The Timber Baron's Virgin Bride

She certainly was different from the rather gauche innocent who sometimes appeared in his dreams.

Bryn had to quell an impulse to exact a sweet revenge on her lovely mouth even as it mocked him.

There was an intriguing dislocation between the Rachel Moore he remembered and the Rachel he’d met today. Now and then a glimpse of the ardent, uncomplicated girl peeked through the cool reserve of the woman, arousing in him a capricious desire to probe deeper and find out just how much she had really changed.

Daphne Clair lives in subtropical New Zealand, with her Dutch-born husband. They have five children. At eight years old she embarked on her first novel, about taming a tiger. This epic never reached a publisher, but metamorphosed male tigers still prowl the pages of her romances, of which she has written over thirty for Harlequin Mills & Boon, and over sixty all told. Her other writing includes non-fiction, poetry and short stories, and she has won literary prizes in New Zealand and America.

Readers are invited to visit Daphne Clair’s website at www.daphneclair.com

THE TIMBER BARON’S VIRGIN BRIDE

BY

DAPHNE CLAIR

CHAPTER ONE

“RACHEL?” BRYN DONOVAN’S grey-green eyes sharpened as he met his mother’s cornflower-blue gaze.

Black brows drawing closer together, he sat slightly forward on the dark green velvet of the wing-chair that, like most of the furniture in the room, had been in the family for as long as the big old house. “You don’t mean Rachel Moore?”

Pearl, Lady Donovan spread her hands in a surprised gesture. Her slight frame seemed engulfed by the wide chair that matched the one her son occupied on the other side of the brass-screened fireplace.

“Why not?” Her mouth, once a perfect cupid’s bow, today painted a muted coral, firmed in a way Bryn knew well. Behind the scarcely lined milk-and-roses complexion and artfully lightened short curls was a keen brain and a will of solid iron.

Bryn said, “Isn’t she rather young?”

His mother laughed as only a mother can at a thirty-four-year-old man whose name in New Zealand’s business and financial circles engendered almost universal respect. The nay-sayers were mostly competitors jealous of the way he had expanded his family company and increased its already substantial fortunes, or employees who had fallen foul of his rigidly enforced standards. “Bryn,” she chided him, “it’s ten years since her family left us. Rachel is a highly qualified historian, and I’m sure I told you she’s already written a book—in fact, two, I think.”

He could hardly tell her he’d tried to expunge all information about the girl from his mind.

Pearl pressed on. “You know your father always intended to write a family history.”

“He talked about it.” It had been one of the old man’s planned retirement projects, until an apparently harmless penchant for the best wines and liqueurs had wreaked a sudden and fatal revenge.

“Well—” the widow’s prettily determined chin lifted “—I want to do this as a memorial to him. I thought you’d be pleased.” A suspicious sheen filmed her eyes.

Bryn’s reputation as a hard-headed though not unprincipled businessman wasn’t proof against this feminine form of assault. His mother had emerged from a year and a half of grieving to at last show real interest in something. Her expression today was less strained and her movements more purposeful than since his father’s death.

That Rachel Moore’s barely seventeen-year-old face under a halo of soft, unruly dark hair, her trusting brown eyes and shockingly tempting, too-young mouth occasionally entered Bryn’s dreams, and left him on waking with a lingering guilt and embarrassment, was his own problem. He couldn’t in conscience pour cold water on his mother’s new project.

He said, “I thought she was in America.” Rachel had gone to the States for postgraduate study after gaining her MA in English and history, and had since been teaching university students there.

“She’s back.” Pearl looked pleased. “She’s taking up a lectureship in Auckland next year, but she needs something to tide her over for six months or so because of the different semesters from America. It’s ideal, and so nice that we can get someone who isn’t a stranger to do this for us. She can stay here—”

“Here? Aren’t her parents—” The former estate manager and his wife, who had helped with housekeeping, had left to go sharemilking in the lush green fields of the Waikato district when their daughter started her university studies there. Bryn had vaguely assumed the only contact with his own family since then had been a yearly exchange of Christmas cards and family news. But his mother had always been an inveterate telephone user.

“She’s with them now,” Lady Donovan told him, “and ready to start in a week or two. She’ll need access to our family records, and I wouldn’t let them go out of the house.” Her expression became faintly anxious. “Of course it will cost, but surely we can afford—”

“No problem,” he assured her, reluctantly conceding a rare defeat. “If she wants the job.” With any luck Rachel might turn it down.

Pearl gave him her sweetest smile. “Her mother and I have it all arranged.”

Rachel had told herself that in ten years Bryn Donovan would have changed, perhaps lost some of his thick, dark hair, developed a paunch from too many business dinners, his aristocratic nose reddened and broadened by the wine imbibed with those dinners if he took after his father. Not that Sir Malcolm hadn’t also worked hard and been generous with the fruits of his labours—his knighthood owed as much to his contribution to the national economy as did his public philanthropy.

But his only son and heir was as good-looking as ever.

As she alighted from the bus in Auckland she immediately spotted him among the dozen or so people waiting to greet other passengers or to climb aboard. As if they recognised a man who required more space than ordinary mortals, he seemed to stand apart from those milling around him.

Jeans hugged his long legs. A casual black knit shirt hardly concealed broad shoulders and a lean torso that showed no sign of flab.

If anything had changed much, it was that his habitual understated self-assurance had morphed into a positively commanding presence. Something fluttered in Rachel’s midriff and she hesitated on the bottom step of the bus before stepping onto the pavement.

Bryn’s eyes seemed silvery in the afternoon light as he inspected the arrivals. When the sweep of his gaze found her and she started towards him, she saw a flash of surprised recognition.

He didn’t move, except that his mouth curved slightly into a controlled smile as he watched her approach, while his eyes appraised her jade-green linen jacket over a white lawn blouse, the matching skirt that skimmed her knees, and the Brazilian plaited leather shoes she’d worn for travelling.

He seemed to approve, giving a slight nod before raising his eyes again to the dark hair she’d tamed into a tight knot, which she hoped gave both an illusion of extra height and a mature, businesslike appearance.

Only when she came to a halt in front of him did she notice the incipient lines fanning from the corners of his eyes, a faint crease on his forehead.

“Rachel,” he said, his voice deeper than she remembered. “You look very…smart.”

Meaning, she supposed, she was no longer the hoydenish teenager he remembered. “It’s been a long time.” She was glad her voice sounded crisp and steady, befitting a successful woman. “I’ve grown up.”

“So I see.” A spark of masculine interest lit his eyes, and was gone.

Rachel inwardly shivered—not with fear but an emotion even more perturbing. Ten years and he still affected her this way. How stupid was that?

“Your mother…?” she inquired. When Mrs Donovan— Lady Donovan now, Rachel reminded herself—had said on the phone, “But of course we’ll pick you up in Auckland… No, you can’t struggle onto another bus to Donovan’s Falls with your luggage…and a computer, too, I suppose,” Rachel hadn’t thought “we” meant Bryn.

“She’s waiting for us at Rivermeadows,” he told her, “with coffee and cakes.”

Once they’d collected her luggage and were on their way out of the city in his gleamingly polished BMW, Rachel removed her gaze from the mesmeric, sun-sequined blue of the Waitemata harbour’s upper reaches alongside the motorway and said, “Thank you for picking me up. I hope it hasn’t inconvenienced you.”

“Not at all,” he replied with smooth politeness.

“But you don’t live at home—I mean, at Rivermeadows now, do you?” she queried, keeping anxiety from her voice. Hadn’t her mother said something about Pearl “rattling around alone in that huge house”?

“I have an apartment in the city,” he confirmed. “But since my father died I’ve been spending most weekends with my mother, and occasionally staying during the week. I suggested she move out of the place, but she seems attached to it.”

The Donovan estate had once been the centrepiece of a small, scattered rural community, but even before Rachel and her family left, it had become an island of green amongst creeping suburbia, not far from a busy motorway.

“It’s only half an hour or so from the city,” Rachel reminded him. “Does your mother still drive?” She recalled Pearl Donovan had adored her sporty little cherry-red car, sometimes driving in a manner that caused her husband and son to remonstrate, at which she only laughed, saying they had the common male prejudice about women drivers.

A frown appeared between Bryn’s brows. “She’s hardly left the house since my father died.” He paused, then said with a sort of absentminded reluctance in his tone, “Maybe having you there will be good for her.”

If he wasn’t overjoyed, it wouldn’t have been Rachel’s preferred choice, either. When her own mother, so pleased with herself, said she’d found the perfect temporary job for her newly arrived daughter, Rachel had to hide dismay on discovering it was at Rivermeadows.

She’d covered it by saying, “It’s…um…so far away from you and Dad.” To which her mother replied logically that it wasn’t nearly as far as America.

Unable to find a more convincing excuse, especially as the hourly rate was way beyond what she could expect from any other temporary position, Rachel saw no choice but to accept. She didn’t intend to sponge on her parents for months.

Hoping she’d mistaken Bryn’s decidedly unenthusiastic tone, she said, “I’m looking forward to seeing Rivermeadows again. I have some wonderful memories of it.”

He cast an unreadable glance at her that lingered for a tiny moment before he switched his attention back to the road.

Rachel turned to look out of the window, trying not to think about one particular memory, having sensibly persuaded herself that he’d have forgotten the incident entirely. It might have been a defining moment in her young life, but while she’d been a bedazzled teenager with an overflow of emotion, even back then Bryn was already a man, someone she’d always thought of as one of the grown-ups.

She said, “I was sorry to hear about your father.” Risking a quick look at Bryn, whose expression now appeared quite indifferent, she added, “I sent a card to your mother.”

He nodded. “His death was hard on her.”

The frown reappeared, and Rachel said softly, “You’re worried about her.”

“It’s that obvious?”

About to say, Only to people who care about you, she stopped herself. He’d think she was presuming on an old acquaintance, and rightly so. Devoutly she hoped he had never realised how closely she’d watched his every movement or expression for a whole year or more every time he came near.

Since then she’d become a different person, and maybe he had too. At twenty-five he’d been handed full responsibility for a new sector of the Donovan business, Overseas Development. And he’d run with it, done spectacularly well at bringing the Donovan name to the notice of international markets and establishing subsidiaries in several countries. Now he was in charge of the entire company. No wonder he gave the impression of a man who had the world securely in his fist and knew exactly how to wring from it every advantage.

The house was as Rachel remembered it, a beautifully preserved, dormered two-storey mansion of white-painted, Donovan-milled kauri timber, dating from the late nineteenth century. Its upper windows were flanked by dark green shutters, and a rather grand front veranda extended into a pillared portico.

Old oaks and puriris and the magnificent magnolia that bore huge creamy, fragrant cups of blossom, cast their benign shadows over the expansive lawn and gardens, and the half circle of the drive was still edged with lavender and roses.

Bryn stopped the car at the wide brick steps leading to the ornate front door sheltered by the portico. Almost immediately the door opened and Pearl Donovan, wearing a pale lemon, full-skirted dress, stood for a moment, then hurried down the steps. Rachel went to meet her and was enveloped in a warm, scented hug, her cheek kissed.

“How nice to see you!” Lady Donovan stepped back with her hands on Rachel’s shoulders to inspect her. “And you’ve grown so lovely! Isn’t she lovely, Bryn? Quite beautiful!”

Bryn, having removed Rachel’s luggage from the car, had his hands full, the laptop case slung over one shoulder. “Quite,” he said. “Where do I put her stuff?”

“The rose room,” his mother told him. “I’ll go and put on the kettle now, and when you’re settled, Rachel, we’ll have coffee on the terrace.”

Rachel followed Bryn up the staircase to one of the big, cool bedrooms. The door was ajar and Bryn pushed it wide with his shoulder, strode across the carpet to a carved rimu blanket box at the foot of the double bed covered in dusky-pink brocade, and deposited the suitcase on top of the box, the smaller bag holding her reference books on the floor. “Do you want your laptop on the desk?” he asked. “Although you’ll probably be working in the smoking room downstairs.”

It was many years, Rachel knew, since anyone had smoked in what was really a private library, but it retained its original name within the family.

She nodded. “Thank you,” she said, and Bryn placed the computer on an elegant walnut desk between long windows flanked by looped-back curtains that matched the bed cover.

He looked about at the faded pink cabbage roses that adorned the wallpaper. “I hope you’ll be comfortable,” he said. Obviously he wouldn’t have been.

Rachel laughed, bringing his gaze to her face. His mouth quirked in response, and the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled a little. “My mother’s right,” he said. “You have grown up beautiful.”

Then he looked away. “Your bathroom’s over there.” He nodded to a door on one side of the room. “You’ll have it to yourself. If you don’t find everything you need, I’m sure my mother will provide it. I’ll see you downstairs.”

He crossed to the door, hesitated a moment and turned. “Welcome back, Rachel.”

She heard his soft footfalls on the hall runner, then on the stairs, still muffled but faster, as though he were hurrying away from her.

After freshening up and exchanging her shoes for cool, flat-heeled sandals, Rachel went downstairs and crossed the big dining room to the French windows that led onto the brick-paved terrace.

Bryn and his mother were sitting at a glass-topped cane table. A large tray held cups and saucers and a china coffee pot with matching milk and sugar containers.

Bryn got up immediately and pulled out another cushioned cane chair for Rachel. The grapevine overhead on its beamed support shadowed his face, and dappled his mother’s dress.

While Lady Donovan poured coffee and talked, he sat back in his chair, looking from her to Rachel with lazy interest that might have been feigned. There was a vitality about Bryn, a coiled-spring quality that didn’t fit easily with leisurely afternoon teas. He curled his hand around his cup as he drank, and his eyes met Rachel’s with a hint of amusement as his mother opened a barrage of questions about life in America.

When their cups were empty Rachel offered to help clear up. But Pearl, who had insisted Rachel was old enough now to call her by her given name, shook her head. “I’ll deal with these. We haven’t brought you here to do housework. Bryn, take Rachel around the garden and show her the changes we’ve made.”

Bryn, already standing, raised an eyebrow at Rachel and when she got up put a hand lightly under her elbow, his fingers warm and strong.

“Who does do the housework?” she asked him as they descended the wide, shallow steps that brought them to ground level. Surely it was too much for one person.

“We have a part-time housekeeper.” He dropped his hand as they reached the wide lawn. “She comes in the afternoon three times a week but doesn’t work weekends.”

They crossed the grass, passing the solar-heated swimming pool that had been retiled in pale blue, refenced with transparent panels and was almost hidden among flowering shrubs. Their feet crunched on a white-shell path winding through shrubs and trees underplanted with bulbs and perennials and creeping groundcovers.

The Donovans had allowed Rachel and her brothers free rein in the garden on condition they didn’t damage the flowerbeds. She had loved playing hide-and-seek, stalking imaginary beasts, or climbing the trees, and knew all the hidden places under low-hanging branches or in the forks of the old oaks and puriris.

“The fish have gone,” she said as they walked under a sturdy pergola—a recent addition—smothered by twining clematis, into an open space paved in mossy bricks. Two rustic seats invited visitors to admire a bed of roses instead of the goldfish pond she remembered.

“Too much maintenance,” Bryn told her, “and mosquitoes loved it.”

Wandering in the shade of tall trees, they eventually came to a high brick wall. Where there had once been a gate giving access to the house her family had lived in, an arched niche held baskets of flowering plants.

“You know we leased out the farm and cottage?” Bryn asked her, and she nodded, hiding a smile. Only someone who’d lived in a mansion could have called the estate manager’s house a cottage.

The path veered away from the wall towards an almost hidden summerhouse, its tiled roof moss-covered and latticed walls swathed in ivy geranium and bare winter coils of wisteria.

Rachel hoped Bryn hadn’t noticed the hitch in her step before they walked past it. She didn’t dare look at him, instead pretending to admire the pink-flowered impatiens lining the other side of the path, until they came to another pergola that a star jasmine had wound about, bearing a few white, fragrant blooms.

Rachel touched a spray, breathing in its scent and setting it trembling.

A lean hand reached past her and snapped the stem.

She looked up as Bryn handed the flowers to her. “Thank you,” she said, suddenly breathless. They stood only inches from each other. His eyes were on her face, his expression grave and intent and questioning. She ducked her head to smell the jasmine and, turning to walk on, brushed against him, her breasts in fleeting contact with his chest.

Heat burned her cheeks, and when Bryn caught up with her she kept her gaze on the jasmine, twirling the stalk back and forth in her fingers as they walked.

And because she wasn’t looking where she was going, a tree root that had intruded onto the path took her by surprise and she tripped.

Bryn’s hands closed on her arms, his breath stirring a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Thanks.” Her bare toes stung but she didn’t look down, giving him what she hoped was a reassuring smile.

He drew back, checked her feet and hissed in a short breath.

“You’re bleeding.” He released her arms to hunker down, his hand closing about her ankle. “Lean on me,” he ordered, lifting her foot to his knee so she had no choice but to put a hand on his shoulder to balance herself.

“I’ll bleed all over you,” she protested. “It’s nothing.”

His hand tightening as she tried to withdraw her ankle, he glanced up at her. “Looks painful,” he said. “Let’s get you back to the house.” Standing up, he placed a firm hand under her elbow again. Inside, he steered her to the downstairs bathroom and, ignoring her claim that she could manage on her own, sat her on the wide edge of the deep, old-fashioned bath and found a first-aid kit in a cupboard. He let her wash her injured foot, then patted it dry with a towel, dabbed on disinfectant and wrapped a toe plaster around the wound.

“Thank you,” she said, picking up her discarded sandal and standing as he put away the first-aid box. She’d dropped the jasmine on the counter next to the washbasin and he picked it up as he turned to her again.

Instead of handing it to her he tucked the stalk into the knot of hair on top of her head, gave her an enigmatic little closed-mouth smile, then ushered her out with a light touch at her waist.

Pearl came out from the kitchen, saying, “Are you staying, Bryn? I’ve got a nice bit of pork in the oven.”

He checked his watch. “For dinner, thanks. But I’ll be off after that.”

Noticing the sandal in Rachel’s hand, and the dressing on her toe, Pearl said, “Oh! Are you hurt?”

“Just a stubbed toe,” Rachel said, and after assuring his mother she was fine, left Bryn to explain while she went upstairs to unpack.

When she came down again he and Pearl were in what the family called the “little sitting room”, as opposed to the much larger front room suited to formal entertaining.

Bryn held a glass of something with ice, and Pearl was sipping sherry. Bryn rose and offered Rachel his wing-backed chair, but she shook her head and sat on the small, ornate sofa that with the chairs completed a U shape in front of the brass-screened grate.

“A drink?” Bryn said, still on his feet. “I guess you’re old enough now.”

“Of course she is,” Pearl said. To Rachel, she confided, “He still thinks of you as a little girl.”

“Not so, Mother,” he told her, but his eyes, with a disconcerting gleam in their depths, were surveying Rachel. “Although,” he drawled, dropping his gaze to her feet, “the plaster does seem like old times.” Transferring his attention back to her face, he teased, “You had a hair-raising sense of adventure as a kid.”

Quickly she said, “I’ve grown out of that. I’d like a gin and bitters if you have it, thanks.”

Without further comment, he crossed to the old kauri cabinet that served as a drinks cupboard and disguised a small refrigerator. After making the drink he dropped a half slice of lemon into the glass before presenting it to her.

Pearl asked what Rachel thought of the garden, and when complimented said, “A local man comes once a week to keep it tidy and I potter about with the flowers. We’ve leased out the farm, so there’s only the grounds around the house to look after. Bryn suggested selling the place—” she cast him scandalized glance that he received imperturbably “—but I hope to have grandchildren some day, and keep the place in the family. After all, Donovans have lived here since it was built. And owned the land even before that.”

“It’s a wonderful place for children.” Rachel didn’t look at Bryn. His older sister had moved to England, was living with another woman and, according to Rachel’s mother, had declared she never intended to have children. Obviously Bryn was in no hurry to carry on the family name. At thirty-four, he still had time and with his looks and his money, probably plenty of choice.