Kitabı oku: «Snowbound With The Heir»

CHAPTER ONE

TORI EDWARDS STARED up at the crenellations and chimneys of Stonebury Hall and wondered which eighteenth-century aristocrat had decided to build a house with battlements in the middle of nowhere, on the north-westerly edge of the North York Moors National Park. Who did they think they were defending themselves from out there anyway?

She supposed the answer was probably in the plastic information file she’d been given on arrival, but her fingers were too frozen to open it and check. The agent who’d welcomed them could probably have told her too, but Tori wasn’t here for the guided tour. She was here to judge exactly how Stonebury Hall could be the next link in the Earl of Flaxstone’s chain of profitable estates, since apparently he’d bought it without consulting her, his deputy, anyway. The agent could only tell her what the property had been. She needed to explore it alone to get a feel for what it could be.

That said, maybe she could explore inside for a while, on the off chance it was ever so slightly warmer away from the biting wind. She looked up at the crenellations again. The stonework matched the heavy grey of the sky, and the whole building gave off a ‘go away’ vibe. She had a suspicion that inside would be just as chilly.

Still, she needed to see the rooms too. Get a feel for if this building was itching to be a hotel, or a business centre, or a restaurant and tea room with craft and independent shops around it. Maybe a place for team-building retreats. Or a farm shop and café, if the land around it proved profitable. So many options…and, for once, Tori might actually get to decide what happened to the space next. Her own project, her chance to show the earl how far she’d come in his employ, that she was ready for more—more responsibility, more challenges, more independence. More life.

‘This place is smaller than it looked on the agent’s website.’ A clipped, plummy voice swept in on the cold draught through the windows, before its owner even appeared in the room. Wasn’t it just like Jasper, Viscount Darlton, the earl’s only son, to assume she’d be there waiting breathlessly to hear him talk? ‘Come have a look at the kitchens.’

He disappeared back through the doorway, not even waiting to see if she followed. Typical. Jasper always expected women to be at his beck and call—there when he wanted them, and then gone when he didn’t. Just like everything else in his privileged life, she assumed.

She did follow him, though. Not because of his aristocratic manner, or his dark, handsome looks, or even his air of expectation and confidence. Because it was her job.

And because she wanted to see the kitchens. She was definitely leaning towards some sort of culinary enterprise for this place…

‘Huh.’ She looked around what, in a building without battlements, would have been a nice, average, farmhouse kitchen, with space for a dining table.

‘See what I mean?’ Jasper ran his hand over the battered wooden table in situ. ‘This is more like an oversized home than a commercial property.’

A place can be both, Tori thought, but didn’t say. Just those simple words would give away more of her past than she’d be comfortable with Jasper—or anyone in her new life—knowing. It was the sort of comment that would raise questions. Ones she was far happier not answering.

She’d let Jasper get too close precisely once in her life. It wasn’t a mistake she intended to repeat.

‘It’s cosy,’ she admitted instead. ‘But I can still see a lot of potential here. I’m going to go check out the other rooms.’

She’d meant alone, but Jasper followed her all the same, adding his own observations about the property. To Tori’s irritation, she found they often matched her own—which meant she then went out of her way to find evidence to the contrary. Apparently, five years away from Flaxstone hadn’t made the earl’s heir any less irritating or persistent. Or maybe she was just oversensitive to it, given the last time they’d seen each other.

Strange to think that for one night she’d honestly thought there might be more to him than the spoilt playboy he portrayed to everyone else. Stupid of her, really.

‘This would be a fantastic master bedroom,’ Jasper said, once they’d reached the upstairs. He crossed the room to the window—rising from Jasper’s waist level almost to the high ceiling, and wide enough to fit a cosy loveseat beneath. ‘Look at those views over the moors.’

Tori didn’t want to look. Out of that window was just another memory she was working on forgetting. She knew what those moors looked like. She’d grown up there. And she was far happier now she was away from them, she reminded herself, in case nostalgia slipped in again just at the sight of the landscape. Living in the tiny cottage on the earl’s estate, just south of York, was far more pleasant. And more than that, a sign of how far she’d come. How right she’d been to leave.

Whatever the consequences had been.

It was important to always remember that. Especially at this time of year, when the temptation to go back was so strong.

‘Those clouds look heavy,’ Jasper added, squinting up at the grey skies. ‘Did they forecast more snow? I know they’re even talking about a white Christmas.’

‘That’ll be good for the Christmas fair at the estate,’ Tori replied. That was what this season meant to her now. Revenue and marketing potential. It was better that way.

‘I was rather thinking it would be good for snowball fights.’ Jasper turned away from the window with a wicked grin.

Tori rolled her eyes. ‘Your father is hoping for a spectacular event this year.’

Jasper’s grin fell away at her mention of the earl. Interesting.

What had brought the errant Viscount Darlton home to Flaxstone, after five long years away? Tori found herself wondering—not for the first time—as they toured the rest of the upstairs of the house, then made their way back to the wide entrance hall. Before he’d left, Jasper had been the quintessential aristocratic playboy. Laid-back, permanently amused by life, and confidently parading a selection of beautiful women through Flaxstone Hall—and never the same one twice.

He’d also been an incurable flirt, and seen Tori as a challenge, she figured, since she couldn’t imagine why he’d waste time flirting with her otherwise. Not when he had all those moneyed honeys to seduce.

Since he’d returned to Flaxstone, Jasper was still all those things, but with a darker edge to them somehow, one she didn’t quite understand. And it niggled at her, not knowing what had changed.

Not knowing why he’d left in the first place.

If she had more of an ego she’d think he’d left and then returned purely to make her life hell, except she was certain she didn’t rank that high in his thinking or priorities. Except for that one night, just before he’d left. He’d been thinking about her then, as he’d kissed his way across her naked body, whispering her name against her skin in the darkness.

But that night was something she definitely wasn’t thinking about. Ever again. It was another thing that was better left in the past. She’d known better then, and she absolutely knew better now.

‘I think we’ve seen all we need to see,’ Jasper told the agent, who was loitering in the chilly hallway waiting for them, his hands jammed into his armpits to try and keep warm. ‘Right, Tori?’

She tried to think of a reason to disagree, just on principle, but nothing sprang to mind, and it was cold, so she gave a short nod of agreement.

‘We’ll be back in touch to organise our next moves once we’ve shared our findings and ideas with the earl,’ she said, shaking hands with the agent before they left. With the sale in the bag already, he didn’t seem particularly bothered by how long that might take, or what they had planned for the place.

‘My turn to drive.’ Jasper held out his hand for the keys to the four-by-four as they strode across the gravel driveway to where she’d parked, an hour or more earlier.

Tori’s fingers flexed around the keys in her pocket, reluctant to give them up. ‘I can drive back.’

‘I know you can. You drove here, after all. Which is why it’s my turn,’ Jasper said, with exaggerated patience.

Tori hesitated, and he sighed.

‘What? Are you afraid I’ll crash? Or steal you away to some secluded inn in some village and treat you to dinner—I am actually starving, though, so that one might happen.’

Depends on the inn.

But she couldn’t tell him that either, so, reluctantly, she handed over the keys.

‘Thank you.’ Jasper’s smile was wide, bright and genuine—the sort of smile only someone raised with advantages rather than disasters could smile.

It just made her resent him more.

‘Come on,’ she said as she opened the passenger-side door and climbed in. ‘I want to get home.’

Home to Flaxstone, that was, where she could put the past firmly behind her again. Not anywhere along the way that might have once held the title of ‘home’.

Because maybe once she was safely back in her bright, light and solitary cottage, she’d be able to stop thinking about the one night she’d spent with Jasper, and forget all about a dark, cosy inn out on the moors that she used to call home.

Jasper eased himself into the driver’s seat and immediately turned up the car’s heating. It was colder than ever out there—chillier even than his father’s reception when he’d returned home to Flaxstone a week or so earlier. And Jasper hadn’t honestly thought that was possible.

The earl, in all his aristocratic glory, had obviously decided that the rift in the family had to be Jasper’s fault, rather than a result of his own behaviour. Jasper had had plenty of time to think about it over the past five years, and the only conclusion he’d been able to reach was that his father’s life hadn’t ever allowed for the possibility of not getting everything he wanted—so he just took it, and to hell with the consequences for everybody else.

Well. One thing he couldn’t just take was his son’s respect. That had been lost five years ago when he’d discovered the truth about his father—and nothing that had happened since showed any signs of the earl winning it back.

But he was done thinking about his father for the day. He’d done what he came here to do.

Coming back to the UK at all hadn’t been his first choice; he was happy with the life he’d forged over in America, with the reputation he’d built up and the portfolio of work he’d created. But then his father had emailed and told him that, given Jasper’s absence, he intended to legitimise his other son as his heir, too. The title was Jasper’s by law, and Flaxstone went with the title, but everything else—the business, the money, the properties—that was the earl’s to distribute as he pleased.

And apparently his illegitimate son by the housekeeper was what pleased him most. The son Jasper had only discovered existed by accident, five years ago, and the reason he’d left home in the first place.

His best friend, Felix.

Jasper hadn’t come back for the money, or the property, or the business. He’d come back for his reputation and, most of all, for his mother.

And it was his mother that had brought him to Stonebury Hall with Tori.

Stonebury Hall would be the perfect home for his mother, if Jasper couldn’t dissuade his father from making a big, public announcement, and the earl went through with his latest, ruinous plan. Jasper wasn’t even sure his mother knew about Felix, or if his father had any intention of telling her before the rest of the country. His mother, lovely and loving as she was, had never really seemed to inhabit the same world as the rest of them, as far as Jasper could tell. She was perfect for opening church fetes, throwing Christmas parties and keeping their little corner of England the way things had been fifty years ago, when she’d watched her mother run her own home in a fashion that was out of date even then, but she’d never really caught up with the changing times—or shown any desire to.

But the changing times had caught up with them.

Right now, the earl was still sticking his fingers in his ears and humming, metaphorically at least, telling himself that an illegitimate son, brought up in the household, with his mother still working at the house, was nothing in this day and age. That no one would care that the boy Jasper had grown up with, whose birthday was just weeks before his own, was actually his half-brother.

That Jasper’s father had been lying to him, and everyone else, his whole life.

People would care, that Jasper was sure of.

Jasper had cared, mightily, the day he’d found out—an accidental glimpse of some paperwork in his father’s office that had turned out to be his updated last will and testament, detailing what he left to each of his sons.

That plural had nearly destroyed him on its own. Hearing the details from his own father, and realising that Felix already knew exactly who his father was—that was what had driven him away completely.

And now the earl was talking about legitimising Felix, handing responsibility for some of the estates over to him, since, as he put it, ‘My other son seems to have disowned us altogether.’

The media was going to have a field day with that. And Jasper wanted to protect his mother from that, even if he couldn’t protect himself.

She needed a retreat, a bolthole, somewhere to hide away from the media, the public, and her husband for a while. Or for ever. And Stonebury Hall would be perfect for that.

Now he just needed to convince the earl to let him make it happen. His father might be the one who decided on the estate’s investments and built up the property portfolio, but the actual work of transforming these places into whatever it was they believed they could be—and make money as—was delegated to others.

And that work, that sort of huge development project, was exactly what Jasper had spent five years managing overseas. He could take it on, make it everything his mother needed. A home, perhaps with a small business involved to bring in income and give her something else to focus on. Perhaps a teashop. Or a stable yard, if the paddock at the back was large enough. He needed to examine the specifications again.

And then he needed to convince his father. Surely, once the sordid truth about him, about their marriage, was out in the world, the earl would understand that his wife needed an escape, a refuge. He wouldn’t begrudge her that, Jasper was almost certain. At least, not when he saw the inevitable backlash and scandal it caused.

It was possible that the whole announcement was just a ploy to get him back in the country, Jasper mused as he eased the car onto another tiny back road that led to another back road, and another, until they finally reached something wide enough for two cars to pass without one of them ending up in a hedge. Maybe it was all a cunning plan to appeal to Jasper’s pride, or even his greed, by threatening to give away his inheritance, responsibilities and status to Felix.

Which just showed how little his father knew him. He had plenty of money of his own these days, thanks to a lucrative career and some canny investments with his inheritance from his grandparents. And he took pride in the career and the life he’d forged for himself away from Flaxstone. As for the responsibilities, Felix was welcome to them, too. Living a life free from expectations, except the ones he placed on himself, had a lot going for it.

But he couldn’t leave his mother alone here to be humiliated and, worse, hurt. That was a step too far. If his father was going public, Jasper needed to be there when his mother found out the truth, and he needed to protect her, spirit her away from everything that followed. Preferably to Stonebury Hall.

And he was still thinking about his father.

Shaking his head, Jasper forced himself to focus on the road, the snowflakes starting to fall in earnest outside. The woman sitting next to him.

Anything except what had brought him home.

Although, he had to admit, the line in his father’s email about Tori had only added to his certainty that he urgently needed to return. He hadn’t imagined she’d still even be working for his father after all this time. And just one sentence—a note about how Felix had been working closely with her on estate business—had sent his mind spiralling back to that one night they’d spent together.

The night he’d found his father’s will.

The night before he’d confronted his father and learned the full, awful truth.

He’d left the country without speaking to her again, which was, he had to admit, a pretty shoddy move on his part. But then, she’d clearly regretted their night together because she’d got up early and crept out of her own bedroom, in her own cottage, to avoid him the morning after, so it wasn’t entirely on him.

‘So, shall we take the boring route home or the scenic one?’ he asked, grinning with a jollity he really didn’t feel.

Tori looked up from her phone, eyes wide. The silent journey so far apparently hadn’t bothered her at all—no surprise there, really. Tori Edwards was the most closed-off woman he’d ever met, so unlike all the other women he spent time with. Well, almost all the time…

He allowed himself a real smile at the memory of the one night he’d managed to slip under her defences and find the real woman hiding behind them. Tori had more battlements than Stonebury Hall, Jasper decided, remembering a time before his life had fallen apart, when trying to breach those defences had been a kind of game for him and Felix. A challenge. Something that niggled at him until he couldn’t help but strive to get her to react, to show something of her real personality—rather than those closed doors behind her eyes.

It hadn’t escaped his notice that the one time he’d succeeded was the night he’d felt more wounded and open than ever before.

Maybe it was all the thinking he’d been doing about his father, or maybe it was the snow and the enclosed space, but suddenly Jasper wanted to see if he could break through those battlements again—even if only for a moment.

‘Given the snow, I’d suggest sticking to the main roads,’ Tori said, her voice even, uninterested. At least, if a person weren’t listening carefully.

Jasper was listening very carefully. Which was why he caught the faint tremor underneath her words. She cared, one way or another, and suddenly he wanted to find out which.

He needed a new challenge—a distraction from his disintegrating family. Persuading Tori Edwards to open up a little could be the perfect entertainment for a snowy afternoon.

He smiled, and began his campaign.

‘The snow isn’t that heavy,’ Jasper pointed out, his lazy voice easy with lack of caring. ‘And the main roads will be packed with drivers avoiding the more interesting routes. We could cut across the moors and make it home before the real weather rolls in.’

Tori glanced out of the car window. The clouds above definitely suggested that there was a lot more snow to come.

‘The weather can be different on the moors.’ She bit down on her lower lip to dispel the memories. ‘The snow might have already hit there.’

‘Or it might miss it entirely.’

That didn’t sound likely. But he was irritatingly right about how busy the main roads would be in this weather. If they could make it across the lesser-used moor roads it would be quicker—unless the snow was heavier, or too many other people had the same idea, or there was a rogue tractor or sheep blocking the road…

They were idling now at the crossroads, the junction where Jasper had to choose which path to follow. Any minute now another car would come up behind them and start beeping its horn—not that Jasper seemed bothered about holding other people up. She wasn’t sure he’d ever realised that it was human to worry about anyone else’s feelings.

Normal, empathetic people didn’t leave the country for five years after sleeping with a person, and then never mention it again.

‘Don’t you ever take a risk?’ he asked, that wicked grin she remembered too well on his lips.

That grin had got her into trouble before. Well, that grin and half a bottle of gin—stolen from the earl’s drinks cabinet, of course—and a bad day that had lowered her defences, if she remembered correctly.

‘Unnecessary risk is the height of foolishness.’

Of course she took risks. That was a normal part of doing business. But personal risk? That was another matter. She’d taken enough of those in the past to know what happened when the risk didn’t pay off. Okay, she’d taken precisely one. But that had been more than enough to teach her a lesson.

Her single night with Jasper had just been an extra reminder. She’d known better than to get involved, however fleetingly, with someone for whom romance was basically a sport. But she’d put her fears aside and let herself believe that there might be more to him, that he might think more of her, only for him to prove quite comprehensively that she was as unimportant to him as she’d always imagined.

She didn’t need reminding again.

‘This risk is necessary,’ Jasper announced. ‘I’m starving, and I want to get home for dinner.’

‘Your stomach is not an emergency.’

‘Maybe not to you.’ Jasper pulled on the handbrake and leant closer, looking into her eyes. ‘Are you worried about the snow? Because if it’s bad we’ll turn back. Or find that secluded inn I mentioned and have some dinner while we wait it out…’

Tori tore her gaze away from his. She wasn’t even going to imagine what he was imagining could happen between them if they did that. Jasper’s determined campaign of flirtation had always been distracting, however much she knew better than to let herself fall for it. ‘Not happening. Fine. Just get us home in one piece, okay?’

‘Your wish is my command, milady.’ Humming a few lines from a Christmas carol, Jasper took off again—heading, of course, for the road that traversed the Yorkshire moors.

Tori hunkered down in her seat. It wasn’t the snow she was scared of—not that she planned to let Jasper know that.

She knew those moors. They were her home, her playground, her life, growing up. But she’d avoided so much as driving through them for nearly eight years now. She’d made her whole life away from them—not too far away, but far enough. This was the first time the earl had sent her to look at property practically on them.

And she knew the road that Jasper would take. Knew the tiny villages and hamlets it would wend and wind through, the landmarks and features it would pass. The inn that would be sitting not far from the side of the road that they would speed past without comment, without recognising the part it had played in Tori’s life. The valley they’d pass through, without any sign of the car that had crashed into the rocks there, and torn her future apart.

The car crash that had killed Tyler, the man who was supposed to be the love of her life. Even if she’d been every bit as responsible for his death as those rocks he’d crashed into.

All of that was part of the life she’d put firmly behind her for ever.

Tori tugged her coat tighter around her, feeling a chill that the fancy four-by-four’s heating system couldn’t hope to warm. She couldn’t wait for this cursed trip to be over.