The Heiress Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

if I did become your wife.”
    She met his eyes as she spoke. He just shook his head. “Stop it, do you hear me? For God’s sake, you’re quite lovely, as you must certainly know.”
    â€œPeople will tell any number of lies, offer more Spanish coin than would fill a cask if they believed one an heiress. I’m not stupid.”
    He dismounted his stallion, hooked the reins about his hand, and strode to beneath a full-leafed oak tree. “Come here. We must talk before I willingly incarcerate myself in Bedlam.”
    Ah, to stand close to him, Sinjun thought, as she obeyed him with alacrity.
    She looked up at that cleft in his chin, and without thought, she raised her hand, stripped off the glove, and her fingertip traced the cleft. He stood completely motionless.
    â€œI will make you an excellent wife. Do you promise you don’t have a troll’s character?”
    â€œI like animals and I don’t shoot them for sport. I have five cats, excellent ratters, all of them, and at night they have the hearth all to themselves. If ever it is really cold in the dead of winter, they sleep with me, but not often, because I tend to thrash about and crush them. If you mean, would I beat you, the answer is no.”
    â€œYou’re obviously very strong. I’m pleased you don’t hurt those who are weaker. Do you also care about people? Are you kind? Do you feel responsible for those people who are your dependents?”
    He couldn’t look away from her. It was very distressing, but he said, “Yes, I suppose so.”
    He thought of his huge castle, only half of it really a castle, and that one not medieval by any means but built by a Kinross earl in the late seventeenth century. He loved the castle with its towersand its crenellated battlements and its parapets and deep embrasures. Ah, but it was so drafty in some parts, so dilapidated, that one could catch an inflammation of the lung just standing in one spot for ten minutes. So much had to be done to bring the entire castle back up to snuff. And all the outbuildings and the stables, the crofts and the drainage system. And the depleted herds of sheep and cattle, and his crofters, so many of them, poor and dispirited because they had nothing, not even enough seeds to plant for crops to feed themselves, and the bloody future was so grim and hopeless if he didn’t do something . . . .
    He looked away from her, toward the line of immense town houses that lined the far side of Hyde Park. “My inheritance was sorely depleted by my father and polished off by my brother, the sixth earl, before he died. I need a lot of money or my family will be reduced to genteel poverty, and many of my dependents will be forced to emigrate, that or starve. I live in a huge old castle set at the eastern side of Loch Leven, beautiful really, not far to the northwest of Edinburgh, on the Fife Peninsula. But still, you would see it as a savage land, despite all its arable land and gentle rolling hills. You’re English and you’d see only the barren heights and crevices, and savage, rocky crags and hidden glens with torrents of rushing water bursting through them, water so cold your lips turn blue just to drink it. It’s usually not all that cold in the winter months, but the days are short and the winds occasionally heavy. In the spring the heather covers the hills with purple, and the rhododendron spreads over every crofter’s hut and even climbs the walls of my drafty castle, in all shades of pink and red and magenta.”
    He shook himself. He was prosing on like an idiot poet about Scotland and his part of it, as ifhe were parading his credentials for her inspection, and she was looking up at him, her expression rapt, taking in every word and watching his mouth. It was absurd. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, accept it. He said abruptly, “Listen, it’s true. My lands have the possibility of wealth because of all the