Marriage on the Rebound

by Michelle Reid

  Twenty minutes later, wrapped in a snowy white bathrobe she had found hanging behind the bathroom door, she came back into the bedroom to find that everything had already been unpacked and put away for her.

  And hanging on the wardrobe was a fresh set of clothes—yet another display of Rafe’s peremptory manner.

  He’d selected a plain linen shirt-waister dress in a natural wheat colour, with brown leather buttons up the front and a matching brown leather belt. She had never seen it in her life before—or the matching brown blazer that hung beside it.

  Or the brown leather shoes sitting neatly to attention on the floor, and the cream silk underwear draped on the bed.

  With a puzzled frown, she stepped up to the wardrobe and slid open the door.

  It was a shock. She recognised nothing of her own in there.

  What the hell…? she wondered in a moment’s blank incomprehension, then felt the first rumblings of mutiny begin to bubble inside her.

  From the moment she’d left her aunt and uncle’s house she hadn’t seen a single piece of her own luggage. Some of the clothes she had so lovingly bought for her honeymoon with Piers had appeared in the wardrobe back at Rafe’s house, but a lot of them hadn’t, and the suitcases she had never seen again.

  Even her flight bag had been a different one. Instead of the black leather bag that matched her old luggage, Rafe had come up with a velvety soft tan one, made of the finest kid leather, in which he’d told her to place her personal items.

  ‘Feeling better now?’

  Rafe appeared in the doorway to the bedroom.

  Shaan pushed her hands into the deep robe pockets and turned slowly to face him. ‘Where did these come from?’ she demanded.

  There was a moment’s pause. ‘Why?’ he countered casually. ‘Don’t you like them?’

  ‘It isn’t a case of like,’ she said. ‘I just don’t recognise them.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘They’re new,’ he explained. ‘I had your sizes faxed out here, so everything should fit…’

  Faxed? Faxed out where, and to whom? ‘But where are my own things?’

  ‘Back in England.’ He shrugged and glanced pointedly at his watch. ‘I have one or two phone calls to make before we—’

  ‘Rate!’ She stopped him before he could turn away. ‘Have—have you discarded all my other stuff?’ she asked him incredulously.

  ‘Did you want to see it again?’ he asked, disturbing her insides with the narrowed coolness of his regard.

  ‘I…no,’ she admitted, feeling the colour recede from her face. ‘But—’

  ‘There is no but,’ he cut in. ‘You hated the sight of those things and I hated them too. So I got rid of them, OK? And even if it isn’t OK it’s too damned late. You’re my wife now, Shaan,’ he added grimly. ‘Not Piers’. And things you bought to please him will certainly not please me.’

  ‘But all that money, Rafe!’ she cried. Whether he was right or wrong, she was horrified by the unnecessary extravagance.

  ‘What money—Piers’ money?’ His mouth turned down into an ugly sneer when Shaan lowered her eyes in guilt.

  Yes, Piers had paid for her trousseau. She had been nothing but a very junior secretary who needed every penny of her income just to live. As Piers had pointed out to her when they’d discussed their honeymoon, she would be his responsibility by then, so why shouldn’t he pay for the kind of clothes he would expect to see his wife wearing?

  ‘Well, then, don’t trouble yourself about it,’ Rafe said tightly. ‘Because any money Piers spent on you initially came from me, so the—“extravagance” is my problem, not yours. Get dressed,’ he commanded, anger flashing across his eyes as he watched her sink heavily onto the edge of the bed. ‘We have a business dinner to attend this evening, and we have to get across the city to my offices to pick up some papers I need to study before we meet these people.’

  ‘We?’ Her head came up sharply, alarm making her catch her breath. ‘But you don’t need me to—’

  His harsh sigh cut her short. He strode over to her then bent to lift her back to her feet, his fingers hurting where they pressed into the delicate structure of her shoulders.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘In the eyes of everyone who matters, we are man and wife. And in the role of wife it is your duty to be at my side when I entertain. Is that asking too much?’

  ‘I… No, of course not,’ she answered stiffly.

  ‘Good.’ He nodded. ‘So, do you come with me to my offices, or would you prefer to sit here moping over your lost trousseau?’

  It was meant to cut, and it did. What she didn’t understand was why he was suddenly attacking her like this. It didn’t make any sense.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she conceded dully. ‘Just for the record,’ she added on a sudden flash of rare defiance, ‘I couldn’t care less what you did with my other things. But I do object to you implying that I was some kind of gold-digger! I was in love with Piers! And I was marrying him for the man I thought he was—not for what I thought I could get out of him!’

  ‘Yet you use the past tense already,’ he threw back coolly. ‘Does real love wither into the past tense that quickly, Shaan?’

  She lowered her head, the cruel taunt killing that small flare of defiance as neatly as if he had taken it between his finger and thumb and snuffed it out.

  ‘Look,’ he continued, turning impatiently away from her, ‘if you could hurry up in here, I would appreciate it. Only I need a shower and a change of clothes myself before we—’

  ‘W-what do you mean?’ Shaan gasped, beginning to feel dizzy with all the shocks he seemed hell-bent on laying on her.

  Rafe was slowly turning back to look at her, his eyes narrowed and very guarded as he prompted carefully, ‘About what, exactly?’

  One of her hands made a fluttering movement out in front of her. ‘Rafe,’ she breathed, a deep sense of unease sending the tip of her tongue on a moistening foray around her suddenly dry lips. ‘I… We aren’t—sh-sharing this bedroom, are we?’

  ‘Of course,’ he confirmed, eyes narrowing even further when what bit of colour she had left in her face drained away. ‘This is a one bedroomed suite. Of course we have to share it.’

  Shaan stared at him in horror. A one-bedroomed suite, she repeated feverishly to herself. With only one bed! ‘No,’ she whispered as alarm shot like a thousand sharp needles through her. That’s not fair. I—I’ve done everything else you’ve expected me to do, Rafe. But I will not sleep in the same bed as you.’

  ‘And why not?’ he demanded, sounding so arrogantly surprised that she wanted to hit him! ‘There is no sin that I know of in a man and wife sharing the same bed.’

  ‘In this case there is,’ she disputed, trying hard to keep her voice as even as his, so he wouldn’t know how close to hysterics she was actually becoming. Sleep with Rafe—close to Rafe? She shook her long mane of hair. She just couldn’t do it, and she was hurt that he was expecting her to! ‘We have a deal, you and I. A deal which involves saving face and nothing else!’

  ‘Exactly,’ he agreed, sounding annoyingly calm and logical in the face of her quivering alarm. ‘This is the best one-bedroomed suite this hotel has to offer. It’s the one I always use when I come here. People know me in this hotel, Shaan,’ he said grimly. ‘How do you think it would look to them if I suddenly asked them for one of their two-bedroomed suites when they know I’ve just taken myself a lovely bride?’

  She swallowed, understanding him exactly. In this particular situation, Rafe was saving his own face. And she knew—knew even as every sense she possessed was clamouring in opposition to it—hat she did not have a single protest she could offer against him doing that.

  Rafe knew it, too. The way he stood there, drawing out the new throbbing silence between them to deliberately punctuate her numbing defeat, said it all.

  Then the telephone in the other room began to ring. ‘Be a good girl and get dressed,’ he said as he turned to go and answer it, adding casual
ly over his shoulder, ‘I may as well order us some lunch here now the hour is getting so late. Ten minutes, Shaan,’ he concluded peremptorily.

  No wonder he was such a brilliant businessman, she thought as she was left staring blankly at the empty space Rafe had left behind him. The man could cut any argument to shreds without even having to try hard!

  And she should have remembered that, she told herself grimly, flopping back onto the bed to stare at the ceiling with a feeling of stunned helplessness.

  Working for the Danvers Corporation herself, she would have to had to be blind and deaf not to know all about the man who paid her wages. Not that she had ever had any contact with him—nor so much as set eyes on him in that vast multi-storey office block where the top-floor chief rarely set foot in the unhallowed halls of his working minions.

  Except once, she recalled, thinking back to that one brief moment in time, before she’d even met Piers, when her eyes had clashed with those of Rafe Danvers.

  A day when she had found herself accidentally tangled up in a sudden wall of bodies that had come surging out of one of the managerial offices on her floor.

  She’d been walking down the corridor, her arms full of files she had just picked up from the filing department. Restricted as she was, she’d had no hope of darting to one side as they’d come like a herd of cattle upon her. They’d tried to avoid her, she allowed. But one rather bullish-looking man wearing an aggressive scowl on his face had looked right through her as if she hadn’t been there, knocking so violently against her arm that she’d staggered, the files going one way, she going the other. He hadn’t even apologised, striding off without so much as turning his head to see the destruction he had left behind him.

  It had been Rafe who had paused, Rafe who’d turned to see what all the clatter was about. Rafe who’d come back and apologised for the accident, and enquired if she was all right.

  The knock had left her breathless, and the fact that she’d recognised him instantly as the big white chief few ever saw off his own executive floor had only made her more flustered. She could remember blushing, remember sliding her eyes quickly away from the hard impatience glinting out of his and mumbling some incoherent assurance that she was fine as she’d bent down to gather together the scattered files.

  She had expected him to leave her then—had wanted him to, so she could rub her arm where the other man had barged into her. But he hadn’t. Instead he too had come down on his haunches, dark trousers stretching across his powerful thighs as he’d helped scoop papers back into spilling files.

  And that had basically been it, she recalled. Except for her mumbling a breathless thank you when he’d silently handed her back her files, and he nodding in acknowledgement before rising back to his full, daunting height again.

  It was then their eyes had clashed—just one tiny speck of time when she’d glanced up and he’d looked down and the world had seemed to grind to a dizzy, swirling halt as those sharp silver points seemed to pierce right into her. Then he’d nodded his head again and strode off, leaving her standing there staring blankly after him as he went to join his impatiently waiting herd.

  That should have been the end of it as far as she was concerned. So she’d been surprised when later on that day the man who had knocked into her turned up at the side of her desk and coughed uncomfortably.

  ‘I believe I owe you an apology,’ he’d said, his bullish face tight, as if apologies did not come easily to him and he resented giving this one.

  Shaan had just blinked up at him, wondering who had sent him and, more to the point, how they’d found out who she was. She was, after all, nothing but a very junior secretary amongst a whole army of secretaries who filled up all the desks in the huge typing pool.

  It was a few weeks later, when she’d been sent to do some urgent processing for Piers, and they’d suddenly discovered an attraction for each other, that he had referred to the incident himself, then grinningly filled her in with what had happened afterwards.

  ‘Rafe hit the roof,’ he’d told her. ‘The moment he got us all back upstairs, he turned on poor Jack Mellor and tore him to shreds!’ His expression alone had said he found it all rather amusing. ‘Said if Jack wasn’t capable of applying even the basics in good manners then what the hell was he doing working for him? Jack just stared at him, wondering what the hell he’d done to bring on such a raking attack. So Rafe told him—in that neatly slicing way he has of diminishing someone to the ranks of idiot without having to try very hard—and poor Jack was ordered off to find out just who you were, apologise personally and then report back to him.’

  In her mind’s eye, Shaan could still see the way Piers had shaken his fair head ruefully. ‘I don’t think Jack will ever forgive Rafe for showing him up like that in front of the rest of us. Since we were all a bit taken aback by his reaction over such a silly little incident, we half expected to hear that you’d been rushed to hospital or something, with at least some broken bones for your trouble. But you didn’t even receive a scratch, did you?’ he’d quizzed curiously.

  But it was only now, as she lay there across the bed she was going to have to share with Rafe tonight, that it occurred to her that the way Piers had been talking had put him amongst that trampling herd that had come bearing down upon her. She hadn’t realised that before—certainly hadn’t noticed him. And only Rafe had cared enough to stop. Only Rafe had considered it more than just the ‘silly little incident’ Piers had obviously considered it.

  Piers. A weight pressing heavily down on her chest sent the air seeping painfully from her lungs. Piers, the younger one, the more handsome and sunny one of the Danvers men. Piers, the less intimidating and far less complicated one.

  And, she now knew, the shallower, more selfish and—‘Shaan!’ The sound of that harshly rasping voice calling from the other room brought her eyes jerking open in startled surprise.

  ‘Coming!’ she answered shakily, jerking off the bed to stand, swaying with a mixture of utter fatigue and miserable confusion as to where her life was going to take her from here on.

  She looked down at the bed, imagining two dark heads on the snowy white pillows—and shuddered in utter rejection of what next went skittering through her mind.

  ‘No,’ she whispered to herself. ‘No. Never. Rafe doesn’t want me like that. I know he doesn’t.’

  And with that comforting thought she made herself get dressed, determined to be as cool and collected about all this as he was being.

  Even if it killed her to do it.

  * * *

  Their lunch was just being wheeled in as she let herself into the other room. Rafe’s voice sounded impatient as he instructed the waiter to leave the heated trolley by the dining table before dismissing him.

  Drawn by the delicious aroma of freshly ground coffee, Shaan walked over to the table and sat down, her eyes carefully averted from the lancing, probing look Rafe sent her.

  The telephone rang again while she was pouring herself a cup of coffee, and it was only as Rafe strode across the room that she realised there was a huge cedarwood desk she hadn’t noticed before, the top of it already lost in a mound of paperwork.

  No wonder he looks so impatient, she thought ruefully. While I’ve been hogging the bedroom, he’s been working like a dog!

  ‘Coffee?’ she offered, striving to sound at ease when really she was strung up like piano wire. ‘Or would you prefer to shower first?’

  He glanced at his watch, grimaced, then sighed. ‘Coffee,’ he decided. ‘Black, no sugar.’ And he made a visible effort to relax some of the tension out of his shoulders as he came to join her.

  He had only taken one step when the telephone began ringing yet again. On another sigh he turned back to the insistent machine and snatched up the receiver. ‘No more calls for the next half hour,’ he instructed whoever was on the other end, then dropped the phone back on its rest, his expression long-suffering as he came to sit down opposite her.

  Mutely, Shaan handed h
im a cup, her gaze watchful as she sipped slowly at her own. He glanced up, caught her studying him and gave a tight, wry smile.

  For some reason that smile melted something inside her—gave her courage to smile back and ask quietly, ‘Do you always have to work at such a pace?’

  ‘One of the trials of being a high-flying businessman,’ he drily mocked himself.

  ‘All work and no play,’ she joined in the joke.

  His eyes came to life suddenly. ‘Not all work,’ he corrected, and watched the embarrassed colour sweep her cheeks as his meaning hit home.

  Piers had told her all about his women. And if Piers was to be believed—which she wasn’t sure of any more—Rafe’s women were very beautiful, very sophisticated, and very independently successful—women who did not cling and understood that they took second place in his life to his job.

  ‘A whole collection of them,’ Piers had described very mockingly. ‘Spread out in a string across the world, all happy to make themselves available to him when he happens to be in town.’

  One in every port, Shaan mused ruefully. Did that mean he had a woman in this port?

  ‘Here,’ he said, placing a covered plate in front of her and removing the domed lid to reveal the lightest, fluffiest omelette she had ever seen. She stared down at it and decided she did not want it. In fact her stomach had just closed up at the very thought of food entering it. She swallowed tensely, aware of his eyes on her, aware that her sudden lack of appetite was due to the sudden suspicion that he had indeed got a woman tucked away somewhere in this crowded city.

  And why should that bother her? she asked herself grimly. His private life was none of her business!

  ‘Eat,’ Rafe commanded, after watching her stare at her food for too long.

  She ate, forcing each morsel into her mouth and having to work at swallowing it

  It was a relief when the phone started ringing again, so that she could desert what was left on her plate when Rafe got up to answer it

  ‘Right’ He turned towards the bedroom the moment he came off the phone. ‘I’ll be about ten minutes. If the phone rings take any messages and tell them I’ll get back to them as soon as I can.’