Merger By Matrimony

by Cathy Williams

  Over the next day, she continued with her routine, mopping him, feeding him in a ritual that could take anything up to an hour, watching and waiting and waiting and watching, barely sleeping herself.

  All she wanted was one word from him, a signal that he was on the mend.

  ‘He’s not going downhill, at any rate,’ her father said on the third day, as he stood next to her and performed a number of routine examinations. ‘In fact, the fever’s beginning to let up a bit.’ Instead of leaving the room this time, he walked slowly across to the window and stood there with his back to it.

  ‘And I want some answers from you, young woman.’

  ‘What answers? I can’t predict the outcome of this any more than you can, Dad,’ Destiny said, deliberately misreading his question, even though she knew that it was no more than a temporary stalling exercise.

  ‘What’s the relationship between you and this young man?’

  ‘Relationship? Relationship?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He had an implacable glint in his eye which she met with a mutinous look.

  ‘I’m just looking after him the way I’d look after any idiot who managed to get themselves in this situation because they were too bull-headed to admit that they couldn’t cope with the rigours of a journey way beyond their experience.’

  Her father didn’t say anything. He just continued to look at her patiently, while Callum lay inert on the bed between them.

  ‘Okay!’ she half-shouted, glaring at her father and that infernally mild expression of his which had always been more effective when it came to getting what he wanted than any Chinese water torture method. ‘So we may have seen one another now and again when I was in England! Is it my fault that the man’s pushy?’ She folded her arms and watched as her father slowly moved towards the bed so that they were now facing each other with only the width of the bed between them. ‘One minute there he was, using every trick in the book to get the company off me, and the next minute…the next minute he’s forcing himself on me so that I have no option but to have dinner with him!’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Okay! So I may have…may have found him attractive…’ She gave her father a weak, apologetic smile. ‘Not,’ she said, addressing the man on the bed because her situation was all thanks to him, ‘that you look very attractive at the moment, Callum Ross! But then whose idiot fault is that?’ Panic and worry made her want to strangle him and hold him tightly at the same time.

  ‘So my little girl went to England and grew up,’ her father mused slowly to himself.

  ‘If by growing up, you call falling in love with the least suitable man on the face of the earth!’ She tenderly stroked his forehead.

  ‘I suspected as much.’

  ‘It’s not going to come to anything!’ Destiny cried. ‘He doesn’t love me!’

  ‘But you love him.’

  ‘Life’s just not fair, is it, Dad? You and Mum just clicked, but me…I had to go halfway across the world and get myself embroiled with a hardheaded businessman who doesn’t know the meaning of love.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  She sighed in resignation. ‘Because he proposed to me, but not,’ she carried on quickly, seeing the interruption forming on her father’s lips, ‘because he loved me. He said that an alliance would make a good business proposition. He wanted my company, we got along, and to him it made sense that we should just tie the two things together and bingo, a marriage made in heaven.’ Now she was beginning to feel like a sixteen-year-old child again. Moreover, she didn’t want the compassion she could see in her father’s eyes. A little bit of shared hostility might have got her going on the right path, but compassion was just going to make her break down.

  ‘So there you go. That’s the relationship. I love him, and now you know I want you to promise not to mention it again.’

  They stared at one another, and then, from the bed, Callum said, ‘But I was getting really interested in all of this. Please, carry on. Don’t mind me.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘ARE you sure it’s all right for you to be here? Anything could happen.’

  ‘Don’t be such a wimp.’ Destiny stepped out into the dense, inky blackness and reached out for the hand waiting for her, which slipped around her waist, pulling her against him.

  ‘Wimp? Me? That’s not what your father thinks.’ Callum buried his face against her hair and reached to cup the side of her head with his hand. ‘In fact,’ he murmured in a satisfied voice, tickling her ear with his breath, ‘if I recall, he told you how lucky you were to meet me.’

  ‘He may have been delusional.’ She was grinning as the hot night air wafted aromatically around them. In the compound, everyone was asleep, unlike outside, where the animals of the night had come out to play and could be heard calling from the trees and beyond into the depths of the forest.

  They walked slowly and entwined, to one of the three benches which had been recently placed in a circular format under a spreading tree, making it a wonderful place for some of the women to do their craft-making during the day, protected from the full-frontal attack of the sun.

  Nine months had changed a lot, not least on the compound, where sensibly-spent money had improved living conditions and amassed more much-needed staff to cope with Henri’s departure, her own and, in due course, her father’s. He would be working in the medical facilities of the Felt Pharmaceutical subsidiary, which had now only been going for a matter of a few weeks.

  Nine months of absolute bliss. It still seemed hard to believe that dreams had come true…

  When Callum, supposedly on his death bed and utterly unconscious to anything happening around him, had murmured those words, Destiny had been overcome by the twin emotions of shock and mortification.

  They had both stared down at the bed to find Callum looking at them, eyes open and with an expression which, if not perky, had been amused enough to inform her that his brush with death had been successfully outmanoeuvred.

  ‘My boy, you’re with us at last.’ Her father scurried around, taking all the routine medical checks, making sure that everything was now returning to the land of the living.

  All Destiny could think of to say was, ‘How long have you been listening to our conversation?’

  ‘Is that any way to greet the man you adore, when he’s been on the brink of death?’

  Aside from his voice sounding weaker, any near-death experience had certainly left his mind as alert as ever it had been and his sense of humour utterly intact.

  ‘Which,’ she hissed, bending down to look at him, at once gutted by such an enormous feeling of relief that he was out of the woods that it was quite possible to allow her embarrassed anger at being eavesdropped to get the better of her, ‘he has clearly managed to overcome.’ He’d put her through hell, and now here he was, frail, haggard, feeble—yet still capable of rousing within her emotions that left no room for anything else.

  What a consummate actor! Lying there on the bed. Had he heard everything she had told her father? Every word? And had he been aware all along of her presence in the room, hovering over him like a desperate mother hen, not bothering to hide her tears at night because she’d foolishly imagined that he couldn’t hear them?

  What did it matter, anyway? He had heard enough.

  ‘Don’t pester the man, Dessie,’ her father ordered, unable to hear their sotto voce conversation but more than capable of hearing the tenor of her voice, which contained no hint of any soothing bedside manner.

  ‘Yes, my worshipping nurse, a little sympathy, please.’ Callum gave her a weak, pathetic smile, and then added insult to injury by asking her whether she would mind feeding him a little something, because he really was quite hungry now.

  ‘Does he think this is a hotel?’ Destiny fulminated to her father, once they were safely out of the choking confines of the room, which seemed to have shrunk to the size of a matchbox the minute Callum opened his eyes. And his mouth, for that matter.

 
‘He may be conscious, but he obviously hasn’t had a good look around at his surroundings as yet,’ she chuntered on, ignoring her father’s lack of input into the conversation. ‘He might just have realised that rustling up a few tasty morsels might be a tad more difficult than he thinks!’

  ‘We could see our way to bread and soup, Dessie,’ her father reminded her gently. ‘There’s no need to take it out on the poor man just because he happened to overhear what you were saying to me about—’

  ‘Don’t remind me!’ Destiny nearly wailed, slopping soup into a bowl, then carefully re-covering it to protect it from the flies.

  ‘He’s been through a bad experience. Can you imagine how hideous this whole thing must have been for him? The man nearly died, for goodness’s sake!’

  ‘I’m not saying that I’m not glad he’s on the mend. I’m just saying that the two-faced cad had a right to let us know what was going on before I embarked on my soul-wrenching confession. But oh, no! Typical!’

  She then proceeded to spend the next two days running and fetching for him. In her father’s presence he professed to be much weaker than he was, refusing to answer any of her questions with a feeble wave of his hand whilst still being able to insist that she sit with him while he fed himself, taking ages in the process, and that she talk to him because, although he couldn’t possibly communicate for any length of time, he still needed to feel the presence of other people around him. By ‘other people,’ he meant her. And having her around gave him ample opportunity to remind her of the heart-wrenching confession he had wilfully overheard.

  He constantly asked her if he really was her beloved darling, and when she refused to answer smiled in an infuriatingly knowing way.

  By the end of day two her father assured her that Callum was fit enough to travel back to the compound. The rains had almost completely stopped, he could now walk unaided—even though he still made a great production of it and insisted on clutching her arm whenever she was around—and her father needed to return to his base.

  The trip was accomplished in half the time and without the sweltering discomfort of the drive to the outpost, and by the time they arrived back at the compound Destiny was determined to pin him to a wall until he told her why he’d made the trip in the first place.

  If he had come for a signature on something, then she would give it to him and send him on his way, because being so close to him with her feelings so nakedly exposed was tearing her apart. The constant feel of his body against hers as he used her as a propping post sent ragged emotions flying through her, and the whole business was driving her crazy.

  She had fled to Panama to escape him, and now found herself in the worst possible spot she could have imagined. He’d discovered how she felt about him and he was determined to wrench every ounce of advantage that he could from the situation.

  No opportunity to remind her of her regrettable confession was left unturned. When he wasn’t insisting on her personal attention she felt him watching her, but stoically refused to meet his eyes and see the smug knowledge resting there.

  If this was his way of getting his own back on her for having run out on him and his cold-hearted marriage proposal, then he had hit jackpot.

  As soon as she’d ensconced him in the room he would be having until he was ready to leave, she closed the door behind them and stood there, hands on hips, watching as he indolently took the chair by the window.

  ‘You can stop pretending now,’ she informed him without preamble, ignoring the innocently raised eyebrows forming a question. ‘And you can stop playing the innocent. You know exactly what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Should you really be taking this tone with someone who’s still recovering from a near-death experience?’

  ‘If you don’t cut it out, Callum Ross, you’ll be facing another near-death experience and it won’t be caused by a mosquito! Don’t think that I’m too stupid to see through your little games.’

  ‘What little games?’ More innocent enquiry in his voice until she wanted to scream. Instead, she swallowed hard and took a couple of deep, reviving breaths.

  ‘So I ran out on you. Maybe I should have stayed in England and told you to your face that I wasn’t about to enter into marriage with someone who saw me as a useful commodity with the added bonus of sex toy until the novelty wore off. I was a coward, but…’

  ‘And now I understand why,’ he murmured, in such a soft voice that she had to reluctantly install herself closer to where he was just to hear him properly.

  ‘Yes,’ Destiny said bitterly, ‘now you know why. And you’re basking in the knowledge, aren’t you? Your ego must have taken a bashing when you got back from New York to find that I’d disappeared, but you’ve had your little gloat now. If you came here for me to sign something, then give it to me, let me sign it, and then you can go and leave me alone to get on with my life.’ A red mist of self-pity and lurking humiliation formed over her eyes like a cloud.

  ‘And what if I came here to propose to you again?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Then you can go back to England and remember what I wrote in that note. The answer is still no.’

  ‘You love me…’

  The words were like a dagger jutting into her soft flesh. ‘It’ll pass,’ she told him acidly. ‘Like an illness. But there’s no way that you’ll use what you know to your advantage. Anyway, what would be the point of marrying me now? You got what you wanted all along. I kept the properties and you got the company.’

  ‘Maybe I want the country house as well,’ he murmured, looking at her unflinchingly.

  ‘To develop? Something else to add to your portfolio?’

  ‘Maybe I want to live there… It would be a rather spectacular place for a family…lots of space for lots of kids…’

  The words swam seductively around her.

  ‘Then you’d better start looking for a woman you love,’ she said in a dull monotone, alarmed by the flight of fancy that had taken her back to the country estate, but this time with this man by her side and children romping around by their feet. A charming little tableau, she thought, were it not for one or two glaring technicalities.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ he asked, tilting his head to one side quizzically. ‘When I’ve already found her?’

  ‘Stop it,’ she whispered. Tears were gathering in the corners of her eyes and she angrily blinked them away, coincidentally blinking away the vision of him in front of her, looking at her in that way, that way that suggested the impossible, even though she knew that he was still playing games with her.

  ‘No, I won’t. I can’t,’ he said huskily, so that now a desperate kind of hope was beginning to wage war with her grim acceptance. And, like a weed, the hope was sending out shoots everywhere.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Destiny asked in a small, despairing voice.

  ‘I’m talking about you and me and why I trudged halfway across the world to get here. All for you. I don’t need your signature on anything aside from on a marriage licence.’

  ‘I told you…’

  ‘You’re not listening, my darling.’

  It was the tenderness in his voice that did it. She looked at him fully in the face, willing him to say what she wanted to hear but bracing herself in case the words she craved veered off somewhere along the line, just as they had done the last time. She reminded herself viciously that this was but one moment in time, and if it proved a bad moment then it would be washed away eventually and become no more painful than a distant memory. He would go; she would stay; life would carry on the way it always did. Hadn’t it been carrying along for the past two months, ever since she had returned from England? She hadn’t died from a broken heart, had she?

  ‘I came here to tell you that…’ His words dried up and a faint flush began spreading along his neck. ‘That…when you ran out on me like that…’ He raked long fingers through his hair and told her that he could do with some water, which she refused to get.

  ‘I’m sti
ll very weak.’

  ‘Carry on with what you were saying.’

  ‘When you ran out on me like that…’ he continued, like a record that had become stuck in a groove.

  ‘Yes?’ She had every intention of pushing the needle a bit further.

  ‘I…it was like a punch in the stomach…’

  ‘Oh.’

  He tilted her face to his and ran his finger along the side of her cheek. ‘No, I’m lying. It was much, much worse than that. It was like watching my life run away down a gutter because…I love you. That’s why I came here. To tell you that I love you.’

  ‘To tell me that you love me.’ The phrase tasted so delightfully delicious on her lips, did such soaring things to her heart, that she just wanted to repeat it over and over again. She laughed incredulously. ‘Because you love me. Because,’ she said, relishing the revelation, ‘you love me.’

  ‘And because, my darling, I want to marry you. I want to have you by my side and in my bed for the rest of my life. Because I want you to have my babies and be there with them, waiting for me at the end of a long day. To touch, to hold, to caress, to grow old with me, to laugh with me, to do everything under the sun with me.’

  ‘Penny for them.’

  The deep voice interrupted her thoughts and she smiled to herself in the dark. ‘I was thinking about…everything.’ She rested her head against his shoulder. ‘About us, the wedding, and now this…’

  She patted her stomach and felt a warm glow of contentment.

  ‘We’ll have to bring him back here, you know. Or her. To see where I lived for so long. He won’t be able to believe it when he’s running around the grounds of the house, that his mother ran around different grounds when she was young. And with Dad leaving I feel a little as if part of me is vanishing for ever.’