The Billionaire's Convenient Bride

The rose-patterned wallpaper in what had been his mother’s room was peeling from the wall, there was a puddle of water rotting the floorboards where a window no longer fitted and everywhere there were mouse droppings.

It would all have to be ripped out, taken back to the bare bones. Or maybe he should just leave it and offer it to Agnès and her grandmother. They’d need somewhere to go, there would be a vacancy for a housekeeper and Agnès would need a job...

They would be the ones begging him to fix the roof, the windows. Priddy pride brought low, he thought. Although it had been pretty low when she was offering the heating engineer lunch to come and fix her boiler and no doubt a bung his boss would know nothing about.

There was a fly buzzing in the window. The wood was swollen; he had to bang on the frame with the heel of his hand to open it so that it could escape. Outside the air was fresh and he leaned on the sill to breathe in the scent of the woods. He could hear the birds, identifying their calls with ease, and in the distance the faint clang of rope against mast out on the creek.

He could have been fifteen again. Foraging for mushrooms at dawn, his dog at his side. Catching a sea trout or two if the warden was safely out of the way to drop off at the chandler’s on his way to school. At dusk he’d be lying in wait by a badger’s sett, or watching foxes slinking through the undergrowth hunting for small mammals. He’d built a hide so that he could watch a pair of owls floating silently to and from their nest as they fed their young, Agnès holding her breath at his side.

He’d caught fish for a young osprey he’d found with a broken wing and even when it was healed and she’d found a mate, had young to feed, she still came to his whistle, sure of a reward.

He’d had that freedom snatched away from him to be replaced by the concrete confines of a city tower block.

He took a step back from the window but as he reached for the catch a movement on the path through the woods caught his attention.

Agnès with that ridiculous dachshund.

She stopped for a moment to take a photograph with her phone, the dog dancing around her. She was looking down, untangling the lead from her legs and then, as if sensing him there, she looked up, lifting her hand to shade her eyes from a low shaft of sunlight that sliced through the trees and lit her face.

How many times had he seen her do that? Make exactly that gesture, looking up at his window, hoping he’d be there, desperate for company, for freedom from the miserable atmosphere in the castle.

A little girl racing through the woods, calling his name, hair flying, all legs and arms, her eyes and mouth too big for her face. Tripping over tree roots, grazing her knees, having to be taken home to have them cleaned up by his mother.

A nuisance, a liability, a responsibility.

But she’d stopped falling over, started to bring food with her. Sandwiches, pie, cake.

She’d been lonely and he’d always been hungry so he’d tolerated her presence. More than tolerated—he’d made her his accomplice. He might have suspected, but the fish warden wouldn’t dare stop Sir Hugo Prideaux’s granddaughter to check her pink backpack for poached fish, not if he valued his job.

He’d taught her to swim, but only because she’d followed him into the river and he would have got the blame if she’d drowned. She could climb trees, knew to keep quiet in a hide; he’d even trained Ozzie to come to her.

He’d treated her like a boy. She was never girly, didn’t care about getting dirty, tearing her clothes. But then one summer she’d come home from school and everything was different. She still came to the woods but her hair was no longer an untidy tangle; it was a dark skein of silk that he wanted to touch. And under the baggy T-shirts and jeans there was no hiding the fact that she was a girl.

He was older, but she was suddenly the grown-up and he felt awkward around her. Worse than awkward. Looking at her mouth made him feel weird, then interested, and he didn’t know what to do.

His mother noticed—she noticed everything—and warned him to keep his distance. Agnès was growing up and Sir Hugo wouldn’t want his granddaughter being touched by the likes of him.

Except she didn’t stay away. He closed his fist at the memory of the river water running off her skin, gleaming pale in the moonlight. His hand running over the sleek softness...

For a moment their eyes met across the distance. Was she remembering that moment? That one forbidden touch?

For a moment it was as if they were frozen in that look but then, as Dora barked, setting up a flurry of collared doves, she turned away and melted into the shade. And he was the one holding his breath. Responding to the memory like a green boy.

He’d wanted to look her in the face as he took everything from her, but he should have left it to his lawyer. It wasn’t too late. This could wait. He could cancel the appointment with the architect he’d asked to meet him here and be gone before she returned from her walk.

He shut the window and, phone in his hand, took one last glance around the room, the patch of damp beneath the window, the darker rectangles on the walls where he’d stuck up posters...

He found the number but then hesitated.

There were things he wanted to see, plans he needed to make, and he still wanted to look Agnès Prideaux in the eye when he told her that he would have her castle, one way or another. But he wouldn’t be indulging a need for pay-back by offering her the cottage.

He’d thought he had what had happened slotted away tidily in the part of his brain labelled ‘The Past’. This was now, and he was the one in control.

He should have remembered that the first casualty in any campaign was the plan. He’d planned to be cold, clinical, detached. Instead he’d been swamped by the rush of memories of a time when they had been friends, allies, accomplices; of that first explosion of sexual awareness.

Agnès might not have a title but while she stayed here people would always think of her, treat her, as a lady. She might look worn down by the financial struggle she faced, broke, but that was the gentry for you.

He paid his bills on time, but until he gave the estate a new purpose, new meaning, to the locals she would still be Miss Prideaux, while he would be the boy whose father had disappeared one day, without a word, leaving his mother to scrub the floors at Priddy Castle.

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