Free His Cinderella Heiress by Marion Lennox Page A

minded how he did it.
    Which was dumb. Jo was a good-looking woman. It was only natural that the lawyer had noticed and what happened between them was nothing to do with Finn.
    So focus on the farm , he told himself, but he had to force himself to do it.
    Sheep.
    The sheep looked scrawny. How much had their feed been supplemented during the winter? he asked himself, pushing all thoughts of Jo stubbornly aside, and by the time he’d walked to the outer reaches of the property he’d decided: not at all.
    The sheep were decent stock but neglected. Yes, they’d been shorn but that seemed to be the extent of animal husbandry on the place. There were rams running with the ewes and the rams didn’t look impressive. It seemed no one really cared about the outcome.
    There were a couple of cows in a small field near the road. One looked heavily in calf. House cows? He couldn’t imagine Mrs O’Reilly adding milking to her duties and both were dry. The cows looked as scrawny as the landscape.
    Back home in Kilkenny, the grass was shooting with its spring growth. The grass here looked starved of nutrients. It’d need rotation and fertiliser to keep these fields productive and it looked as if nothing had been done to them for a very long time.
    He kept walking, over the remains of ancient drainage, long blocked.
    Would some American or Middle Eastern squillionaire pay big bucks for this place? He guessed they would. They’d buy the history and the prestige and wouldn’t give a toss about drainage.
    And it wasn’t their place. It was... his ?
    It wasn’t, but suddenly that was the way he felt.
    This was nuts. How could he feel this way about a place he hadn’t seen before yesterday?
    He had his own farm and he loved it. His brothers had grown and moved on but he’d stayed. He loved the land. He was good at farming and the farm had prospered in his care. He’d pushed boundaries. He’d built it into an excellent commercial success.
    But this... Castle Glenconaill... He turned to look at its vast silhouette against the mountains and, for some reason, it almost felt as if it was part of him. His grandfather must have talked of it, he thought, or his father. He couldn’t remember, but the familiarity seemed bone-deep.
    He turned again to look out over the land. What a challenge.
    To take and to hold ...
    The family creed seemed wrong, he decided, but To hold and to honour ... That seemed right. To take this place and hold its history, to honour the land, to make this place once more a proud part of Irish heritage... If he could do that...
    What was he thinking? He’d inherited jointly with a woman from Australia. Jo had no reason to love this place and every reason to hate it. And the lawyer was right; even with the wealth he now possessed, on his own he had no hope of keeping it. To try would be fantasy, doomed to disaster from the start.
    â€˜So sell it and get over it,’ he told himself, but the ache to restore this place, to do something, was almost overwhelming.
    He turned back to the castle but paused at the ha-ha. The beautifully crafted stone wall formed a divide so stock could be kept from the gardens without anything as crass as a fence interfering with the view from the castle windows. But in places the wall was starting to crumble. He looked at it for a long moment and then he couldn’t resist. Stones had fallen. They were just...there.
    He knelt and started fitting stone to stone.
    He started to build.
    To hold and to honour ... He couldn’t hold, he decided, but, for the time he was here, he would do this place honour.
    * * *
    Jo thought about heading outside but Finn had gone that way and she knew he’d want to be alone. There was silence from the kitchen. Mrs O’Reilly was either fainting from shock or trying to decide whether she could tell them they could shove their offer. Either way, maybe she needed space too.
    Jo started up towards her