Almost Heaven (50 page)

The door was opened by a short footman, who looked Ian over insolently from head to toe, his chin thrust out pugnaciously. Ignoring the odd behavior of Elizabeth’s servants, Ian glanced with interest at the timbered ceiling and then at the walls, where bright patches of wallpaper marked the places where paintings had once hung. There were no Persian carpets scattered on the polished floors, no treasures reposing on tabletops; in fact, there was precious little furniture anywhere in the hall or the salons off to his right. Ian’s heart squeezed with a combination of guilt and admiration for how proudly she had pretended to him that she was still the carefree young heiress he’d thought her to be.

Realizing that the footman was still glowering at him, Ian looked down at the short man and said. “Your mistress is expecting me. Tell her I’ve arrived –”

“I’m here, Aaron,” Elizabeth’s voice said softly, and Ian turned. One look at her and Ian forgot the footman, the state of the house, and any knowledge of architecture he’d ever possessed. Garbed in a simple gown of sky-blue gauze, with her hair twisted into thick curls bound with narrow blue ribbons, Elizabeth was standing in the hall with the poise of a Grecian goddess and the smile of an angel. “What do you think?” she asked expectantly.

“About what?” he asked huskily, walking forward, forcing his hands not to reach for her.

“About Havenhurst?” she asked with quiet pride. Ian thought it was rather small and in desperate need of repair, not to mention furnishings. In fact, he had an impulse to drag her into his arms and beg her forgiveness for all he’d cost her. Knowing such a thing would shame and hurt her, he smiled and said truthfully, “What I’ve seen is very picturesque.”

“Would you like to see the rest?”

“Very much,” he exaggerated, and it was worth it to see her face light up. “Where are the Townsendes?” he asked as they started up the staircase. “I didn’t see a carriage in the drive.”

“They haven’t arrived yet.” Ian correctly supposed that was Jordan’s doing and made a mental note to thank his friend.

Elizabeth gave him a grand tour of the old house that was saved from being boring by her charming stories about some of its former owners; then she took him outside to the front lawn. Nodding to the far edge of the lawn, she said, “Over there was the castle wall and the moat, which was filled, of course, centuries ago. This whole section was a bailey then – a courtyard,” she clarified, “that was enclosed by the castle walls. In those days there were outbuildings here in the bailey that housed everything from livestock to the buttery, so that the entire castle was completely self-sufficient. Over there,” she said a few minutes later as they rounded the side of the house, “was where the third Earl of Havenhurst fell off his horse and then had the horse shot for throwing him. He was most ill-tempered,” she added with a jaunty grin.

“Obviously,” Ian grinned back at her, longing to kiss the smile on her lips. He glanced at the spot on the lawn she’d mentioned and said instead, “How did he happen to fall off his horse in his own bailey?”

“Oh, that,” she said with a laugh. “He was practicing at the quintain at the time. In the Middle Ages,” she explained to Ian, whose knowledge of medieval history was as complete as his knowledge of architecture, and who knew exactly what a quintain was, “the knights used to practice for jousts and battles with a quintain. A quintain is a crossbar with a sandbag hanging off one arm and a shield in front of the sandbag. The knights would charge it, but if a knight didn’t strike the shield squarely with his broadsword, then the crossbar whirled around and the sandbag hit the knight in his back and knocked him off his horse.”

“Which, I gather, is what happened to the third earl?” Ian teased as they headed toward the largest tree on the far edge of the lawn.

“Exactly,” she averred. When they came to the tree she linked her hands behind her back, looking like an enchanting little girl with a secret she was about to share. “Now,” she said, “look up there.”

Ian tipped his head back and laughed with amazed pleasure. Above him was an enormous and very unusual tree house. “Yours?” he asked.

“Of course.”

He cast a swift, appraising look at the sturdy “steps” nailed into the tree and then quirked a brow at her. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?”

“You’re joking!”

“If you could invade mine, I can’t see why I shouldn’t see yours.”

The carpenters who’d built it for her had done their jobs well, Ian noted as he bent over in the middle of it, looking around. Elizabeth had been much smaller than he, and everything was scaled to her size, but it was large enough that she could nearly stand upright in it as an adult. “What’s over there, in the little trunk?”

She sidled behind him, smiling. “I was trying to remember just that when I was in yours. I’ll look. Just as I thought,” she said a moment later as she opened the lid. “My doll and a tea service.”

Ian grinned at it, and at her, but he saw the little girl she must have been, living alone in relative splendor, with a doll for her family and servants for friends. In comparison, his own youth had been much richer.

“There’s just one more thing to show you,” she said several minutes later when he’d extracted her from the tree limbs and they were heading toward the house.

Ian pulled himself from thoughts of her disadvantaged youth as she changed direction. They skirted the comer of the house, and when they came to the back of it Elizabeth stopped and raised her arm in a graceful, sweeping gesture. “Most of this is my contribution to Havenhurst,” she told him proudly.

The sight that Ian beheld when he looked up made his grin fade as tenderness and awe shook through him. Spread out before him in colorful splendor were the most magnificent flower gardens Ian had ever beheld. The other heirs of Havenhurst might have added stone and mortar to the house, but Elizabeth had given it breathtaking beauty.

“When I was young,” she confided softly, looking out at the sloping gardens and the hills beyond, “I used to think this was the most beautiful place on earth.” Feeling a little foolish over her confidences, Elizabeth glanced up at him with an embarrassed smile. “What is the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?”

Dragging his gaze from the beauty of the gardens, Ian looked down at the beauty beside him. “Any place,” he said huskily, “where you are.”

He saw the becoming flush of embarrassed pleasure that pinkened her cheeks, but when she spoke her voice was rueful. “You don’t have to say such things to me, you know – I’ll keep our bargain.”

“I know you will,” he said, trying not to overwhelm her with avowals of love she wouldn’t yet believe. With a grin he added, “Besides, as it turned out after our bargaining session,
I’m
the one who’s governed by all the conditions, not you.”

Her sideways glance was filled with laughter. “You were much too lenient at times, you know. Toward the end I was asking for concessions just to see how far you’d go.”

Ian, who had been multiplying his fortune for the last four years by buying shipping and import-export companies, as well as sundry others, was regarded as an extremely tough negotiator. He heard her announcement with a smile of genuine surprise. ‘“You gave me the impression that every single concession was of paramount importance to you, and that if I didn’t agree, you might call the whole thing off.”

She nodded with satisfaction. “I rather
thought
that was how I ought to do it. Why are you laughing?”

“Because,” he admitted, chuckling, “obviously I was not in my best form yesterday. In addition to completely misreading your feelings, I managed to buy a house on Promenade Street for which I will undoubtedly pay five times its worth.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and, as if she was embarrassed and needed a way to avoid meeting his gaze, she reached up and pulled a leaf off an overhanging branch. In a voice of careful nonchalance, she explained, “In matters of bargaining,
I
believe in being reasonable, but my uncle would assuredly have tried to cheat you. He’s perfectly dreadful about money.”

Ian nodded, remembering the fortune Julius Cameron had gouged out of him in order to sign the betrothal agreement.

“And so,” she admitted, uneasily studying the azure-blue sky with feigned absorption, “I sent him a note after you left itemizing all the repairs that were needed at the house. I told him it was in poor condition and absolutely in need of complete redecoration.”

“And?”

“And I told him you would consider paying a fair price for the house, but not one shilling more, because it needed all that. “

“And?” Ian prodded.

“He has agreed to sell it for that figure.” Ian’s mirth exploded in shouts of laughter.

Snatching her into his arms, he waited until he could finally catch his breath, then he tipped her face up to his. “Elizabeth,” he said tenderly, “if you change your mind about marrying me, promise me you’ll never represent the opposition at the bargaining table. I swear to God, I’d be lost.” The temptation to kiss her was almost overwhelming, but the Townsende coach with its ducal crest was in the drive, and he had no idea where their chaperons might be. Elizabeth noticed the coach, too, and started toward the house.

“About the gowns,” she said, stopping suddenly and looking up at him with an intensely earnest expression on her beautiful face. “I meant to thank you for your generosity as soon as you arrived, but I was so happy to – that is –” She realized she’d been about to blurt out that she was happy to see him, and she was so flustered by having admitted aloud what she hadn’t admitted to herself that she completely lost her thought.

“Go on,” Ian invited in a husky voice. “You were so happy to see me that you –”

“I forgot,” she admitted lamely. “You shouldn’t have done it, you know – ordered so very many things, and from her shop. Madame LaSalle is
horribly
expensive – I remember hearing about her when I made my debut. “

“You are not to consider that sort of thing,” he said firmly. Trying to lessen her lingering guilt over the gowns, he added jokingly, “At least we’ll have the gowns to show for the expenditure. The night before I ordered them for you,
I
lost £1,000 on a hand of cards with Jordan Townsende.”

“You’re a gambler,” she said curiously. “Don’t you normally wager such sums on a hand?”

“Not,” Ian said dryly, “when I’m not holding anything in that hand.”

“You know,” she told him gently as she led him across the lawn toward the front door, “if you persist in spending heedlessly, you’ll end up just like my papa.”

“How did he end up?”

“Up to his ears in debt. He liked to gamble, too.”

When Ian was silent, Elizabeth ventured hesitantly, “We could always live here. There’s no need for three establishments – it’s very costly.” She realized what she was saying and hastily said, “I didn’t mean to imply I won’t be perfectly comfortable wherever you live. I thought the cottage in Scotland was very beautiful, actually.”

It delighted Ian that she evidently had no knowledge of the extent of his wealth and yet had still agreed to marry him, even if it meant living in a modest cottage or the town house on Promenade Street. If that was true, it gave him the proof that he desperately wanted – proof that she cared for him more than she was ready to admit.

“Let’s decide the day after tomorrow when you see my house,” he suggested mildly, already looking forward to what he hoped would be a shocked reaction.

“Do-do you think you could try to be more prudent with money?” she asked gently. “I could make out a budget, I’m quite good at that –”

Ian couldn’t help it; he muffled a laugh and did what he’d been longing to do from the moment he saw her standing in the hall. He pulled her into his arms, covered her mouth with his, and kissed her with all the hungry ardor that being near her always evoked, and Elizabeth kissed him back with the same yielding sweetness that always drove him mad with desire.

When he reluctantly let her go, her face was flushed and her beautiful eyes were radiant. Lacing his fingers through hers, he walked slowly beside her toward the front door. Since he was in no hurry to join his chaperons, Ian diverted her by asking about a particularly interesting shrubbery, an unusual flower in the front bed, and even a perfectly ordinary rose.

Standing at the window overlooking the lawn, Jordan and Alexandra Townsende watched the couple heading toward them. “If you’d asked me to name the last man on earth I would have expected to fall head over heels for a slip of a girl, it would have been Ian Thornton,” he told her.

His wife heard that with a sidewise look of extreme amusement. “If
I’d
been asked, I rather think I would have named
you.”
 

“I’m sure you would have,” he said, grinning. He saw her smile fade, and he put his arm around her waist, instantly concerned that her pregnancy was causing her discomfort. “Is it the babe, darling?”

She burst out laughing and shook her head, but she sobered again almost instantly. “Do you think,” she asked pensively, “he can be trusted not to hurt her? He’s done so much damage that I-I just cannot like him, Jordan. He’s handsome, I’ll grant you that, extraordinarily handsome –”

“Not
that
handsome,” Jordan said, stung. And this time Alexandra dissolved in mirth. Turning, she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him soundly. “Actually, he rather reminds me of you,” she said, “in his coloring and height and build.”