AMID THE CHAOS OF Helen’s thoughts, she retreated to one of the inset bookcases in the corner of the office.
“I don’t understand,” she said, even though she was terribly afraid that she did.
Mr. Winterborne prowled after her slowly. “Trenear won’t stand in the way after he finds out you’ve been ruined.”
“I would rather not be ruined.” It was becoming more difficult to breathe by the minute. Her corset had clamped around her like a set of jaws.
“But you want to marry me.” Reaching her, he rested a hand on the bookcase, cornering her. “Don’t you?”
In moral terms, fornication was a mortal sin. In practical terms, the risks of sleeping with him were enormous.
A horrid thought drained the color from her face. What if Mr. Winterborne slept with her and then refused to marry her? What if he were capable of such vindictiveness that he might dishonor and abandon her? No gentleman would ever offer for her. Any hope of gaining a home and family of her own would be lost. She would become a burden to her relations, condemned to a life of shame and dependence. If she conceived, she and her child would be social outcasts. And even if she didn’t, her disgrace would still sabotage her younger sisters’ marital prospects.
“How can I trust that you would do the right thing afterward?” she asked.
Mr. Winterborne’s expression darkened. “Questions of my character aside, how long do you think Trenear would let me live if I tried something like that? Before nightfall, he’d have me hunted and felled like a carted deer.”
“He might anyway,” Helen said glumly.
He ignored that. “I would never abandon you. If I took you to my bed, you would be mine, as sure if we vowed it on an oathing stone.”
“What is that?”
“A wedding ritual in my part of Wales. A man and woman exchange vows with a stone held between their joined hands. After the ceremony, they go together to cast the stone into a lake, and the earth itself becomes part of their oath. From then on, they are bound to each other for as long as the world exists.” His gaze locked with hers. “Give me what I ask, and you’ll never want for anything.”
He was overwhelming her again. Helen felt a light perspiration breaking out from her scalp to the soles of her feet. “I need time to consider it,” she said.
Mr. Winterborne’s determination seemed to feed from her distress. “I’ll give you money and property of your own. A stable of thoroughbreds. A palace, and the market town around it, and scores of servants to wait on you hand and foot. No price is too high. All you have to do is come to my bed.”
Helen reached up to rub her throbbing temples, hoping that another migraine wasn’t coming on. “Couldn’t we just say that I’ve been ruined? Devon would have to take my word for it.”
Mr. Winterborne shook his head before she had even finished the question. “I’ll need an earnest payment. That’s how a deal is bound in business.”
“This isn’t a business negotiation,” she protested.
He was adamant. “I want insurance in case you change your mind before the wedding.”
“I wouldn’t do that. Don’t you trust me?”
“Aye. But I’ll trust you more after we sleep together.”
The man was impossible. Helen floundered for another solution, some means of countering him, but she could sense him becoming more intractable with every passing second.
“This is about your pride,” she said indignantly. “You were hurt and angry because you thought I’d rejected you, and now you want to punish me even though it wasn’t my fault.”
“A punishment?” His black brows lifted mockingly. “Not five minutes ago you were enthusiastic about my kisses.”
“Your proposition involves far more than kissing.”
“It’s not a proposition,” he informed her in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s an ultimatum.”
Helen stared at him in disbelief.
Her only choice was to refuse. Someday she would meet an eligible man her family would approve of. A member of the landed gentry, bland and reserved, with a very tall forehead. He would expect her to make his opinions and wishes her own. And her life would be planned out for her, every year the same as the last.
Marrying Winterborne, on the other hand . . .
There was still so much she didn’t understand about him. What would be expected of a woman whose husband owned the largest department store in the world? What people would she become acquainted with, and what activities would fill her days? And Winterborne himself, who so often wore the look of someone who’d had more than a few quarrels with the world and had forgiven nothing . . . what would it be like, to live as his wife? His life was so large that she could easily imagine becoming lost in it.
Realizing that he was watching her closely, alert to every nuance of her expression, she turned her back to him. Rows of books confronted her, catalogues, manuals, ledgers. But lower down, amid a row of utilitarian volumes, she saw a collection of what appeared to be botanical titles. She blinked and looked at them more closely: Bromeliads; Being a Concise Treatise on the Management of the Hothouse; Orchidaceae Genera and Species: An Enumeration of Known Orchids; and Orchid Cultivation.
These books on orchids weren’t in his office by happenstance.
Cultivating orchids had been a keen interest and hobby of Helen’s ever since her mother had passed away five years ago, leaving a collection of approximately two hundred potted orchids. Since no one else in the family had been inclined to care for them, Helen had taken it upon herself. Orchids were demanding, troublesome plants, each with its own temperament. At first Helen had found no enjoyment in her self-appointed responsibility, but over time, she had become devoted to the orchids.
As she had once told Kathleen, sometimes one had to love something before it became lovable.
She touched the gilded book bindings with a hesitant fingertip, tracing the edge of a hand-painted flower. “When did you acquire these?” she asked.
Mr. Winterborne’s voice came from close behind her. “After you gave me the potted orchid. I needed to know how to take care of it.”
A few weeks earlier, he had come for dinner at Ravenel House, and Helen had impulsively given one of her orchids to him. A rare Blue Vanda, her most prized and temperamental plant. Although he hadn’t seemed especially enthused about the gift, he had thanked her and taken it dutifully. But the moment their engagement had been broken, he had sent it back.
To Helen’s amazement, she had discovered that the sensitive plant had thrived in his care.
“You looked after it yourself, then,” she said. “I wondered about that.”
“Of course I did. I had no intention of failing your test.”
“It wasn’t a test, it was a gift.”
“If you say so.”
Exasperated, Helen turned to face him. “I fully expected you to kill it, and I intended to marry you regardless.”
His lips twitched. “But I didn’t.”
Helen was silent, trying to balance all her thoughts and feelings before making the most difficult decision of her life. But was it really that complicated? Marriage was always a risk.
One never knew what kind of husband a man might turn into.
For one last time, Helen allowed herself to consider the option of leaving. She imagined walking out of his office, entering the family carriage, and riding back to Ravenel House on South Audley. And it would be well and truly over. Her future would be identical to that of any young woman in her position. She would have a London Season and scores of dances and dinners with civilized suitors, all of it leading to marriage with a man who would never understand her nearly as well as she understood him. She would do her utmost never to look back on this moment and wonder what would have happened, or what she might have become, if she’d said yes.
She thought of the conversation she’d had with the housekeeper, Mrs. Abbott, before leaving this morning. The housekeeper a plump and neat silver-haired woman who had served in the Ravenel’s employ for four decades, had objected strongly upon hearing that Helen intended to go out in the daytime with no companion. “The Master will sack the lot of us,” she had exclaimed.
“I’ll tell Lord Trenear that I slipped away without anyone’s knowledge,” Helen had told her. “And I’ll say that I gave the driver no choice but to take me to Winterborne’s or I threatened to go on foot.”
“My lady, nothing can be worth such a risk!”
However, when Helen had explained that she intended to visit Rhys Winterborne in the hopes of renewing their engagement, it seemed to have given the housekeeper cause for second thought.
“I can’t fault you,” Mrs. Abbot had admitted. “A man such as that . . .”
Helen had stared at her curiously, noticing the way her face had softened with dreamy pensiveness. “You hold Mr. Winterborne in esteem, then?”
“I do, my lady. Oh, I know he’s called an upstart by his social betters. But to the real London—the hundreds of thousands who work every blessed day and scrape by as best we can—Winterborne is a legend. He’s done what most people don’t dare dream of. A shop boy, he was, and now everyone from the queen down to any common beggar knows his name. It gives people reason to hope they might rise above their circumstances.” Smiling slightly, the housekeeper had added, “And none can deny he’s a handsome, well-made chap, for all that he’s as brown as a gypsy. Any woman, highborn or low, would be tempted.”
Helen couldn’t deny that Mr. Winterborne’s personal attractions were high on her list of considerations. A man in his prime, radiating that remarkable energy, a kind of animal vitality that she found both frightening and irresistible.
But there was something else about him . . . a lure more potent than any other. It happened during his rare moments of tenderness with her, when it seemed as if the deep, tightly locked cache of sadness in her heart was about to break open. He was the only person who had ever approached that trapped place, who might someday be able to shatter the loneliness that had always held fast inside her.
If she married Mr. Winterborne, she might come to regret it. But not nearly as much as she would regret it if she didn’t take the chance.
Almost miraculously, everything sorted itself out in her brain. A feeling of calmness settled over her as her path became clear.
Taking a deep breath, she looked up at him. “Very well,” she said. “I agree to your ultimatum.”