before he could ask, her smile had faded. She took a sip of whisky. Her hand was quite steady now. ‘I remained with my husband, but matters between us were extremely strained. John devoted himself to myriad schemes he found to lose money, and I—I pursued a new interest of my own which was distracting and made me feel not quite so useless, but ultimately, I was burying my head in the sand. And then my father died, and his will dealt our marriage a death blow.’

‘The trust?’

She nodded. ‘I discovered later that John had asked him for money. Neither of them saw fit to inform me of that fact.’ Her eyes blazed. ‘My own father! I thought he trusted me. I thought— But there, I was wrong. Money is a matter for the man of the house, apparently.’ The fire disappeared from her eyes as quickly as it had come. ‘To cut a long and tedious story short, my father changed his will so that my entire inheritance was put into trust for my first child. He did not specify the sex, so at least I should be grateful for that—not that it makes any difference, since there is no child. When John found out, he...’ Her voice wavered, but she quickly got it back under control. ‘He was furious. He wanted to break the trust. He wanted me to find a way to break the trust, to use the law to go against my own father’s wishes. It was not exactly conducive to marital harmony. Not that there was much of that by then. When I wouldn’t cooperate—well, it seems I didn’t have to, for what was mine was actually my husband’s. Fortunately for my father’s wishes, though not so fortunately for my husband and his creditors, the trust could not be broken. And then my husband died.’

Her voice was hard. Obviously, the love she’d felt for the man she had married was long gone. ‘How?’ Innes asked, wondering fleetingly if she was about to confess to killing him. There was a bit of him that would not have been surprised. A bit of him that would have approved.

‘Pleurisy,’ she replied. ‘They found him dead drunk down in the Cowgate, out cold in a puddle. Heaven knows how long he’d been there or where he’d been before. He had not been home for three days.’

Was that what she’d meant when she implied she knew more than any respectable woman ought, about the women who plied their business in that scurrilous area? He wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to distract her. Despite the sorry tale she’d told him, she was defiant, and he couldn’t help but admire her for that. ‘I take it then, that your husband left you with nothing?’ Innes said.

‘Nothing but debts. Not even my jointure, for it was to be sourced from investments that are now worthless. There is a mortgage on our house that becomes due in a month, a year after his death, and my father’s trust is so watertight that, as Mr Thomson confirmed this morning, not even my utter ruin can break it. But you know, it’s not even the money that bothers me. It’s the extent to which I have been kept in the dark—allowed myself to be kept in the dark—not just by John, but by my father. It makes me feel about this size.’ Mrs McBrayne held her thumb and index finger about an inch apart. ‘That’s how much of a say they gave me in my own life.’

‘I am sure your father meant only to protect you.’

‘Because I’m nothing but a frail female without a mind of my own?’ she snapped. ‘It made me wonder how many hundreds, thousands more of us poor wee souls there are out there, living life blindfolded.’

‘You make it sound like a conspiracy.’

‘That’s because it feels like one, and not even Madame He...’

‘Madame He?’

‘Never mind.’ Mrs McBrayne shook her head and picked up her glass, swirled the contents, then replaced it without drinking. ‘I beg your pardon. I did not mean to become so emotional. I have made my bed, as they say, and now I must lie on it. Or not, for it is to be sold.’ She smiled tightly. ‘Like all sorry tales, this one comes with a moral. Whatever happens, I shall never again allow anyone to make my decisions for me. For good or ill, my fate will be of my own determination in the future. And now that is quite enough of me. It is your turn.’

He had a hundred questions, but she had folded her hands and her lips together, and was making a great show of listening. Innes was not fooled. Her eyes were overbright, her fingers too tightly clasped. She had taken quite a battering, one way or another. A lesser woman would have cried, or flung herself on some man’s mercy. He could not imagine Mrs McBrayne doing either. He wanted to cheer her. He wanted to tell her she would be fine, absolutely fine. He was very tempted to offer her money, but she would be mortified, to say nothing of the fact that he was pretty certain she’d also see it merely as a transfer of obligation, and he didn’t want her to feel beholden. What he wanted was for her to be free. It wasn’t so much that he felt sorry for her, though he railed at the injustice of it all, but he felt—yes, that was it—an affinity.

‘What have I said to make you smile?’

‘Your situation, Mrs McBrayne, has struck a great many chords.’

‘I do not see how. I don’t know you, but you have told me yourself you’re a self-made man and a success. Men such as you will never brook any interference in your life.’

‘Actually, that’s not true. Unfortunately, I know very well indeed what it’s like to have someone else try to bind you to their rules, to dictate your life without you having a say.’

He was pleased to see that he had surprised her. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Did I not say at the outset that we are both the victims of fathers and trusts?’ Innes replied. ‘It’s a strange coincidence, but I while you were consulting Thomson on the finer points of your father’s will, I was consulting Ballard on the very same thing. I too have been left the victim of a trust fund, only my father’s intention was not to protect me but to call me to heel, and unlike your trust, mine can be broken, though only in a very particular way.’

‘What way, Mr Drummond?’

Innes smiled thinly. ‘Marriage, Mrs McBrayne. An institution that I assure you, I abhor every bit as much as you do yourself.’

Chapter Two

Ainsley stared at him in astonishment. ‘Your father’s will sets up a trust that requires you to marry?’

‘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.’

‘Is it a great deal of money?’

Innes shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea, since I’m not even entitled to see the accounts, but the money isn’t the point, I have plenty of my own. I haven’t a clue what state the place is in at all. It could be flourishing, it could have gone to rack and ruin, for all I know.’

‘So the fall out between yourself and your father then, it was...’

‘More like a complete break. I told you, he was an old-fashioned man. Do as I say, or get out of my sight.’

Innes spoke lightly enough, but she was not fooled. ‘How long is it since you were there?’

‘Almost fourteen years. Since Malcolm—since I lost my brother.’ Innes shuddered, but recovered quickly. ‘You’re wondering why I’m so upset about the trust when I’ve spent most of my adult life away from the place,’ he said.

‘I think this has all been much more of a shock than you realise,’ Ainsley answered cautiously.

‘Aye, mayhap you’re right.’ His accent had softened, the Highland lilt much more obvious. ‘I had no inkling the old man was ill, and he’d no time to let me know. Not that I think he would have. Far better for me to be called to heel through that will of his from beyond the grave. I don’t doubt he’s looking down—or maybe up—and laughing at the mess he’s put me in,’ Innes said. ‘He knew just how it would stick in my craw, having to choose between relying on someone else to run what is mine or to take up the reins myself under such conditions. Be damned to him! I must find a way to break this trust. I will not let him issue decrees from beyond the grave.’

He thumped his fist on the table, making his glass and Ainsley jump. ‘I’m beginning to think that your situation is worse than mine after all.’

‘Ach, that’s nonsense, for I at least don’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. It’s a sick coincidence, the way the pair of us are being punished by our parents, though,’ Innes said. ‘What will you do?’

‘Oh, I’m beyond worrying right now.’ Ainsley waved her hand in the air dismissively. ‘The question is, what will you do? If only you could find a woman to marry who has no interest in actually being your wife, your problems would be solved.’

She spoke flippantly, more to divert his attention from her own tragic situation than anything, but Innes, who had been in the act of taking another sip of whisky, stopped, the glass halfway to his lips, an arrested look in his eyes. ‘Say that again.’

‘What? That you need to marry...’

‘A woman who has no interest in being my wife,’ he finished for her with a dawning smile. ‘A woman who is in need of a home, and has no fixed plans, who might actually be looking for a respite from her current life for a wee while. You’re right, that’s exactly what I need, and I know exactly the woman.’

‘You do? You cannot possible mean...’

His smile had a wicked light in it. ‘I do,’ Innes said. ‘I mean you.’

Ainsley was staring at him open-mouthed. Innes laughed. ‘Think about it, it’s the ideal solution. In fact, it could almost be said that we are perfectly matched, since you have as little desire for a husband as I have for a wife.’

She blinked at him owlishly. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Then I must be, for you cannot possibly be proposing marriage. Apart from the fact that we’ve only just met, I thought I had made it plain that I will never—absolutely never again—surrender my independence.’

‘I’m not asking you to. I’m actually making it easier for you to retain it, because if we get married, I can pay off all those debts that bastard of a husband of yours acquired and then you really will be free.’

‘But I’d be married to you.’

‘In name only.’

‘I owe a small fortune. I couldn’t take it from you just for the price of putting my name on a bit of paper.’

‘You’d have to come with me to Strone Bridge. The clause that specified my spending a year there doesn’t actually include my wife, but all the same, I think you’d have to come with me for a wee while, at least.’

‘That would not be a problem since, as you have already deduced, I’m going to be homeless very shortly, and would appreciate a change of scene, but I simply couldn’t think of accepting such a huge amount of money and give so little in return.’

‘What if you saw it as a wage?’ Innes asked, frowning.

‘For what?’

‘A fee, paid for professional services,’ he said, ‘and a retainer to be paid in addition each year until you are forty, which you could pay me back if you wish, when you eventually inherit, though there is no need.’

‘But I’m not a professional.’ Her eyes widened. ‘You cannot possibly mean— I told you, I was joking about the Cowgate.’

Innes laughed. ‘Not that! I meant a business professional.’ She was now looking utterly bewildered. Innes grinned. ‘The more I think about it, the more I see how perfect it is. No, wait.’ He caught her as she made to get up. ‘I promise you, I’m neither drunk nor mad. Listen.’

Ainsley sat down, folding her arms, a sceptical look on her face. ‘Five minutes.’

He nodded. ‘Think about it as a business proposal,’ he said. ‘First of all, think of the common ground. To begin with, you need to pay off your debts and I am rich enough to be able to do so easily. Second, you are a widow, and I need a wife. Since we are neither of us in the least bit interested, now or ever, in marrying someone else...’

‘How can you be so sure of that?’

‘How can you?’ He waited, but she made no answer, so he gave a satisfied nod. ‘You see? We are of one mind on that. And we are of one mind on another thing, which is our determination to make our own way in life. If you let me pay off your debts, I can give you the freedom to do that, and if you marry me, you’ll be freeing me to make up my own mind on what to do—or not—about my inheritance.’

‘But we’ll be tied to one another.’