Chapter 2
WTF? Why had she even mentioned such a thing? Maybe it was time to stop reading paperback romances and start reading thrillers or horror novels instead. Lea could feel a hot flush of colour flooding her cheeks and bent down to straighten the items in her basket to disguise it.
“Of course not, are you insane?” No. Of course not. Her voice was part laugh, part gasp, and it came out shamefully high and tight. Her? His bride of convenience? No way! She wouldn’t be a convenient bride for anyone, much less Dave fucking-playboy-Borthman.
A strange silence crept from the far corners of the room, stealing oxygen particles, stilling dust motes, stirring possibilities...
Dave walked back to where she was hovering over her cleaning basket, his footsteps steady and sure. Step. Step. Step. Step. Lea slowly raised her gaze to his inscrutable one, her heart doing a crazy tap dance in her chest. She drank in the landscape of his face—the ink-black prominent eyebrows over impossibly blue eyes, the patrician nose, the sensually sculpted mouth, the steely-determined jaw. The lines of grief etched into his skin made him seem older than he was. At thirty-three, he was in the prime of his life. Wealthy, talented, a world-renowned painter—you could not find a more eligible bachelor—or one so determined to avoid commitment.
“Think about it, Lea.” His tone was deep, with a side note of roughness that made a faint shiver course through her body. A shiver of awareness. A shiver of longing that could no longer be restrained in its secret home.
Lea picked up her basket from the floor and held it in front of her body like a shield. Was he teasing her? Making fun of her? He must surely know she wasn’t marriage material—certainly not for someone like him. She was about as far away from his ex as you could get. “You are seriously out of your mind.”
“But—”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dave.”
His hand came down to touch her on the forearm, and even through two layers of clothing, her skin tingled. She looked down at his long, strong fingers and disguised a swallow. She could count on one hand the number of times he had touched her over the years and still have fingers left over. His touch was unfamiliar and strange, almost alien, and yet her body reacted like a crocus bulb to spring sunshine.
“Lea, I’m serious, this is the best—I mean, you know, clearly, like getting two birds with one stone,” he said, looking at her with watchful intensity. “I need a temporary wife to save Brathellae from being sold or destroyed, and who better than someone who loves this place as much as I do?”
“You don't love this place, Dave."
“I do,” he said, raising a brow.
She bit her lips before saying, “Maybe!”
But you don’t love me.
The words came into her head at random, but she had no way of getting rid of them. They were like gate-crashers at a party—unwelcome and intrusive. Forbidden. Yep, she definitely had to switch reading genres. Lea slipped out of his hold and moved a couple of steps back, still holding her basket in front of her body. “I’m sure you can find someone much more suitable to be your wife than me.”
Someone beautiful.
Someone glamorous.
Someone perfect.
"I’m not talking about a real marriage here.” His frown was back, his voice as steady and calm as a patient teacher speaking to a slow student. “It would be a marriage on paper and would only last a year, max. We wouldn’t even have to go through the charade of a big wedding. We could marry privately with only the minimum witnesses required to make it legal.”
Lea rolled her lips together, her gaze slipping away from his. Her mind was wheeling round and round like a hamster on performance-enhancing drugs. A short-term marriage to Dave Borthman to save Brathellae. To save her great-aunt and Flossie, the geriatric dog. Lea would wear Dave’s ring but not be a real bride. Given her dating record, it might be her only chance to be anyone’s bride. Could she agree to spend the year being ‘married’ to Dave? Living with him for all intents and purposes as if they had married for all the right reasons?
But who would ever believe she was the love of his life?
Lea brought her gaze back up to meet his. “Aren’t you worried about what people might say? I mean, the upstairs-downstairs thing? I’m the housekeeper’s orphaned great-niece. You’re the lord of the castle. I’m hardly what anyone would consider a suitable bride for you.”
His frown carved a trench between his midnight-blue eyes. “Why are you so hard on yourself? You’re a beautiful young woman. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
Wow. A compliment.
A warm glow flooded through her body, her self-esteem waking from a coma. Beautiful, huh? That certainly wasn’t what her mirror told her, but Dave had never seen the full extent of her scars. But a compliment was a compliment, and she was going to take it at face value for once. She brought her gaze back to his, keeping her tone even. “And what happens when the year is up?”
“We have the marriage annulled and get on with our lives as before, easy pissy!”
Lea put down the cleaning basket and wiped her suddenly damp palms on her thighs. She had suffered temptation before and mostly resisted. Mostly. But walking past a bowl of her great-aunt’s Belgian chocolate mousse was clearly not in the same league as agreeing to be
Dave’s temporary bride. She would be in close contact with him, not sleeping with him but living with him.
Sharing his life for a whole year.
How was she going to stop herself from developing feelings for him? Feelings that were already lurking in the background, like a secret smouldering coal that only needed a tiny whiff of oxygen to leap into a scorching hot flame. She could feel it now—the slow burn of attraction that made her aware of every movement he made. Every time he took a breath, every time he frowned, every time his gaze meshed with hers.
“I don’t expect you to do this for nothing, Lea. I’ll make sure you are financially well compensated.” He named a figure that made her eyebrows shoot up so high they nearly flew off her face.
Now was probably not the time to tell him she would have done it for free. There was probably never going to be that time. Dave had loved deeply and had tragically lost that love. No woman would ever take the place of his fiancée, and any woman who thought she could would be a silly romantic fool.
But the amount of money he was offering would allow Lea to expand her cleaning business into a household concierge service as well. She could take on more staff so she didn’t have to do so much of the physical work, which increasingly tired her. It would mean she could be at the helm of her business, playing to her strengths instead of her weaknesses.
Lea raised her chin, keen to portray a cool and steady composure she was nowhere near feeling. “I’d like a day or two to think about it.” She was proud of the evenness of her tone given the pitty-pat, pitty-pat hammering of her pulse.
His expression barely changed, but she sensed a restrained relief sweeping through him. “Of course. It’s a big decision and not without its risks, which brings me to a difficult but necessary discussion.”
Lea knew where he was going with this, and it annoyed her that he thought her so gauche for it to even be a possibility for her to fall in love with him. She was definitely no Jane Eyre. She might find him ridiculously attractive, and her pulse might go a little crazy when he was around, but that’s as far as it could ever go. As far as she would let it go. She had willpower, didn’t she? She would send it to boot camp ASAP.
She raised her brows in twin arcs of derision. “Oh, the one about me not getting any silly ideas about falling head over heels in love with you?”
Heels? Now that was the stuff of fantasy.
If he was taken aback by her bluntness, he didn’t show it. “I would hate for you to get hurt in the process of helping me save Brathellae. We both love this place, but that doesn’t mean we have to fall in love with each other.”
Lea painted a stiff smile on her lips, but something inside her shrivelled. Of course, he would never fall in love with her. Why would he? She was more or less invisible to him and had been for the past fourteen years. But for him to rule the possibility out at the get-go was still a slap in the face to her feminine ego. ‘Message received loud and clear.’
He gave a slight nod, the quiet intensity of his gaze unsettling her already shaky equilibrium.
“Here—I’ll carry your basket downstairs for you.”
He stepped forward to pick up her basket, and at the same time, she bent down to get it. Their hands met on the handle, and a jolt of electricity shot up Lea’s arm and straight to her core, fizzing like the ignited wick of a firework. She pulled hers away and straightened, but in her haste, she lost her balance and would have fallen if it hadn’t been for the quick action of Dave grabbing her arm to hold her steady.
His fingers overlapped on the slim bones of her wrist, and another wave of heat coursed through her body. Heat that simmered and sizzled in all her secret places.
His gaze locked with hers, and she got the strangest sense that he was seeing her for the first time. The slight flare of his pupils and the gentling of his fingers around her wrist were less of a steadying hold, more like that of a caress. Lea could smell the cool, fresh lime top notes of his aftershave and the base notes of cool forest wood and country leather. She could see the various shades of blue flecks in his eyes, reminding her of flickering shadows over a deep mountain lake. His lean jaw was lightly sprinkled with regrowth, and the dark pinpricks were a reminder of the potent male hormones surging around his body.
His mouth…
Her heart skipped a beat. Her stomach flip-flopped. Her female hormones started a party. She should not have looked at his mouth. But she was drawn by an impulse she had zero control over. His lips were more or less even in volume, with well-defined contours that hinted at his determined, goal-achieving personality. She wondered what his mouth would feel like pressed to her own. Wondered and wanted, and wished for it to happen.
“Lea, are you okay? You're pale.” His voice was husky and low—as low as an intimate lover’s voice.
Lea stretched her lips into a polite smile that felt shaky around the edges. “I’m fine. Thanks. Just a little, um, dizzy!” She stepped out of his hold to create some distance between them, but she couldn’t help noticing he was opening and closing his fingers as if to remove the same tingling sensation she had felt. Or maybe he hadn’t felt tingles. Maybe he was disgusted—as disgusted as her teenage date all those years ago when he’d seen her damaged body.
“I’ll go and see to your room.” Lea injected housekeeper briskness into her tone. “I assume you’re staying for a night or two?”
“It depends.”
“On?”
His unwavering gaze held hers. “On your decision.”
“And if I say no?”
A fault line of tension rippled along his jaw, and an embittered light came into his eyes. “You and your great-aunt will no longer have a home here. Not if my sister Mary has her way,” he winked.
Dave waited until Lea had left before he let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. But truth be told, he felt like he’d been holding his breath ever since he’d found out the contents of his grandfather’s will. Nothing could have come as a shock as finding that the survival of the Brathellae estate was dependent on him finding a wife. A wife, he had resolutely decided a few months ago, he would never have.
Not after the suicide of his lover. Tragic, it was very unexpected.
Dave went back to the windows that overlooked the estate. His chest ached and burned with the thought of losing his family’s ancestral home. Generations of Borthmans had lived, loved, and died here.
He drew in a breath as rough and uneven as Highland scree. There was no other way but to marry if he was to save the estate from her sister, whom he knew was planning something. After all, he knew Mary liked Lea a lot.
But could he risk his heart again?
And who better to marry than Lea Carloth, who has lived here since she was a child?
Dave would be lying if he said he hadn’t noticed how beautiful she was. Perhaps not in a classical sense, but with her waist-length chestnut hair, creamy complexion, and grey-green eyes, she had an ethereal quality about her that was just as captivating—maybe even more so. For months since he saw her at Tyler and Mary’s wedding, she’d just been a cute little 'I don't give a damn' sort of woman, but a somewhat annoying one that lurked around his mind from time to time. He liked to annoy her too.
But it was impossible not to notice her now.
But he would have to, because he wasn’t entering into a long-term relationship.
Not now.
Not again.
Not ever.
Dave walked back over to the boxes Lea had packed and opened the lid of one that contained his grandfather’s clothes, as he thought if the estate was sold, there would be no trace left of his grandfather or his ancestors! They would be gone. Lost. Erased.
He had been straight with Lea on the terms of the deal. Brutally straight, but he was unapologetic for it. He had no intention of hurting her by giving her false hope. A marriage of convenience was the only way he could save his family’s home. A home Lea had loved from the moment she’d arrived to live with her great-aunt Evelyn. If Dave thought Mary would do the right thing by Brathellae, he wouldn’t have bothered with the messy business of fulfilling the terms of the will.
But lately he’d become aware of Mary’s habit of asking him to get married. A disturbing habit that had run up some eye-watering NO from him. His sister saw Brathellae differently from him.
Mary didn’t have the same deep connection with the estate Dave had. Once his sister got hold of Brathellae, she would sell it to the highest bidder and walk away from the estate that had been in their family for centuries. That's what she told him, but yeah. He believed her.
But selling Brathellae wasn’t going to happen if Dave could help it. He would enter a short-term marriage to protect a long-term estate. To protect the legacy of his great-great grandfather.
And he would do the right thing by Lea by making sure she had no illusions about their marriage from the get-go. He would pay her generously for her time as his wife. They would marry as friends and part as friends. He knew how much this place meant to her—how much she used it as a base when she wasn’t in Edinburgh, where she ran her small business. Any niggling of his conscience, he settled with the conviction that he was helping her in the long run. He was offering her a staggering amount of money to be his temporary wife.
How could Lea possibly say no?