Pact without desire

by Jane Arbor

  Pact Without Desire by Jane Arbor

  "I will marry the first man who asks!"

  Sara made her reckless statement in a moment of hurt and piqueafter being jilted by Cliff. And for better or worse, the man listening asked her.Rede Forrest had said her desire to "show" her ex-fiancé suited his own plans. He needed a wife. And for reasons she couldn't quite explain to herself, Sara rashly accepted his offer. But once married to Rede - and savoring her new life in Singapore—all thoughts of Cliff were wiped out of her Mind!

  PRINTED IN U.S.A

  OTHER Harlequin Romances by JANE ARBOR:

  858—MY SURGEON NEIGHBOUR 887—LAKE OF SHADOWS 919—DEAR INTRUDER950—KINGFISHER TIDE 1000—A GIRL NAMED SMITH 1048—HIGH MASTER OF CLERE 1108—SUMMER EVERY DAY 1157—YESTERDAY'S MAGIC 1182—GOLDEN APPLE ISLAND 1277—STRANGER'S TRESPASS 1336—THE CYPRESS GARDEN 1406—WALK INTO THE WIND 1443—THE FEATHERED SHAFT 1480—THE LINDEN LEAF 1544—THE OTHER MISS DONNE 1582—WILDFIRE QUEST 1665—THE FLOWER ON THE ROCK 1740—ROMAN SUMMER 1789—THE VELVET SPUR 1832—MEET THE SUN HALFWAY 1896—THE WIDE FIELDS OF HOME 1963—SMOKE INTO FLAME 2033—TREE OF PARADISE 2066—TWO PINS IN A FOUNTAIN 2108—A GROWING MOON 2231—RETURN TO SILBERSEE 2251—LATE RAPTURE.

  Many of these titles are available at your local bookseller.

  For a free catalogue listing all available Harlequin Romances, send your name and address to:

  HARLEQUIN READER SERVICE,M.P.O. Box 707, Niagara Falls, N.Y 14302

  Canadian address: Stratford, Ontario, Canada N5A 6W2

  Original hardcover edition published in 1979 by Mills & Boon Limited

  ISBN 0-373-02299-9

  Harlequin edition published December 1979

  Copyright ©1979 by Jane Arbor.

  Philippine copyright 1979. Australian copyright 1979.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher. All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention. The Harlequin trademark, consisting of the word HARLEQUIN and the portrayal of a Harlequin, is registered in the United States Patent Office and the Canada Trade Marks Office.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FOR Sara the hour-long freedom to leave the aircraft and walk the concourse at Bahrain gave her her first glimpse of the East, and she was experiencing it alone. Her luggage had gone aboard labelled 'Mrs Rede Forrest', her new passport named her as 'Sara Forrest'; for a week now she had signed herself so, and the narrow gold ring guarded by her engagement diamond signalled her as the married woman which, so far, she was not.

  So far ... But even if Rede—his name still came strangely—had not had to fly out on a crisis call from Singapore on the very afternoon of their wedding-day, would her marriage have been more real than in name only even yet?

  She did not know. Since that traumatic evening when she had accepted his bizarre proposal, she and Rede had been on no terms of intimacy from which she could sense his intentions of their future. They had met on most days, had lunched and dined and shopped for clothes for her at his dictation. At the end of his leave, after their wedding, they were to fly together to Singapore—but that plan had been disrupted by his urgent departure ahead of her.

  The hours she had spent with him, nervously feeling her way to knowing him, had had a dream-

  like quality of their happenings being not quite real, and only when she was alone had she come down to the earth of questioning where a marriage with so little romantic heart to it could lead, and why they had contracted it.

  Rede had claimed that he wouldn't be the loser by it, but where was his gain? She wasn't wealthy, she hadn't aristocratic standing, and as in the circumstances he couldn't have married her in order to cherish her—why? And even of herself she only knew a confusion of motives which baffled her.

  Revenge against the man—Rede Forrest—whose influence with Cliff Iden had virtually taken Cliff from her? Yes, there had been a brief temptation to tie him to a loveless marriage to pay him out for that. But the meanness of that rancour had passed. Pride then? The chance Rede's proposal had given her to carry out her reckless threat she had made to him—that, now hating Cliff for his betrayal of her, she would marry the first man who asked her? Yes, that still perhaps, but by no means uppermost. For there had been something else ... something she could only define as an acute awareness of the magnetic importance of Rede to her life.

  She didn't love him—of the stranger who had cynically taken her at her word and proposed a loveless marriage to her, that was impossible. But still her world, empty of his dominant direction of it, would now, she suspected, be empty indeed; the time before she knew him appearing flat and featureless as a desert. On too short an acquaintance

  to justify it, he had become foremost in her thoughts, and against all reason or prudence she had begun to feel committed to the bloodless pact with which he had claimed her. She had to see it through. (But 'through' to--where?) She had no answer to that.

  The in-transit passengers were being recalled to the plane, and, pursued by Arab souvenir-vendors to the last, she joined the queue for yet another security check. Singapore was several flying hours away. If she were lucky and could be left alone by the diligent cabin staff, she might catch some sleep. For Rede would probably be meeting her, and from her short knowledge of his standards she sensed that he would expect reasonable chic after even a seventeen-hour flight. She mustn't arrive looking like a rag.

  But Rede did not meet her. When the porter she had managed to corral had collected her bags from the carousel and loaded them on a trolley she was hailed by name from the barrier by a beaming Malay in faultless chauffeur's uniform. In English which was good though stilted, he took her over from the porter and, apologising for the distance, conducted her to a long grey open car in the car park, where she chose to sit in the passenger seat beside him.

  'Tuan Forrest unavoidably detained in office,' he explained. 'But he send flowers for you, mem,' he added with a backward jerk of his head at the back seat. Sara looked round at the big sheaf in florists'

  wrappings which would have greeted her if she had sat there. 'I see. Thank you,' she said, and forced her feeling of let-down to bow to 'unavoidably'.

  The car slid smoothly along tree-lined streets and avenues basking in late afternoon sunshine, flanked by luxurious hotels and shopping precincts and peopled glamorously to Western eyes. The chauffeur ('call me Lim, mem,') treated Sara to a running commentary as he drove.

  'Singapura beautiful city, mem. Great seaport— fourth in the world. Many lovely sights—the Jade House, the Orchid Gardens, fine temples, Sentosa Island. A happy city too—work and good housing and schools for all—you will see.'

  The drive was a long one, mostly through residential areas, leaving the central business district largely to seaward. But when, Lim said, they were within ten minutes of Rede's house in Nassim Road, he proposed to make a detour to show Sara the Temasik building. (Tuan Forrest's orders, if Mem were not too tired.)

  He pulled up at the wrought-iron gates to a long, one-storeyed building standing back in a courtyard of ornamental flowerbeds. It was white and gleaming, with sun-canopies to every window and upward-turned eaves to its Oriental roof.

  Sara mentally compared it with the soot-begrimed London offices of Temasik to which C
liff had sometimes taken her when they were engaged. So this was Rede's kingdom, named Temasik for the island's ancient title of 'sea town', the source of all the jade,

  silks, batik, pewterware, porcelains and silver which went out from here all over the world. She thanked Lim for showing her the place and gave him a description of its opposite number in London, at which he shook his head in shocked disbelief.

  After his offices, Rede's luxurious house was no surprise. It was one of a few mansions in its exclusive avenue, behind walls hung with bougainvillea and morning glory; white too, with flowers climbing over trellis on its walls, and a first-floor carved balcony running its length. Sara's pulse quickened at the sight of it. Was this the place—because of Rede—which she was going to have to call 'home'?

  At the door Rede's houseman, Chakan, took her bags from Lim, and Buppa, Chakan's wife and Rede's housekeeper, welcomed her into the cool hall, spread with rugs and sweet with flower scents.

  Hands in a prayer-attitude beneath her chin, Buppa bobbed. 'Madam would like to go to her suite, no doubt?' Madam smiled that she would, and followed the woman up a wide curving staircase to a big sunny room overlooking sloping lawns. The bed was a fourposter; a door gave on to a bathroom, another door opened briefly by Buppa showed Rede's bedroom; both rooms shared a window balcony.

  Sara asked what time Rede might be home. Buppa was vague. Soon perhaps, or not yet. Evening—some time. For dinner—yes; surely. He should be told Madam had arrived. In the meantime Madam would like tea to be brought to her, and then to rest?

  The tea, fragrant with lemon, was brought by a tiny child in a maid's smock, who volunteered her name as Malee and her age as seventeen while she turned down the bed-coverings and drew linen blinds against the sun. When she had gone, smiling and bobbing her way out, Sara sipped the tea gratefully, then took a silk wrap from her overnight bag, unzipped her sleeveless linen dress and lay down on the bed. But not to sleep, for all her lack of rest on the plane. She was too keyed-up, too chillingly apprehensive of Rede's homecoming to find her here. She had perhaps an hour—less?—more?—in which to wait for him, and she had to brace herself to the ordeal of meeting him for the first time since their marriage and parting three hours later. Her thoughts went back to the first time she had ever seen him ...

  The usher at Cliff's wedding had met her halfway up the aisle. 'Friend of the bride—or of the groom?' he asked in a church whisper.

  'Neither,' she told him, and had obeyed the shooing motion with which he intimated that the place of mere spectators was further back. She joined a pewful of people who shuffled closer to make room for her, glancing briefly at her immediate neighbour, and glancing again while his profile was turned to her.

  Seated, he was head and shoulders taller than she. He was dark, tanned, almost to swarthiness; she had an impression of a high-bridged nose and a strongly

  jutting chin; he was dressed as informally as she was, and when he interrupted her scrutiny by looking her way there was a glint of conspiratorial amusement in the dark grey eyes he had turned upon her.

  'Like me, having no wedding-garments, you've been cast into the outer darkness? You're not a guest?' he had enquired, not whispering, but only for her hearing.

  Her sore spirit had been in no mood for badinage. 'No,' she had replied shortly, facing front.

  'Then you collect fashionable weddings, per-

  haps?'

  'Collect them?'

  'As some people collect stamps or Old Masters. On "Weddings I have Known" you are possibly a connoisseur?'

  `I'm not snooping for the sake of it. I—happen to know the bridegroom, that's all,' and, suddenly roused by the man's impertinent curiosity, she had turned on him. 'Since you're so interested as to why I'm here, what about you?' she had demanded.

  'I? Oh, I—happen to know both the bride and the groom.' His hesitancy mimicked her own.

  She had put studied insolence in the glance which appraised his open-necked shirt, patterned silk cravat and beige slacks. 'But they didn't invite you as a guest?' she had insinuated.

  'I didn't know I could attend. I only flew in from the Far East this morning, noted the date, remembered the name of this church and stopped by—'

  He checked as the soft meanderings of the organ voluntary had ceased, signalling the imminent appearance of the bride—Cliff's bride, passing up the aisle in a rustle of silk and chiffon to meet Cliff, expectant and nervously smiling at the altar, while Sara had stared unseeingly at the Order of Service sheet in her hands.

  `Dearly beloved, we are gathered together ...' There at Cliff's side, in the place of the stranger named Isabel Carbery, should she, Sara Duncan, have stood sometime in the near future, hearing the lovely age-old words spoken over her and Cliff, making her vows to him, accepting the promised faith of his.

  Before he had gone out to Singapore for his three months' trial for his new job with his firm, Temasik, exporters of luxury wares from the East, everything had been in accord. He and Sara were to marry soon after his return, and a fortnight before it she had given up her post as a television studio assistant, in order to tackle the delicious task of preparing a trousseau for young wifehood in the tropics. And then Cliff had come to her with his craven confession.

  At first he had been lonely in Singapore. Then there had been this lovely girl, Isabel, out from England on a visit to her Singapore-based relatives; herself the daughter of a director of the English branch of Temasik; Cliff's introduction to her made and his courtship encouraged, by his chief-to-be,

  the Overseas Director, Rede Forrest. So would Sara free him?

  She had done so, feeling no charity towards him, indulging the savage hope that he might be eaten by remorse. Meanwhile, he had his Isabel. It had been she, Sara, for whom there had been only emptiness ahead. She hadn't even a job any longer, would have to start again.

  Now she was remembering how, unable to watch him marry Isabel Carbery, she had kept her . eyes lowered until the tears of self-pity threatened to course down her cheeks. Then she had flung back her head, lest people should notice ... her curious neighbour not above asking why she was not following a ceremony she had presumably come to see. But in the instant of trying to behave like everyone else, she had realised the culpable folly of having come, pretending to an excusable need for a last sight of Cliff and a first sight of the girl who had supplanted her.

  For primarily she had come in order to rub salt into her wounds by indulging her near-hatred of Cliff—and suddenly to be cherishing in church only the sour rancour of her hatred and jealousy—had appeared to her like sacrilege. She couldn't, mustn't stay. She had to get out, and had plunged into the aisle, reckless of the turned eyes watching her go.

  There had followed three dreary weeks of seeking a new job—the daily task of going for interviews or calling at the agency to see what had 'come in'. She could have returned to her former job,

  but refused to face the humiliation of admitting her broken engagement. She hadn't gone near the studios since she had resigned, leaving her late colleagues to conclude that she had had a 'relatives only' wedding and had gone straight out to the East with Cliff.

  Relatives only—that had been an ironic laugh in itself. For she had none nearer than an aunt in the North and some cousins. The small ground-floor flat, one of several such warrens in a formerly one-family mansion in Wimbledon, had been her home since she had been able to afford to leave the hostel where she had lived when she had first gone to London. Her name had been in the slot below her own bell at the front door. But only friends and tradesmen ever rang for her. No one of her own at all.

  Then there had been the day which she was to remember as That Evening. Earlier its rain, no spring shower but a dance of hailstones on the ground and a fusillade upon window panes, had soaked her while she was out, and when she came in she had bathed, changed into a kaftan and tied her hair back carelessly with a ribbon, not bothering again with lipstick. When the time came she need only exchange the kaftan for he
r nightgown and she would be ready for bed. She had gone through the same routine on the day of Cliff's wedding and this time she had found in the pocket of the kaftan's skirt a thick fold of paper.

  She had taken it out, uncreased it, the silver

  engraved Order of Service which she had brought away with her. She scanned it. Wagner ... Mendelssohn ... Bach Toccata and Fugue ... Love Divine, All Loves Excelling ... Cliff and Isabel would have gone out to Singapore by then, and as she crumpled the sheet and had thrown it in the wastepaper basket, she had thought again of the man, her pew-neighbour, who had offered it to her, noticing she hadn't collected one at the church door.

  That man. Rede. Her husband—The man who, when she had had to answer her bell a moment or two later had stood at the outer door, his bare head and his shoulders the immediate target of the overflow from the porch roof, and to whom her instinctively hospitable, 'Oh—please come in,' had been exactly simultaneous with her startled recognition

  of him—`that man'.

  At her impulsive invitation he was inside the hall and almost inside her living-room, which had no vestibule. She had stared at him, her heart thumping. How had he found her? Why?

  He had murmured a perfunctory `May I?' following her into her room, where he held out his hand to her. 'Sara Duncan?' he had questioned, as if knowing he would not be corrected, and added, `Rede Forrest', in the same flat tone.

  Rede Forrest! The Overseas-Director of Temasik, who had fostered and encouraged Cliff's match with Isabel Carbery, when Cliff must surely have told him he was already engaged! Along with her contempt of Cliff, she had despised a Rede Forrest

  she was never likely to meet. But had met—in church at Cliff's wedding. With a hand at her throat she had demanded of him, 'What do you want? And how did you find me?'

  He had turned a palm upward. 'Simple. On the fternoon we met I invited myself belatedly to the wedding reception and described you to the bridegroom.'

  'Described me to Cliff? How?'