Chapter 3

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.