The Wagered Miss Winslow Read Online Free PDF Page B

household of women behind her, she would have to stand fast, denying Beaumont Remington what he seemed to feel his right—entrance to Winslow Manor.
    And possession of Winslow Manor. She could not forget that. The man actually believed he owned the estate. She had read the family tree traced on the inside cover of the Bible she had found on a high shelf in the library, of course, and should have recognized the Remington name at once. For Beaumont Remington was right to say that Winslow Manor had once been Remington Manor. Thirty-five years ago. A lifetime ago. Certainly more than her lifetime.
    And the Winslows had won it in a card game? It had never occurred to her to ask how her father had come by the estate. She had first seen it when she was no more than ten, as it was their most southern, most minor holding, but she had fallen in love with it on sight. When the time had come to admit that her father was dying, she had gone to him and told him that all she wanted from him, all she wanted from life, was to own Winslow Manor, and her father, loving her, had agreed to turn over the deed to her.
    There had been a hitch to the gift, of course, due to the fact that Rosalind was a female and, even worse, had not yet reached her majority. Niall’s name had been added to the deed, giving him ownership in half the estate.
    But it had been purely a legality. They had been given duplicate deeds, one bearing her name, one his. Technically, she owned the buildings, and he owned the land that it and the surrounding farms stood on. She had nearly forgotten that, probably because she had wanted to forget. After all, everyone knew that Rosalind was the owner, that her father had meant Winslow Manor to be her inheritance.
    “But half of the estate is still technically Niall’s,” she said aloud as another turn in the lane led her to the crest of a small hill and within sight of Winslow Manor. “Or at least it was.”
    She pulled the cart to a halt and looked down at the rolling hills, the fields just now being planted, and the house she had lived in for the past five years.
    Winslow Manor sat in the middle of a small dell, surrounded on three sides by artfully planted stands of trees, the whole of it encircled by a nigh brick wall in the same manner that Winchelsea had been surrounded by farms spread out to the east, north, and west. Where Wincnelsea had been designed with four gates, Winslow Manor had only two, but they were both in good repair, and with strong locks on them to keep out people not expressly invited inside.
    Not that they were ever locked.
    Not that they wouldn’t be stoutly secured the moment she could give the order.
    The house itself was not all that imposing as estate houses went, containing only three salons, a music room, library, morning room and study, and only seventeen bedrooms. But it was home. Her home. And she loved every mellow pink brick in the H-shaped, four-storied building.
    Late afternoon sunlight winked against the windows as she flicked the reins, urging the pony into movement once more, and she drove straight in through the rear gates, even though she knew Riggs would be waiting for her just inside the front door, wringing his thin hands as he paced the foyer, sure his mistress had come to grief in St. Leonard’s churchyard.
    And, she thought wryly, sighing, in an oblique sort of way, she had.

Four
     

     
    M orning arrived, as it always does, and Beau had not slept well, an occurrence that came as no surprise to him, as his shoulder had been hurting like the very devil ever since his spill, and even more after the good doctor had gotten through pushing and pulling on it. He hadn’t broken his arm after all, but only “suffered a slight dislocation of the shoulder, good sir, which I can put right if you were but to lie back and bite on this stick and let me work.”
    As Dr. Beales’ idea of “work” was to all but stand on Beau, his foot on Beau’s chest (and the doctor was not a small