LITMIR.BIZ

      Prologue

      Elmswood Manor, Shropshire, April 1820

      Kate glanced nervously at the tarnished mantel clock. Like everything else around here it had seen better days. It told her that it was fifteen minutes to the allotted start time of what she hoped would be her life-changing appointment. One minute less than when she had last checked.

      She adjusted the blotter so that it sat perfectly in the middle of the desk, then straightened the ledger so that it sat square on the blotter. Next, she placed the annual accounts summary she had drawn up on top of the ledger. Finally, she ran a hand nervously over her hair, which she had pinned tightly up in an attempt to project a mature, businesslike demeanour, though her bedroom mirror had reflected something more reminiscent of a frightened rabbit. Then she glanced over at the clock again.

      It didn’t seem to have moved. Had it stopped? But she’d wound it up yesterday evening, as she did at the same time every night, as Papa had been in the habit of doing, and she could hear it ticking slowly and softly, just as it had always done.

      She felt sick. Was she really going to put her outrageous proposition to a virtual stranger? No, not outrageous. She mustn’t think of it in those terms or she’d come over as an irrational fantasist. It was actually a common-sense suggestion rooted in practicality, one she had evaluated from every angle in the long weeks spent awaiting this much-heralded return, while her future, her father’s security and the fate of every one of the estate’s tenants and those few staff that remained were left hanging in the balance.

      Pushing back the worn leather wing-backed chair, Kate edged out from behind the huge desk that dominated the Estate Office to risk a glance out of the window. The office was located at the far end of a row of outbuildings, behind what had once been the kitchen gardens, with an excellent view in all directions. If he was coming from the stables, walking around from the front entrance or any of the rooms that opened onto the terrace at the rear, she’d see him approach.

      And he would turn up, she reassured herself, he had asked for the appointment himself, hadn’t he?

      Though the appointment had actually been made with her father—for the new Lord Elmswood seemed to be uniquely unaware that his lands were being managed by his estate manager’s daughter.

      Kate returned to the desk and retrieved the note from under the blotter, but the brief informal scrawl told her nothing more than she already knew or had surmised.

       Sir,

       With regard to the settling of my late father’s estate, which I have perforce returned to England to oversee, I anticipate that I will have completed all necessary business with my lawyer in London by the sixteenth of this month. I will then travel to Shropshire, arriving at Elmswood on the seventeenth.

       I assume it will be convenient for you to meet with me on the eighteenth in the Estate Office at ten o’clock that morning, with a view to formally resolving the issue of your continued stewardship and any residual outstanding business.

       I would appreciate it if you could do everything possible to expedite matters, as I am extremely eager to return to my own pressing business abroad.

       Yours respectfully,

       Daniel Fairfax

      Fairfax, she noted. He didn’t use his new title. He had clearly returned reluctantly, for the briefest period possible. How would he feel, knowing he would never see his father again? There was no trace of any emotion in that note save impatience. Her own dear papa’s slow decline over the last few years had forced her to face the reality of his mortality, but she didn’t for a moment imagine that when the time came it would be anything other than a terrible blow to lose him. It seemed to be a very different matter for Daniel Fairfax, who could probably count on one hand the number of weeks he’d spent as an adult in his father’s company.

      He was twenty-eight years old. She’d known him—or of him—all her life, for, like him, she had been born on the estate, though, unlike him, she had never had any desire to live anywhere else. He was six years her senior. Though she knew from her father that he had been a sickly child, and educated at home as a little boy, by the time she’d been old enough to perch in front of Papa in the saddle as he rode around the estates on his regular inspections, or sit here in this office, drawing happily while he attended to estate business, Daniel Fairfax had been a boarder at a prestigious school.

      As a result, for most of the year, Kate had been able to pretend that the grounds of Elmswood Manor belonged exclusively to her. When he came home for the school holidays she would catch the occasional glimpse of him, swimming in the lake or setting out on his pony from the stables, but those encounters had been rare. She’d had no idea what he did all day, or where he went, and his awareness of her had been confined to an absent, uninterested nod as he’d passed purposefully in the opposite direction. Though he was, in effect, like her, an only child, he’d seemed perfectly content in his own company. She couldn’t recall him ever having friends to stay, save once, and that hadn’t been a school friend but some sort of tutor.

      During the last school holiday he had spent at Elmswood he’d left, before it was over, when he was sixteen to Kate’s ten, not to return to school but to go to London to take up a position at the Admiralty. When he’d next returned, on reaching his majority, after an absence of five years, he had left both the Admiralty and his youth behind. The deeply tanned young man she had encountered one morning, staring grim-faced at the lake, had been a rather intimidating and fiercely attractive stranger who’d left Kate embarrassingly tongue-tied.

      Where he had been in the intervening years not even Papa knew, and it had only been after he’d left—a long time after he’d left—that Lord Elmswood had revealed his son was off ‘exploring the world’. And, the world being a very big place, it had seemed unlikely that he would return any time soon.

      ‘Any time soon’ had turned into never. If there had been letters, old Lord Elmswood had kept the contents to himself. On his death, it had seemed like a minor miracle when his lawyer had revealed that he knew how to contact the heir, and a miracle of considerably larger proportions when he’d sent word to Elmswood to inform Papa that the man himself had actually arrived in London.

      But, regardless of the fact that he’d inherited an estate and an earldom, Kate was willing to stake her life on Daniel Fairfax, nomadic explorer, heading back to his life of wandering the far-flung corners of the world as soon as he possibly could.

      In fact, she thought wryly, she was banking on him doing exactly that, even though she knew almost nothing of him. She was taking a leap of faith, but he was Lord Elmswood’s son, after all, and she’d heard nothing to suggest he was in any way of dubious character or unsavoury temperament. In any event, if her plan came to fruition she wouldn’t have to put that assumption to the test, since she was unlikely to see hide nor hair of him for the foreseeable future.

      ‘Excuse me, I have an appointment to meet Mr Wilson.’

      ‘Lord Elmswood!’ Kate scrabbled to her feet.

      Daniel Fairfax, for it was unmistakably he, stood in the doorway, eyeing her quizzically. ‘This is still the Estate Office, I assume?’

      ‘Yes, you are in the right place. I am Mr Wilson’s daughter, I—’

      Kate broke off, blushing. Dammit! Cool, calm and collected was what she needed to be, not a simpering miss! Daniel Fairfax might be a self-confident man of the world, and she might be a country hick, but she was a country hick who knew his estates like the back of her hand, and he needed her—even though he didn’t know it yet.

      ‘Lord Elmswood. You clearly don’t remember me. I am Kate Wilson. How do you do?’

      ‘Miss

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