Remarried In Haste

“You’re just another client to me.” About the Author Title Page PROLOGUE CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN EPILOGUE Copyright

“You’re just another client to me.”

“I haven’t said I want to be anything else,” Brant remarked.

“Good,” she said viciously. “You’re in room 9—here’s your key.”

She was holding it in her fingertips. To test his immunity to her, Brant deliberately closed his hand over hers, and as soon as he’d done so, knew he’d made a very bad mistake. Her skin was warm and smooth, with that supple strength he’d forgotten.

He snatched the key from her. Rowan hurried past him and unlocked the door to room 10, entered the room and shut the door with rather more force than was necessary.

Brant stood very still under the moon. He wanted Rowan—in his bed, in his arms, where she belonged—and to hell with the divorce. How was he going to get a minute’s sleep, knowing she was on the other side of the wall from him?

Although born in England, SANDRA FIELD has lived most of her life in Canada; she says the silence and emptiness of the north speaks to her particularly. While she enjoys traveling, and passing on her sense of a new place, she often chooses to write about the city that is now her home. Sandra says, “I write out of my experience. I have learned that love with its joys and its pains is all-important. I hope this knowledge enriches my writing, and touches a chord in you, the reader.”

Remarried in Haste

Sandra Field

www.millsandboon.co.uk

PROLOGUE

“IT’s time you go and see your wife, Brant.”

The rounded beach stone Brant had been idly playing with slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. The noise it made seemed disproportionately loud, jarring his nerves. He bent to pick it up and said coolly, “I don’t have a wife.”

Equally coolly, Gabrielle said, “Her name’s Rowan.”

“We’re divorced. As well you know.”

Gabrielle Doucette was leaning back in her seat, her legs slung carelessly over one arm of the chair; her bundled black hair and deep blue eyes were very familiar to him, as was her ability to look totally relaxed in tense situations. “Sometimes,” she said, “a divorce is just a legal document, a piece of paper with printing on it. Nothing to do with the heart.”

“I was legally separated for a year, and I’ve been divorced for fourteen months,” Brant said tightly. “In all that time I’ve neither heard from Rowan nor seen her. Her lawyer sent back my first batch of support checks with a letter that told me, more or less politely, to get lost. The letter with the second batch was considerably less polite. All of which, to my mind, indicates something a little more significant than a mere legal document.”

Gabrielle stared thoughtfully into her glass of wine; they had eaten bouillabaisse, which was her specialty, and had moved from the table to sit by the window of her Toronto condominium, which overlooked the constant traffic of the 401. “On her part, maybe.”

“On mine, too.” Brant tipped back his glass, draining it. “When are you going to produce the delectable dessert I know you’ve got hidden away somewhere in the refrigerator?”

“When I’m ready.” She smiled at him, a smile of genuine affection. “You and I were thrown together for eight months under circumstances that were far from ordinary—”

“That’s the understatement of the year,” he said; the stinking cells, the oppressive heat, the inevitable illnesses to which they’d both succumbed had been quite extraordinarily unpleasant. Not to say life-threatening.

“—Yet you never fell in love with me.”

He opted for a partial truth; he had no intention of telling her certain of the reasons why he hadn’t fallen in love with her, they were entirely too personal. “I knew you weren’t available,” he said. “You still haven’t gotten over Daniel’s death.” Daniel had been her husband of seven years, who’d died in a car accident before Brant had met Gabrielle.

“True enough.”

He looked around the stark and ultramodern room. “Besides, I don’t like your taste in furniture.”

She chuckled. “That, also, is true. But I think there’s another reason. You didn’t fall in love with me because you still love Rowan.”

Brant had seen this coming. Keeping his hands loose on the stem of his glass, he said, “You’re missing out by being a labor negotiator, Gabrielle—you should be writing fiction.”

“And how would you feel if you heard Rowan was about to remarry?”

His whole body went rigid; for a split second he was twenty-six years old again, back in Angola that sultry evening when a live grenade had arched gracefully through the air toward him and his feet had felt like lumps of concrete. He rasped, “Is she? Who told you?”

Gabrielle smiled again, a rather smug smile. “So you do care. I thought you did.”

“Very clever,” Brant said, making no attempt to mask his anger; he and Gabrielle had long ago passed the point of being polite to each other for the sake of outward appearances.

“It’s bound to happen sooner or later,” Gabrielle continued placidly. “Rowan is a beautiful and talented young woman.”

“What she does with her life is nothing to do with me.”

Quite suddenly Gabrielle snapped her glass down on the chrome-edged table beside her. “All right—I’ll stop playing games. I’ve watched you the last two years. You’ve been acting like a man possessed. Like a man who couldn’t care less if he got himself killed. Any ordinary person would have been dead five times over with some of the things you’ve done, the situations you’ve exposed yourself to since you and Rowan split up.” Her voice broke very slightly. “I don’t want to pick up the paper one day and find myself reading your obituary.”

Brant said blankly, for it was a possibility that had never occurred to him before, “You’re not in love with me, are you?”

He looked so horrified that genuine amusement lightened her features. “Of course not. Someday I’m sure I’ll fall in love again, it would be an insult to Daniel’s.memory if I didn’t But it won’t be with you, Brant.”

“You had me worried for a moment.”

“And if you’re trying to change the subject,” Gabrielle went on with considerable determination, “it won’t work. I know you still love Rowan. After all, you and I virtually lived together for the eight months we were held for ransom, I had lots of opportunity to observe you. One of the things that kept you sane through that terrible time was the knowledge you’d be going home to Rowan. Your wife.”

Through gritted teeth Brant said, “Your imagination’s operating overtime.”

Imperturbably Gabrielle went on, “And then we were released unexpectedly. When you got home she was leading a tour in Greenland, and when she got back from there her lawyer made it all too clear that Rowan wanted nothing to do with you because she thought you and I were a number. You wouldn’t let me go and see her to try and explain—oh, no, you were much too proud for that. In fact, you made me swear I wouldn’t get in touch with her at all, stiffnecked idiot that you are. So you lost her. And you’ve never stopped grieving that loss. I know you haven’t. I’d swear it in court on a stack of Bibles as high as this building.”

“Dammit, I’m divorced! And that’s the way I like it.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

He surged to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this—I’m getting out of here.”

“Can’t take the heat? Afraid you might have to admit to emotions? You, Brant Curtis, feeling pain because a woman left you?” She swung her legs to the floor and stood up, too, with a touch of awkwardness that reminded him, sharply and painfully, of Rowan’s sudden, coltlike movements. “I know you have feelings,” Gabrielle announced, “even if I don’t know why you’ve repressed them so drastically they don’t have the slightest chance of escaping... sort of like us in that awful cell. You have them, though—and they’re killing you.”

“You’ve got a great touch with purple prose.”

“So you’re a coward,” she said flatly.

Her words bit deep into a place Brant rarely acknowledged to himself and certainly never would to anyone else. Of course he wasn’t a coward. If anything, he was the exact opposite, a man who continually took risks for the highs they gave him. He headed for the door, throwing the words over his shoulder. “Remind me the next time you invite me for dinner to say no.”

“You need to see Rowan!”

“I don’t know where she is and I’m not going looking for her!”

“I know where she is.” Gabrielle turned and from a wrought-iron shelf picked up a folded brochure, waving it in the air. “In three days she’ll be leading a small group of people through various islands in the West Indies looking for endemic birds. Which, in case you didn’t know, means birds native to the area. I had to look it up.”

In spite of himself, Brant’s eyes had flown to the folded piece of paper and his feet had glued themselves to the parquet floor. Conquering the urge to snatch the brochure from her, he rapped, “So what?”

“There’s a vacancy on that trip. My friend Sonia’s husband—Rick Williams—was to have gone, but he’s come down with a bad respiratory infection. You could take his place.”

His mouth dry, Brant sneered, “Me? Looking for endemic birds on those cute little Caribbean islands? That’s like telling a mercenary soldier he’s going back to kindergarten.”

“You’d be looking for your wife, Brant.” Gabrielle’s smile was ironic. “Looking for your life, Brant. You didn’t know I was a poet, did you?”

“You’ve been watching too many soap operas.”

“Kindly don’t insult me!”

His lashes flickered. Gabrielle almost never lost her temper, unlike Rowan, who lost it frequently.

Rowan. He’d always loved her name. His first gift to her had been a pair of earrings he’d had designed especially for her, little enameled bunches of the deep orange berries of the rowan tree, berries as fiery-colored as her tumbled, shoulder-length hair. Spread on the pillow, her hair had had the glow of fire....

With an exclamation of disgust, because many months ago he’d rigorously trained himself to forget everything that had happened between him and Rowan in their big bed, he held out his hand. Gabrielle passed him the brochure. Brant flattened it; from long years of hiding anything remotely like fear, his hands were as steady as if he were unfolding the daily newspaper. “‘Endemic Birds of the Eastern Caribbean,’” he read. “‘Guided by Rowan Carter.”’

She’d kept her own name even when they’d been married. For business reasons, she’d said. Although afterward, when she’d left him, he’d wondered if it had been for other, more hidden and more complicated reasons.

He cleared his throat. “You’re suggesting I phone the company Rowan works for and propose myself as a substitute for your friend’s husband? Rowan, as I recall, has a fair bit of say about the trips she runs—the last person in the world she’d allow to go on one of them would be me.”

“Don’t tell her. Just turn up.”

His jaw dropped. For the space of a full five seconds he looked at Gabrielle in silence. “Intrigue,” he said, “that’s what you should be writing.”

“Rick can cancel easily enough—he bought insurance and he’ll get his money back. Or you can pay him for the trip and go in his place. All you’d have to do is change the airline tickets to your name.”

“So I’d turn up at the airport in—” he ran his eyes down the page “—Grenada, and say, ‘Oh, by the way, Rowan, Rick couldn’t make it so I thought I’d come instead.’” He gave an unamused bark of laughter. “She’d throw me on the first plane back to Toronto.”

“Then it’ll be up to you to convince her otherwise.”

“You’ve never met her—you have no idea how stubborn she can be.”

“Like calls to like?” Gabrielle asked gently.

“Oh, do shut up,” he snapped. “Of course I’m not going, it’s a crazy idea.” Nevertheless, with a detached part of his brain, Brant noticed he hadn’t put the brochure back on the shelf. Or—more appropriately—thrown it to the floor and trampled on it.

“I made tiramisu for dessert. And I’ll put the coffee on.”

Gabrielle vanished into the kitchen. Like a man who couldn’t help himself, Brant started reading the description of the trip that would be leaving on Wednesday. Seven different islands, two nights on each except for the final island of Antigua, where a one-night stopover was scheduled. Hiking in rain forests and mangrove swamps, opportunities for swimming and snorkeling.

Opportunities for being with Rowan.

For two whole weeks.

He was mad to even consider it. Rowan didn’t want anything to do with him, she’d made that abundantly clear. So why set himself up for another rejection when he was doing just fine as he was?

Because he was doing fine. Gabrielle’s imagination was way out of line with all her talk of love and needs and repressions. He didn’t need Rowan any more than Rowan needed him.

He’d hated it when his checks had been returned by that smooth-tongued bastard of a lawyer. Hated not knowing where she was living. Hated it most of all that she’d never wanted to see him again.

But he’d gotten over that. Gotten over it and gone on with his life, the only kind of life he thrived on.

The last thing he needed was to see Rowan again.

What he needed was a cup of strong black coffee and a bowl of tiramisu laden with marscapone. Brant tossed the brochure onto the dining room table and followed Gabrielle into the kitchen.

CHAPTER ONE

AT THIRTY-seven thousand feet the clouds looked solid enough to walk on, and the sky was a guileless blue. Brant stretched his legs into the comfortable amount of space his executive seat allowed him and gazed out of the window. He was flying due south, nonstop, from Toronto to Antigua; in Antigua he’d board a short hop to Grenada.

Where Rowan should be on hand to meet him.

Among the various documents Rick had given him had been a list of participants; he, Brant, was the only Canadian other than Rowan on the trip. Therefore, he’d presumably be the only one coming in on that particular Hight; the rest of the group would fly via Puerto Rico or Miami.

It should be an interesting meeting.

Which didn’t answer the question of why he was going to Grenada.

His dinner with Gabrielle had been last Sunday. On Monday he’d phoned Rick’s wife Sonia and told her he’d take Rick’s tickets. On Tuesday his boss—that enigmatic figure who owned and managed an international, prestigious and highly influential magazine of political commentary—bad sent a fax requesting him to go to Myanmar, as Burma was now known, and write an article on the heroin trade. Whereupon Brant had almost phoned Sonia back. He liked going to Myanmar, it had that constant miasma of danger on which he flourished. His whole life revolved around places like that.

Grenada wouldn’t make the list of the world’s most dangerous places. Not by a long shot.

So why was he going to Grenada and not Myanmar?

To prove himself right, he thought promptly. To prove he no longer had any feelings for Rowan.

Yeah? He was spending one hell of a lot of money to prove something he’d told Gabrielle didn’t need proving.

And why did he, right now, have that sensation of supervigilance, of every nerve keyed to its highest pitch, the very same feeling that always accompanied him on his assignments?

Don’t try and answer that one, Brant Curtis, he told himself ironically, watching a cloud drift by that had the hooked neck and forked tongue of a prehistoric sea monster. He’d told his boss he had plans for a well-earned vacation; and the only reason he’d phoned Sonia back was to borrow Rick’s high-powered binoculars and a bird book about the West Indies. The book was now sitting in his lap, along with a list of the birds they were likely to see. He hadn’t opened either one.

Why in God’s name was he wasting two weeks of his precious time to go and see a woman who thought he was a liar and a cheat? A sexual cheat. How she’d laugh if she knew that somehow, in the eight months he and Gabrielle had been held for ransom in Colombia, Gabrielle had seemed more like the sister he’d never had, the mother he could only dimly remember, than a potential bed partner. This despite the fact that Gabrielle was a very attractive woman.

He’d never told Gabrielle that, and never would. Nor would he ever tell Rowan.

A man was entitled to his secrets.

Tension had pulled tight the muscles in Brant’s neck and shoulders; he was aware of his heartbeat thin and high in his chest. But those weren’t feelings, of course. They were just physiological reactions caused by adrenaline, fight or flight, a very useful mechanism that had gotten him out of trouble more times than he cared to count. The airplane was looking after the flight part, he thought semihumorously. Which left fight.

Rowan would no doubt take care of that. She’d never been one to bite her tongue if she disagreed with him or disliked what he was doing; it was one of the reasons he’d married her, for the tilt of her chin and the defiant toss of her curly red hair.

Maybe she didn’t care about him enough now to think him worth a good fight.

He didn’t like that conclusion at all. With an impatient sigh Brant spread out the list of bird species and opened the book at page one, forcing himself to concentrate. After all, he didn’t want to disgrace himself by not knowing one end of a bird from the other. Especially in front of his ex-wife.

Rowan could have done without the connecting flight from Antigua being four hours late. Rick Williams from Toronto was the last of her group to arrive: the only other Canadian besides herself on the trip. The delay seemed like a bad omen, because it was the second hitch of the day; she and the rest of the group had had an unexpected five hours of birding in Antigua already today when their Grenada flight had also been late.

Rick’s flight should have landed in Grenada at six-thirty, in time for dinner with everyone else at the hotel. Instead it was now nearly ten forty-five and Rick still hadn’t come through customs.

His luggage, she thought gloomily. They’ve lost his luggage.

She checked with the security guard and was allowed into the customs area. Four people were standing at the desk which dealt with lost bags. The elderly woman she discounted immediately, and ran her eyes over the three men. The gray-haired gentleman was out; Rick Williams was thirty-two years old. Which left...her heart sprang into her throat like a grouse leaping from the undergrowth. The man addressing the clerk was the image of Brant.

She swallowed hard and briefly closed her eyes. She was tired, yes, but not that tired.

But when she looked again, the man had straightened to his full height, his backpack pulling his blue cotton shirt taut across his shoulders. His narrow hips and long legs were clad in well-worn jeans. There was a dusting of gray in the thick dark hair over his ears. That was new, she thought numbly. He’d never had any gray in his hair when they’d been married.

It wasn’t Brant. It couldn’t be.

But then the man turned to say something to the younger man standing beside him, and she saw the imperious line of his jaw, shadowed with a day’s dark beard, and the jut of his nose. It was Brant. Brant Curtis had turned up in the Grenada airport just as she was supposed to meet a member of one of her tours. Bad joke, she thought sickly, lousy coincidence, and dragged her gaze to the younger man. He must be Rick Williams.

Her eyes darted around the room. These was nowhere she could hide in the hopes that Brant would leave before Rick, and therefore wouldn’t see her. She couldn’t very well scuttle back through customs; they’d think she was losing her mind. Anyway, Rick was one of her clients, and she owed him whatever help she could give him if his bags were lost.

At least she’d had a bit of warning. She was exceedingly grateful for that, because she’d hate Brant to have seen all the shock and disbelief that must have been written large on her face in the last few moments; the harsh fluorescent lighting would have hidden none of it. Taking a deep breath, schooling her features to impassivity, Rowan walked toward the desk.

As if he’d sensed her presence Brant turned around, and for the first time in months she saw the piercing blue of his eyes, the blue of a desert sky. As they fastened themselves on her, not even the slightest trace of emotion crossed his face. Of course not, she thought savagely. He’d always been a master at hiding his feelings. It was one of the many things that had driven them apart, although he would never have acknowledged the fact. Rowan forced a smile to her lips and was fiercely proud that she sounded as impassive as he looked, “Well...what a surprise. Hello, Brant.”

“What the devil have you done to your hair?”

Nearly three years since he’d seen her and all he could talk about was her hair? “I had it cut.”

“For Pete’s sake, what for?”

A small part of her was wickedly pleased that she’d managed to disrupt his composure; it had never been easy to knock Brant off balance, his self-control was too formidable for that. Rowan ran her fingers through her short, ruffled curls. “Because I wanted to. And now you must excuse me...I’m supposed to be meeting someone.”

She turned to the younger man and said pleasantly, “You must be Rick Williams?”

The man glanced up from the form he was filling in; he smelled rather strongly of rum. “Nope. Sorry.” Doing a double take, he looked her up and down. “Extremely sorry.”

Rowan gritted her teeth. She rarely bothered with makeup on her tours, and her jeans and sport shirt were quite unexceptional. Why did men think that she could possibly be complimented when they eyed her like a specimen laid out on a tray? And where the heck was Rick Williams? If he’d missed the plane, why hadn’t he phoned her?

Brant said, “Rick couldn’t come. So I came in his place.”

“What?”

“Rick has a form of pneumonia and the doctors wouldn’t let him come,” Brant repeated patiently. “It was all rather at the last minute, so I didn’t bother letting you know.”

She sputtered, “You knew if you let me know I wouldn’t have let you come!”

“That’s true enough,” he said.

So that was why he hadn’t looked surprised to see her, he’d known all along she’d be there to meet him. Once again, he’d had the advantage of her. “Were you bored and thought you’d stir up a little trouble?” she spat. “From reading the newspapers, I’d have thought there were more than enough wars and famines in the world to get your attention without having to turn yourself into an ordinary tourist in the Caribbean.”

So she did care enough to fight, thought Brant. Interesting. Very interesting. He said blandly, “If we’re going to have a—er, disagreement, don’t you think we should at least go outside where there’s a semblance of privacy?”

Rowan looked around her. The young man who wasn’t Rick Williams was leering at her heaving chest; the customs officer was grinning at her. Trying to smother another uprush of pure rage, she managed, with a huge effort, to modulate her voice. “Is your baggage missing?”

Brant nodded. “They figure it’s gone on to Trinidad—should be here tomorrow. No big deal.”

“Have you finished filling in the forms?”

Another nod. “I’m ready to go anytime you are.”

“I’ll phone the airlines on the way out,” she said crisply, “and get you on the first flight back to Toronto. A birding trip is definitely not your thing.”