Outside, her car sparkled in the autumn sunshine. She ought to drive into Chester to collect some supplies. Her car was only two years old, an expensive model that she would never have dreamed of buying, but which her grandfather had insisted on giving her as a birthday present. Each time she looked at it, she mentally calculated how much she could get for it, but how could she sell Gramps’ last gift to her … a gift she was sure he could barely afford himself?
He had excused his generosity, saying testily that, since he was no longer allowed to drive, she would have to act as his chauffeur, and that he was damned if he was going to be driven about the place in one of those poky modern things.
But a Daimler … for someone in her financial position? She leaned back in the leather chair which had once been her grandfather’s. It was too large for her, and not very comfortable.
She closed her eyes tiredly, only to open them again in shock as she heard Joss saying tauntingly, ‘Finding the old man’s chair too big for you, Nell? Just like his shoes, eh?’
‘Joss! What are you doing here?’
She sat up, flustered that he should have caught her off guard. She was already all too well aware of the most comical contrast she must be to the women in his life … beautiful, expensively groomed women. She hated him seeing her when she wasn’t prepared.
‘It’s quarter day—remember?’
Quarter day … of course Her grandfather still had stuck by the old-fashioned calendar all his life, and he had left intructions in his will that every quarter day she was to present her household accounts to Joss, as first his wife and then his sister had once presented theirs to him.
‘Oh, yes, the accounts. Well, they’re all here.’
She got up tiredly, so that he could take her seat and study the books open in front of her. As she stood, her body reacted to its tiredness and she stumbled awkwardly, catching her hipbone on the corner of the desk. The impact sent a shock-wave of pain through her, making her catch her bottom lip between her teeth.
She saw Joss frown, the amber eyes flaming as they always did when he was annoyed. Of course, her clumsiness would be offensive to a man used to women who only moved with elegance.
‘You look as though you haven’t slept in a month, and you’re too thin,’ he told her brutally. ‘What the hell are you doing to yourself?’
‘Nothing,’ Nell countered, adding pettishly for some reason she couldn’t define, ‘I wish you wouldn’t allow Grania to believe that her allowance comes from Gramps’ estate, Joss. It makes it difficult for me.’
‘You know she believes this place should be sold and the proceeds split between you?’ he interrupted her.
Nell gripped the edge of the desk with slender fingers and agreed bleakly. ‘Yes.’
‘But of course your grandfather felt, as she isn’t a de Tressail by birth, that she should be excluded from inheriting from the estate. A court of law might very probably take a different point of view.’
Nell swallowed painfully. Was Joss telling her that he shared Grania’s view that Gramps had been unfair in not leaving the house to them jointly?
‘Gramps wanted the house to stay with the family. He hated the thought of it being sold.’
She had to blink back emotional tears and keep her face averted from him. She wasn’t like Grania, she couldn’t cry prettily. At Gramps’ funeral she had been too anguished to do anything more than simply watch in frozen silence. It had been Grania who wept, silent, pretty tears that barely touched her make-up, her head restling vulnerably against Joss’s chest.
She had watched them, telling herself she was a fool for the jealousy she felt. Joss would never look at her. In the three years she had known him, the only time he had come anywhere near embracing her had been the first Christmas. He had arrived at the house on Christmas Eve to see her grandfather. Nell had let him in and his eyes had gone briefly to the mistletoe hanging in the hall, and then to her mouth as he stepped inside. Even now she could still feel her pulses flutter dangerously at the recollection of that moment when she had known he was going to kiss her.
His mouth had been hard and warm and she had quivered in his arms, unable to hold back the sensations storming her. He had released her immediately, stepping back from her, and she was sure she had read derision in his eyes as her grandfather came into the hall to welcome him.
He had not touched her since, and she could hardly blame him. She was not his type of woman and she never would be.
‘I know,’ Joss told her drily. ‘One could almost say, in fact, that he was obsessed with it, to the point where the continuation of the de Tressail name and the family’s occupation of this house were more important to him than anything else. More important than you, for instance, Nell,’ he added cruelly.
‘Yes … he never really got over the fact that my father had no son,’ she agreed evenly, ignoring the look in his eyes.
‘Do you know what his plans were, had he remained alive?’ Joss asked her abruptly.
Nell looked at him. ‘Plans for what?’
‘For the continuation of the de Tressail family,’ Joss told her mockingly. ‘For your marriage, Nell, and the production of a great-grandson to carry on the name.’
‘He had no plans,’ Nell told him huskily, frowning as she saw the derision in his eyes. ‘Joss, the days are gone when families arranged marriages.’
‘Are they? Your grandfather was a desperate man, and desperate men do strange things. Six months before he died, your grandfather asked me if I would marry you.’
Nell was stunned, her white face giving away her feelings.
‘Surprised, Nell, that he should even consider such a marriage? With a self-made man like myself with no breeding or background; no family history stretching back for generation upon generation? But you forget one thing. I have one valuable asset: I’m rich … very rich. I have the money that Easterhay so desperately needs.’
Nell wasn’t listening. She swung round, her face in her hands as she murmured frantically, ‘How could he? Oh, how could he?’
‘Quite easily,’ Joss told her calmly. ‘To him, it was an almost ideal solution to your family’s problems.’
Beneath the weight of her shame and betrayal that her grandfather should humiliate her in such a way, she was desperately aware of how amused and contemptuous Joss must be. She was the very last woman he would want as his wife, and no doubt he was now going to enjoy letting her know it.
To stop him she said frantically, ‘The whole thing’s absurd. Poor Gramps. He was so ill towards the end that …’
‘His mind was as sound as yours or mine,’ Joss interrupted brutally,’ and you know it. What’s wrong, Nell? Having second thoughts now that you’re actually being called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice? It was all all right when you were playing at being the struggling Lady of the Manor, proudly trying to keep things going, but when a real solution to your problems presents itself, you flinch from taking it. No need to ask myself why, of course. I’ve no doubt that given your choice, you’d much rather have someone like Williams as a husband.
‘Unfortunately though, my dear, he has even less money than you do yourself, and you’d never keep this place going with what he earns as a country solicitor. Make your mind up to it, Nell. It’s either marry me or sell up.’
‘Marry you?’ Nell stared at him, her eyes dark with shock. ‘Joss, you can’t possibly be serious about this.’
‘Why not?’
‘But why? Why would you want to marry me?’
She