The Heiress Read online

  Jamie blinked at her, for a moment not knowing where he was or what was happening to him. Confusion seemed to be a normal state with him lately. It had become a way of life ever since he had climbed over that wall and met this extraordinary young woman.

  Although she was still sitting on his lap, she was angry at him—as she always seemed to be. “Do you think I am another Diana?” she asked him, her nose close to his.

  Had she been any other woman in the world and he’d awakened with her on his lap, he would have kissed her, but Axia wasn’t like anyone else.

  Unceremoniously, without saying a word, he pushed her off his lap onto the hard ground and went to his horse.

  Axia was confused herself. Did he fondle every woman he met? “Lecher!” she said but without the venom that such an accusation required. Then, standing, she dusted herself off.

  “I will not—” she began when he approached her, but he grabbed her around the waist so tight he cut off her breath, then he lifted her onto the saddle. However, he lifted her a little too high, then dropped her so she landed hard on the leather and wood of his saddle. When she said, “Ow!” he gave a little smile as he threw his leg over the saddle and sat behind her.

  And as soon as the horse took a step, Axia leaned back against Jamie in a familiar way that made him smile. And, although he didn’t see, she smiled also. She didn’t really believe he was a lecher. He’d wanted to kiss her.

  After a while, she said softly, “I had a choice of cheeses so I got that hard white kind you like best.”

  “Did you?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm, but inside he was leaping with joy. It was the first time she’d ever done anything for him. But best of all, she had noticed what he liked.

  He searched for something else to say. “Maidenhall gave me a purse for expenses, and what you traded for today will save me.”

  Twisting in his arms, she looked up at him, “Oh, Jamie, I would like to help save expenses. I liked buying and selling today. Oh, but it was fun, and …” She looked down. “And maybe I was good at it.”

  He smiled at the top of her head. “You were magnificent.”

  “Really? Do you truly think so?”

  “Yes, the best. You are as talented at selling as you are at drawing.”

  Her eyes wide, she looked up at him. “But I’m not so good at drawing. I’m sure you’ve seen much better.”

  “Never. Not anywhere in the world.”

  Opening and closing her mouth for a few moments, Axia seemed at a loss for words, and that pleased Jamie very much. “I noticed you like almonds, so I shall stuff a duck with almonds and here …” Reaching inside her bodice, she pulled out several sprigs of wild sage. “I found this and thought it would help the dressing.”

  Jamie smiled at her. “I shall relish every bite,” he said in a low voice.

  For a moment Axia had no idea what he meant, then she blushed because she realized he was referring to where the sage had been. Her face still red, she turned around and settled back against him.

  When the camp came into view, she said, “May I try to help with expenses? I so like to be useful.”

  “If you like,” Jamie said. “But no lying. No more promises of cloth that will never wear out. And no more disappearing so I don’t know where you are. You can’t imagine how worried I was this morning when I awoke and you weren’t there.”

  “I would think you’d be glad,” she said, tight-lipped. “Your life would be much easier if I fell into a hole and stayed there.”

  He laughed as he put his arms tighter around her. “Axia, I think I would miss you if you were gone. I know you cause me nothing but trouble, but I would miss you.”

  She knew he couldn’t see her face, so she indulged herself in a wide grin. “I have turnips and carrots and a huge slab of butter. And, oh, yes, tiny onions. And I could pull the feathers from the geese to start making you a pillow.”

  “That would be very nice,” he said softly as they entered the camp, and Rhys put up his arms to help her down. “Very nice indeed.”

  Chapter 12

  As soon as Frances saw Axia sitting on the horse in front of Jamie, she knew that things had changed between the two of them. And of course it would, as it seemed that Axia had a way with men. Frances wasn’t sure, but she thought perhaps it was the way Axia was always feeding them.

  “They are men, not hogs to be fattened for market,” Frances had said more than once. “If I were them, I’d worry you were after my liver.”

  Now, looking at Axia getting down from Jamie’s horse, Frances gave a great sigh. This trip was not going as she’d hoped. When she agreed to be the Maidenhall heiress in Axia’s place, she had envisioned traveling the country with everyone knowing who she was. That way she would have had much interest from men, and she had planned to choose one for a husband. Perhaps it would be trickery to make a man believe she was an heiress before they were married and later tell him that she was poorer than he was, but then Frances hoped that her beauty would inspire a man to love her. Frances knew that if she was to make a good match, she had to do it now, on this trip.

  Axia knew what awaited her at the end of this journey, but Frances did not. In usual Axia-fashion, she refused to brood about her approaching marriage, but Frances knew that somewhere inside her, Axia knew. As for Frances, she had no idea what Perkin Maidenhall had planned for her. Would a letter be awaiting her, telling her she was no longer needed as a “companion” to Axia? Would she be sent back to her “family”? Sent to that group of people who she always described to Axia as a set of angels but who, in truth, never stopped badgering Frances to get more goods, more money, more anything from the Maidenhall estate?

  Frances knew that Axia thought her life in her “beautiful prison” was the most horrible existence on earth, but then Axia had never experienced much of life. She was protected from it, sheltered, had never really seen it.

  But Frances knew what happened to women without money. Her mother had been beautiful, from all accounts more beautiful than Frances ever thought of being. But her mother had married for love. She had run away from a marriage with a prosperous, but old and boring, banker and married a handsome ne’er-do-well who refused to stay at one occupation for more than a few months. Within five years, her mother was no longer beautiful but worn out from bearing children and taking in sewing.

  While her mother was still alive, Frances, dressed in patched and worn clothing, used to walk past the banker’s rich house and wondered how her mother could have married her father. She used to look at the banker’s children in their clean and pressed clothing, looked at their toys, and she vowed that she would never do what her mother did. If she, Frances, was fortunate enough to inherit her mother’s beauty, she would use it.

  It was her idea to write to Perkin Maidenhall and point out that her family was distantly related to his through his father’s brother and ask him for employment. Sometimes Frances thought of that letter, remembered how she had laboriously written it again and again, then thought how she’d stolen the good-quality writing paper from a printer’s desk. She wrote that his daughter must be very lonely as no one ever saw her and could she, Frances, go and be her friend?

  When the answer came, along with a pouch of money, no one had ever been more joyous than Frances and her family. They had celebrated for a week, until nearly all the money was spent. And when the Maidenhall wagon came to take Frances away, she never looked back.

  So now Frances had seen a way to get away from Axia, from her parsimonious father, from horrid Tode, and from dependence on the Maidenhall money. If she could get a man to fall in love with her, she’d marry him. She did not ask for someone fabulously wealthy nor a man who was a blushing maiden’s dream of handsomeness. All she wanted was someone like that banker her mother had turned down.

  But who? How? Frances wanted to scream. How was she going to meet an eligible man if she was traveling as James Montgomery’s wife? Which, of course, was a joke. Other than the ment