Loe raamatut: «Pregnant On The Earl's Doorstep»

CHAPTER ONE

LENGROTH CASTLE LOOKED bigger than it had on the website. More imposing.

On the slick, professional website of the Earl of Lengroth the castle had been bathed in sunlight, with impossibly blue skies shining behind its corner towers, the stone walls almost white in the sunshine. In reality, even on a dry July day in Scotland, the skies were more white with cloud than blue, and the stone was a heavy, dark and imposing grey. The seventeen stone steps up to the dark wooden front door seemed designed to put visitors off altogether—they were narrow, steep, and they looked slippery with moss encouraged by the moat they rose across.

In fact, the whole scene was enough to make Heather Reid want to jump on the first train back to Hertfordshire and never return.

Except she couldn’t. Not until she’d done what she’d come to do. After that...? Well, what happened next was anybody’s guess. By then the ball would be firmly in the court of Ross Bryce, Earl of Lengroth.

Steeling herself, Heather crossed the gravelled courtyard from the open front gate and carefully made her way up those seventeen slippery steps. Halfway up, she risked a glance down at the moat. The water was black and bottomless. Much like her fear.

Heather swallowed and took another step.

A splash beside her made her jump and almost lose her footing. Grappling for purchase on one of the higher steps, Heather darted her gaze around, looking for the cause of the sound. A fish? Duck? Crocodile? She wouldn’t put it past the Earls of Lengroth to have installed the Loch Ness Monster in their moat.

Then she spotted the rubber duck, bobbing happily on the dark water.

‘Not a monster,’ she whispered to herself. ‘That’s a start.’

But that duck definitely hadn’t been there when she’d started climbing the steps. Risking letting go of her step, Heather looked up at the windows overhead, trying to see who might have thrown the rubber duck.

Nothing.

Ross Bryce had kids, she remembered uncomfortably. Two of them, perfectly turned out in a party dress and a sailor suit respectively, featured on the home page of the website, standing and smiling sweetly next to their handsome father, the Earl, and their beautiful mother, Lady Jane Bryce, Countess of Lengroth.

She’d been physically sick when she’d seen that photo and realised how monumentally she’d screwed up. Of course, she’d been throwing up a lot lately anyway. But seeing that photo had marked the moment she’d realised just how much trouble she was in, and the magnitude of the consequences she had to face.

There was still no sign of the duck’s owner, but Heather had been a teacher long enough to know that when a child threw a duck at you it meant you weren’t wanted. In fact, she was pretty sure she’d have been able to figure that much out even without her teaching qualification.

Carefully, she reached down to the water and retrieved the duck as it bobbed past, tucking it under her arm.

‘I don’t want to be here, either, kid, believe me,’ she muttered.

And then she took the next step anyway—because what choice did she have?

She’d made a mistake and now she needed to own up to it, deal with it and face it head-on. She knew only too well what happened when people ducked their own guilt and tried to cover up their actions with lies.

The big brass knocker on the castle door echoed around the courtyard as she lifted it and let it fall against the wood. At least she’d survived the steps and the duck missile. As long as the door didn’t open outwards and send her flying into the moat she was almost there.

And then would come the really hard part.

She’d practised what she would say to Ross—it was hard to think of him as the Earl of Lengroth at this point—all the way up on the train. She’d thought of different ways to break the news, but it all came down to the one basic fact.

I’m pregnant. With your child.

She really hoped his wife wasn’t in the room when she saw him again.

Not that he’d mentioned his wife, of course, when they’d met that night in London. Or his kids. He’d told her about the castle, and about lonely dark Scottish nights—even in early June, apparently. He’d talked about the countryside and his responsibilities and the parties he went to.

But he’d failed to mention his family. And he hadn’t been wearing the wedding ring she’d seen on his finger later, in the most prominent website photo of them all—a large family portrait.

‘You must have all the aristocratic ladies after you,’ she’d joked, when he’d told her where he lived and shown her a snapshot on his phone. ‘How do you know they’re interested in you and not your castle?’

‘Trust me,’ he’d replied with a wicked grin. ‘My castle is the least impressive thing about me.’

Heather groaned, just remembering the line. How had she fallen for that? She blamed the cocktails her friend Lacey had insisted on them drinking.

Was anybody ever going to open this door? She really wasn’t enjoying reliving the worst mistake of her life in her head while she waited. She’d done enough of that over the last month as it was.

Now she was there, at Castle Lengroth, she just wanted to get this over with. She wanted to see Ross Bryce and tell him everything. She wanted this to be someone else’s problem, too, even if just for a few minutes before he inevitably threw her out.

Heather didn’t have high hopes for this meeting. But she knew it was something she had to do. Ross deserved to know about the baby—even if he didn’t want anything to do with it, or her, after this. At least she’d have done the right thing.

Because, apart from one stupid night in London almost two months ago, Heather Reid always did the right thing. Her mother had taught her that much—if only by being a stunning example of what happened when a person didn’t.

Finally the door creaked open to reveal an elegant, polished older lady in a navy skirt suit and a cream blouse, with a string of pearls around her neck and sensible navy shoes on her feet.

‘I’m here to see the Earl of Lengroth,’ Heather said as confidently as she could, as if it were the sort of thing she said every day.

‘You’re late,’ the woman told Heather sternly. ‘Come on. He’s waiting.’

Heather blinked twice, then followed. She got the feeling that this woman wasn’t used to being disobeyed.

‘Um...how am I late, exactly?’

Well, she was late—six weeks late at this point—but she was pretty sure the woman wasn’t talking about Heather’s period.

‘I didn’t have an appointment...’ Maybe she should have made one. Except she couldn’t imagine that Ross was going to be happy to see her again.

The woman didn’t answer—in fact, Heather wasn’t even sure if she heard her over the sound of her own heavy footsteps on the polished stone floors of the hallway. On either side the walls were painted dark shades of green, in between bare stone columns, and every now and again they’d pass a chair with tartan cushions, as if there to give people a chance to recover from the unrelenting hard darkness of the place.

Finally, after several more hallways, eight chairs and two staircases, the woman stopped in front of another heavy wooden door and rapped her knuckles sharply against it.

‘Come in,’ a male voice called, and as the woman opened the door Heather thought she heard him mutter, ‘Finally...’ under his breath.

Heather stepped inside just as the woman said, ‘The new nanny is here, sir.’

Nanny? Okay, someone had got something seriously confused here.

But as Heather stared at the darkly handsome man behind the mahogany desk she realised that a case of mistaken identity was the least of her problems. Because the man sitting at the desk belonging to the Earl of Lengroth wasn’t the man she’d slept with in London almost two months earlier.

* * *

Cal Bryce had never harboured any ambitions to be the Earl of Lengroth. He didn’t want the title, the castle, the requirement to provide an heir, the responsibility, or to have to uphold the reputation expected of a sterling member of the aristocracy.

And in fairness, he still didn’t have most of those things. He wasn’t the Earl—he remained the Hon Calvin Bryce, as he’d always been as the Earl’s younger brother. The castle wasn’t his—it belonged to his nephew Ryan, the eight-year-old newly minted Earl. He didn’t have to provide an heir—and he didn’t think anyone was expecting Ryan to do so for quite some years yet.

Since his brother Ross’s death, however, the responsibility was all his—at least until Ryan turned eighteen. And the reputation... Well, it seemed that was Cal’s to fix, too.

What on earth made you take that corner so fast, brother? Cal thought, not for the first time since he’d got that middle-of-the-night call and heard Mrs Peterson, the castle housekeeper, shrieking incomprehensibly down the phone at him from thousands of miles away in Scotland.

‘They’re dead! They’re both dead, Cal!’ she’d finally managed to say.

And the bottom had fallen out of Cal’s world.

His whole life Ross had been a constant. And he’d needed that so badly—especially when they were growing up. While the world around them might have believed that the Bryce family were a perfect example of modern aristocracy done right, Ross and Cal had known the truth.

The family weren’t above scandal and outrageous behaviour—they’d just grown very, very good at covering it up.

As a child, all Cal had known was that he had to get out of the way when his father started shouting, and that if he was drinking it was better not to be in the castle at all. Ross, three years older, had taught him all the best hiding places—and the signs to look out for telling him that it was time to run. And when Cal got it wrong Ross had stood between him and the Earl to give his little brother a head start.

Cal had idolised Ross. Until six weeks ago.

Even as he’d grown up into a teen, and then a young man, it had taken Cal some time to realise the true nature of his genetic inheritance. The Bryces hid their scandals well—even from their own flesh and blood. But once he’d seen his first evidence—walking in on his father in bed with the barmaid from the village pub was a scene sadly seared into his memory—he’d started to notice it everywhere. Especially as his parents had become less careful of their words around him.

There was the affair his mother had been having with the family lawyer for most of Cal’s life. The endless parade of barmaids and local girls he’d seen letting themselves out of the castle kitchens in the mornings. The bruises on Ross’s face and arms after a shouting match with their big bear of a father—red-faced and fuming so much of the time.

Hell, there was even the legend of the Lengroth ghost, which was currently causing him issues in ways the woman couldn’t possibly have imagined a hundred years ago when she’d died. The story went that a century earlier one of the local village girls had got pregnant and claimed the father was the Earl. Shunned by the local village people, and with her reputation ruined, she’d come to the castle to ask for his help. The Earl had denied her and sent her away, and she’d fallen down the castle steps and died—although some still whispered to this day that she’d been pushed.

Cal wished he didn’t know the truth about that one, if he was honest. His ancestors were enough of a disappointment to him already.

But not Ross. Ross had married the beautiful and lovely Janey and had two beautiful and lovely children. Ross had bucked the family trend.

Cal couldn’t even look at the battlements of Lengroth Castle without remembering all the awfulness that had happened inside it. But Ross had moved the family in—made the castle a home, even if it was still stone-walled and imposing. Ross had found a way to overcome their genetic disposition towards scandal and bad behaviour.

At least so Cal had believed, until he’d returned home to take over the reins after Ross’s death.

Now he was starting to think that Ross had just been better than all of them at hiding his true self.

Cal had thought that the world of business was hard—building up and running a company with a multiple seven-figure turnover took time, energy and commitment. He’d thought he understood about responsibility and challenges.

But that had been before he’d had to deal with the gambling debts, the lies and promises Ross had left behind him.

And before he’d had to hire a nanny for two grieving and uncontrollable children.

He eyed the latest one—the ninth in six weeks—as Mrs Peterson showed her in. In addition to being a full forty minutes late, she looked a little casual for a job interview, dressed in a flowery sundress and sandals—with a jumper on top because this was summer in Scotland, after all. Her copper-coloured hair flowed loose in waves over her shoulders, and she carried a rucksack on her back, as if she were a gap year student going travelling. Which she might be, he supposed. She looked young enough.

She also had a rubber duck tucked under her arm, but Cal decided he wasn’t even going to ask about that.

The bottom line was that desperate guardians couldn’t be choosers, and the agency must be running out of nannies to send him by now.

Mrs Peterson was also looking unimpressed with her. She, Cal noticed, was wearing her best suit and heels—the way she always did when there was a potential new member of staff on-site or an important visitor of some sort. She must have got more wear out of it in the last six weeks than in the decade beforehand. But Cal knew she’d have her fluffy slipper boots back on the moment she made it back to the kitchen. The stone floors of Castle Lengroth were hard on the feet.

He turned his attention back to the nanny. Part of him wanted to dismiss her out of hand, but another, larger part, knew that he needed her. He wasn’t capable of being the parental figure his niece and nephew so desperately required. He just wasn’t father material—he’d always known that.

Which meant he needed someone who would stick it out and look after Daisy and Ryan for the next six weeks—and he’d got the impression from his most recent call to the agency that this was his last shot.

Which meant he had to be persuasive. And he had to follow the plan he and Mrs Peterson had cooked up the night before.

1. Offer her more than she can get anywhere else

2. Make it completely conditional on her finishing the six weeks

3. Don’t mention the ghost

Easy.

‘Okay, Miss...’ he consulted the notes from his call with the agency ‘...Thomas. Here’s the deal. My niece and nephew need a reliable, effective and capable nanny for the next six weeks of the school holidays, until they leave for boarding school in England. Your agency says that you’re up to the job, and I have to believe them. So I’m going to make you an offer you won’t get anywhere else. If you stick out six weeks here at Castle Lengroth, and get the children prepared physically, mentally and emotionally for boarding school, I’ll pay you for a full year’s work at your agency base rate. But if you quit before the six weeks are up you get nothing.’

The redheaded nanny opened her mouth, then closed it again. Then she said, ‘I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding—’

Cal cut her off before she could get any further. That was another thing he and Mrs Peterson had agreed on—not giving her too much time to overthink things. He knew that the agency nannies talked to each other—they probably had their own message group on social media or something—so she almost certainly already knew the situation here.

The last nanny had quit before she’d even made it into the castle, when ten-year-old Daisy had thrown a bucket of soapy water over her from the nursery window above the front steps. Cal wasn’t risking losing this one before she even met the devil children.

‘I know what you must have heard from your predecessors, Miss Thomas,’ he said, smiling as charmingly as he could, given what was on the line here. ‘I can’t imagine it’s many families that go through eight nannies before they find the right one. But I have an excellent feeling about you,’ he lied.

‘Eight nannies?’ she echoed faintly, and Cal cursed himself for mentioning it. It sounded so much worse spelt out like that.

‘The children have been through a lot since their parents died nearly two months ago,’ he said, defensively. ‘It’s natural that they’re acting out a bit. And, in fairness, seven of the eight said it wasn’t the children that drove them away, it was the ghost.’

Dammit. I wasn’t supposed to mention the ghost.

In the doorway, Cal saw Mrs Peterson throw up her hands in despair and turn to leave, closing the door behind her. Obviously she knew a lost cause when she saw one.

But the new nanny didn’t even seem to register his mention of a supposed supernatural being haunting the castle. Probably because she was a sensible person who didn’t believe in ghosts and was going to accept his offer. He hoped.

‘Eight nannies in less than two months?’ she said incredulously.

Then her pale face turned somehow even whiter. Cal resisted the impulse to check over his shoulder for the ghost.

‘Wait, their parents...? The Earl of Lengroth, Ross Bryce, and his wife...?’

‘Yes. My brother, Ross, and my sister-in-law, Janey,’ Cal confirmed, confused.

She sank into the chair opposite him without being invited to do so. Since she looked as if she might fall over otherwise, Cal didn’t object. He probably should have asked her to sit before he’d hit her with the terms of the job, actually.

‘They died? When?’

She placed the rubber duck on the desk absently. Really—who brought a rubber duck to a job interview?

‘Almost two months ago,’ Cal repeated, since the information clearly wasn’t going in.

She couldn’t be a local girl if she didn’t know that already, although he’d guessed that from her accent anyway. It had been a mere blip of a mention in the national news—a blink-and-you’d-miss-it piece. But locally it had dominated the newspapers for weeks.

‘June,’ she said softly, and bit down on her lip. ‘It must have been just after I—’ She broke off and shook her head, copper curls rustling.

‘Miss Thomas. Tragic though my brother’s passing is...’ Cal swallowed hard at the memory, hearing Mrs Peterson’s panicked voice all over again ‘...I really think we should get back to the matter in hand. Your position as nanny to my niece and nephew.’

She looked up, her green eyes bright. ‘And I think, Mr Bryce, that we need to start over. You see, I’m not Miss Thomas from the agency, and I’m not here for the nanny position. I’m here about your brother.’

And suddenly Cal knew that his faith in his perfect older brother was about to take another hit.

One it might not be able to recover from.