Merger By Matrimony

She could feel unanswered questions flying around in her head like a swarm of bees. There was something more personal to his desire to gain control of her company. What? And was her stepcousin all part of his plan? A useful arrangement because she brought shares with her? Not enough to enable him to gain downright control of the company if he married her, but enough to ensure that he remained active in whatever was happening within it. Active and, through Stephanie, with a voice.

Or was her bond to the company simply a coincidence? Was he in love with her?

She realised that intrigue was something she had so rarely encountered it was a job grappling with it all now.

‘What is Stephanie like?’ she asked guilelessly.

‘You’ll meet her soon enough. This afternoon, in fact. With the rest of the fools.’

What kind of a non-answer was that? she wondered.

The door was pushed open and Derek’s face popped around it. ‘Had enough time, Mr Ross?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he walked in and quietly shut the door behind him.

Not nearly enough, Callum felt like saying, but in fact he was already running late. Stephanie would be at the restaurant in under fifteen minutes. He felt an irrational surge of irritation rise to his throat, but he swallowed it and smiled politely at Derek.

‘We’ll need to continue this conversation after you’ve met your people,’ he addressed Destiny, pushing himself away from the window and almost throwing the little Derek into shadow as he strolled past him towards the door. ‘My offer still stands, but, like I said, don’t leave it too late or you might find that I’m forced to reduce it.’

At which he saluted them both and left, not bothering to shut the door behind him and affording Destiny the sight of Derek’s personal assistant, a woman in her mid-fifties, hurriedly half-rising as Callum swept past her, the expression on her flushed face one of addled confusion.

By the time she arrived at the company, Destiny was feeling addled and confused herself. Over lunch—an intricately arranged fresh tuna salad, the sight of which had nearly made her burst out laughing, so remotely had it resembled anything edible—she had tried to find out a bit more about the much-maligned directors she was to meet. But Derek had not been a source of useful information. His friendship with her uncle stretched back a long way and there was a debt of gratitude to him which ensured his unswerving loyalty. Fighting hard not to be distracted by the comings and goings in the restaurant, she’d discovered that Abraham Felt had helped Derek when he had first struck out, decades previously, on his own. No wonder he was so protective of her and so unofficially antagonistic towards Callum Ross!

Walking into the glass monument to wealth further shredded her nerves.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Derek murmured staunchly at her side, as they got into the elevator and glided up to the third floor. Destiny doubted it.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you were in my shoes,’ she murmured back, thinking that in my sandals would have been a more appropriate description. Three months previously she and her father had made the nine-hour trek to Panama City and had spent two days shopping for essentials, but somehow London was a great deal more daunting than the country she had learnt to love. However, come hell or high water, she would buy some clothes in the morning. Derek had established a bank account for her and she had arrived in England with more money than she had seen in a lifetime at her immediate disposal. Whether she liked it or not, she would have to get rid of her ethnic garb and conform.

‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,’ Derek told her, as the elevator doors slid open. ‘Just get a feel for the people, for the company. You already know what the state of their profit and loss column looks like, so to speak, but you can put it all into real perspective once you’ve met the people in charge.’

Four hours later, Destiny thought that that was easier said than done. All the directors had been there, except the one she was most curious to meet, her stepcousin, and their reactions had run the gamut from suspicion, to relief that she had not summarily announced that she would be selling, to wheedling as they brought out their individual reports and regaled her with why she shouldn’t abandon the ship.

They were all men in their late fifties, on the verge of retirement, and she’d inappropriately recalled Callum’s scathing description of them as a pack of old fools when Tim Headley had patted her hand and attempted to excuse four years of misguided management under the heading of ‘going through a bad patch.’

‘I shall go home and read all this,’ she had said wearily, as three o’clock had rolled into four, then five, then six. It had been a further hour and a half before she had finally managed to leave and had been told by a beaming Derek that she had done really well. Buoyed them up. Given them that little injection of hope they needed.

Her head was throbbing when she at last made it back to her house, for which she felt an inordinate rush of fondness as it contained the two things she wanted most. A well-stocked fridge and a bed.

She’d not managed to attack the first when her telephone rang and she heard a breathless, girlish voice down the end of the line.

‘Who is this?’ she demanded, cradling the telephone between shoulder and head as she fumbled to undo the front fastening buttons of her dress.

‘Stephanie. I should have been at the meeting this afternoon, but…somehow my appointments overran…’

Destiny stopped what she was doing and held the telephone properly.

‘Anyway, I thought that perhaps we could meet for supper this evening? You could come to my apartment—actually, I only live about ten minutes’ drive away from you…?’

‘Well…’ The thought of slotting in one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle that had become her life was too enticing to resist. ‘If you tell me where you are…can I walk to you? No?… How do I get a taxi?… Yes, right… Well, give me about forty-five minutes and I’ll be there… Right, yes, that’s fine… Yes, I do know what Chinese food consists of… Okay, fine, bye.’

As she inspected her wardrobe, selecting the least colourful of her dresses, she wondered what her stepcousin would be like. Her gut feeling warned her that a disaster lay ahead. Callum Ross was made of steel and any fiancée of his would more than likely be made of similar stuff. She was fast developing a healthy streak of cynicism in this bewildering world where scheming seemed to be part of an acceptable game and exploitation was part and parcel of the same game. The healthy streak of cynicism was now telling her that Stephanie Felt had probably been primed by her lover to use every trick in the book to get what she wanted. Her healthy streak of cynicism was going one step further and warning her that the other woman had probably avoided the meeting on purpose, simply so that their first meeting could be on her own territory. Alone. Destiny stared back dejectedly at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and discovered that, despite her lifelong predilection for all things logical and scientific, her imagination was scrabbling frantically now to make up for lost time.

She left the townhouse nervous, but grimly resolved to face down yet one more enemy. The taxi carried her out of Knightsbridge and into the heart of Chelsea, and then stopped in front of a Victorian house, one in a row of many, all of which were as impeccably maintained as the one she had just left.

She sighed involuntarily as she rang the doorbell. Her nervous system couldn’t take much more. She longed with a physical ache for the simplicity of her compound, with its heat and wild beauty and unthreatening routines.

From Callum Ross to Stephanie Felt in the space of a few short hours. She wondered what else could hit her. There must be some evil, as yet undisclosed relation somewhere in the background, clutching a potion, a broomstick and a book of spells.

The woman who answered the door almost made her gasp in surprise.

‘Hiya.’ More of a girl than a woman, just out of her teens from the look of it, with wavy brown hair and huge blue eyes. Even in her heels, she was still small. Small and slender, her heartshaped face smoothly unlined by time.

‘Have I come to the right house?’ Destiny blustered, trying to peer at the plaque on the door to see whether she had made a mistake with the numbers. ‘I’m looking for Stephanie Felt.’

‘That’s me.’ When she smiled, her face dimpled and she stood back to let Destiny walk past. ‘I’ve been dying to meet you, you know. A stepcousin! I never even knew you existed until Callum told me! Can you believe it? Abraham never mentioned his family, not even to Mum!’ Her voice was light and excited as she led the way to the sitting room. ‘You’ll have to tell me all about where you lived. I’ve never been to your part of the world—never. Can you believe it? Callum says it’s really primitive where you come from. Gosh!’ She turned around and looked at Destiny with glowing curiosity and awe. ‘This must all seem very strange to you! I love your dress, by the way. Neat. All those swirly colours. Is that what the people over there wear? Is it, like, their native costume, so to speak?’

‘No, not really.’ Destiny smiled. For the first time since she had set foot on English shores, she felt unthreatened and relaxed. ‘Most of the women in the Indian tribes I come into contact with walk around bare-breasted…’

‘Which would never do,’ came a familiar drawling voice, ‘so I should practise that mode of dress only in the privacy of your own house.’

Sure enough, Callum was sprawled in a chair strategically positioned so that Destiny was afforded a full-frontal of the man at leisure. It was the first time she had seen him without the formality of a suit and she was taken aback to realise that he looked younger. Younger yet no less off-putting. His cream trousers made his legs seem longer and the short-sleeved shirt with the top two buttons undone revealed masculine forearms and a sneak preview of dark hair shadowing his chest.

Her mouth felt disconcertingly dry and she almost shrieked her, ‘Yes, please!’ when Stephanie offered her something to drink. ‘Beer, please.’

‘Beer?’ they both echoed in unison, with varying degrees of surprise on their faces.

‘Perhaps not.’ She faltered and looked to her stepcousin for support.

‘Perhaps some wine?’ Stephanie suggested, grinning. ‘It’s nice and cold.’

‘Yes, thank you, that sounds fine.’ She breathed a sigh of relief and sat down in the chair facing Callum, more because of its relative proximity than for any other reason, although the badly chosen seating arrangement now guaranteed an uninterrupted vision of him.

‘You were talking about your national costume—or, rather, the lack of it,’ he said, crossing his extended legs at the ankles and linking his fingers together on his lap.

‘What are you doing here?’ Destiny surprised herself by asking. This man, like it or not, made her say things and behave in ways that were alien to her. And her skin felt hot and itchy under the intensity of his blue eyes. Was that possible? Could someone make someone else feel hot and itchy just by looking at them? It had certainly never happened to her before.

His eyebrows shot up in exaggerated astonishment at her question. ‘Stephanie’s my fiancée. Naturally I wanted to be by her side when she met her stepcousin for the first time. She’s a very gentle soul.’ He lowered his eyes when he said this but there was a tell-tale smile tugging the corners of his mouth. ‘I didn’t want you to terrify her.’

‘Me? Terrify her?’ Her protesting voice was more of a furious splutter.

‘With your aggression.’

‘My aggression? How can you talk about my aggression?’

She reduced the volume of her voice at the sound of approaching footsteps, but the rankled feeling managed to stay with her for the remainder of the evening. Even more infuriating was the fact that her fulminating looks did very little more than provide him with a source of barely contained amusement.

Only Stephanie’s cheerful banter, as she dragged out details of Panama from her guest, besieging her with interested questions, squealing with delight when Destiny talked about the children she taught and gasping with little cries of horror at her stories of the jungle and what it contained, saved the evening. Destiny wondered if her stepcousin knew that she would be marrying someone who made the most ferocious jungle animal pale in comparison.

They had spoken not one word of business by the time eleven-thirty rolled around and she stood to leave, feeling woozy from the wine, to which she was in no way accustomed, and exhausted by her jet lag.

‘So, what did you make of the buffoons at the company?’ Callum asked, standing up as well and shoving his hands into his pockets. ‘I suppose they pulled out all the stops? Made you pore over cobwebbed reports of how great and good the firm used to be years ago? Played down what a shambles it’s in now?’ Despite consuming what had seemed, to Destiny, prodigious amounts of wine during the evening, the man still looked bright-eyed, alert and rearing to attack.

She threw him a wilted looked and stifled a yawn.

‘Mmm. That interesting, was it?’ A wicked glint of humour shone in his eyes.

‘I wasn’t trying to make a comment on what the meeting was like,’ Destiny said with lukewarm protest in her voice. ‘I’m tired.’

‘Leave her alone, Callum,’ Stephanie said sympathetically.

‘Business has to be discussed, Steph.’

‘Why now? It’s so boring.’

‘Boring for you perhaps, but you want to remember that your finances are tied up with what happens next in this little exciting scenario. I buy the company, play with it a bit until it’s running along smoothly, and your shares go up. Our Panamanian heiress keeps the company and—’

‘Do you mind not talking as if I wasn’t here?’

‘Have you ever been to London before, Destiny?’ Stephanie linked her arm through her stepcousin’s and ushered her to the front door, pointedly turning her back on her fiancée.

‘No. It’s all new and—’ she glanced over her shoulder and her eyes clashed with Callum’s ‘—a little scary.’

‘It would be. You’re just so brave to come all this way, on your own. I’d never dream of doing it!’

‘No.’ Callum’s voice behind them was silky. ‘It takes a certain type of woman to do that. Some might call it brave, darling; others might just call it—well, let’s just say that it’s a very masculine response.’

At which Stephanie flew around to face him with her hands on her hips and a simmering look in her baby-blue eyes. ‘Don’t be horrible!’

‘Me?’ He raised both his hands in innocent denial, but the blue eyes that locked with Destiny’s were unrepentant. ‘Horrible? It was meant to be a compliment! A glorious example of how far the women’s movement has got!’

‘What women’s movement?’ Destiny asked, her body language echoing Stephanie’s. ‘I’ve never been a part of any movement in my life before!’

‘No?’ He tried to stifle a grin and failed miserably. ‘Well, let’s just say that feminism has missed out there.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning that I’ll give you a lift back to your place.’ He bent over to give Stephanie a gentlemanly peck on the cheek and a pat on the back. ‘That all right with you, darling?’

‘Don’t badger her, Callum.’

‘I wish people wouldn’t constantly stereotype me.’ He pulled open the front door and gave Destiny an exaggeratedly wide berth to exit ahead of him into a clear night that was considerably more bracing than it had been earlier on in the evening.

‘What about tomorrow?’ Stephanie asked him, standing in the doorway to see them off, an angelic, diminutive shape that made Destiny feel like an Amazonian hulk in comparison. ‘The Holts have invited us to supper. Did you remember? Daisy and Clarence are going to be there as well. Oh, and Rupert.’

Callum paused and frowned, appearing to give the matter weighty thought, then he said with a shrug,

‘Meeting. Sorry, darling. You go, though. Don’t stay in because of me.’

‘You’re always at meetings,’ Stephanie said in a childish, sulky voice. ‘He’s always at meetings,’ she addressed Destiny in an appeal to sisterhood, which Destiny took up with sadistic relish.

‘If he loved you, he’d cancel, I’m sure.’

‘If you loved me, you’d cancel.’

There was a brief silence. ‘I’ll do my best.’ He sighed and Stephanie’s face radiated at this unexpected victory.

‘Oh, goody!’ She blew them both a delighted kiss and shut the front door on them.

CHAPTER THREE

‘THANK you. Thank you very much,’ he grated sarcastically, as the engine of his powerful car purred into life. He pulled away from the kerb unnecessarily fast and Destiny clutched the car door handle to steady herself.

In the shadows of the car, his averted profile was hard and unsmiling and she had to stifle a desire to burst out laughing. Suddenly, sleep was no longer beckoning at her door. In fact, she felt surprisingly revived, and wondered whether her body might not just have been craving some fresh air.

Not that the London air was particularly fresh. Back in Panama, when she breathed in, she could smell everything. The musky aroma of hot, hard-packed dirt, the rich fullness of the trees and the bushes, the distant freshness of the snake-like river coiling its way lazily into the heart of the jungle. At certain times during the day she could smell the fragrance of food being cooked. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she could almost seem to detect the smells of the sky and the clouds and the stillness.

Here, she felt stuffy. Pollution, of course. Not as severe as she had seen in Mexico years ago, where the pollution bordered on contamination, but there nevertheless, unseen but ever-present.

‘Thank you for what?’ she asked innocently, playing him at his own game, and his mouth turned down darkly at the corners.

‘You know what for,’ he accused, looking away briefly from the empty road to glare at her. ‘I’d hoped Stephanie had forgotten all about that damned dinner party. Now I’m going to have to go and spend at least three agonising hours being bored to death by Rupert and his cronies.’

‘Oh, dear,’ she said unsympathetically, which provoked another blistering look.

‘Where,’ he asked, ‘did you get that?’

‘Get what?’ Her voice was genuinely surprised.

‘Your sarcasm. I always thought that missionaries were supposed to be glucose-sweet.’

Destiny bristled. ‘I am not a missionary, actually. If you’d done your homework properly, you might have discovered why we’re on a compound in the heart of Panama, and it has nothing to do with converting anyone to any kind of religion. We’re there to help educate people in desperate need of education, and I’m not really talking about reading, writing and arithmetic.’

‘What, then?’ He could feel himself reluctantly being drawn in, like a fish on the end of a line, curious to find out details of the background that had produced the creature sitting next to him. It felt peculiar to find himself hanging on to a woman’s conversation when normally he was the one playing the conversational game, digging into his reserves of wit and charm without even realising it. He wasn’t sure whether he liked it or not. He felt himself relax his foot on the accelerator so that the car meandered along.

‘We teach them how to use the land they have to maximise their crops—how to be self-sufficient, in other words. We help them with distributing crafts. Some of them make things for the tourist market in the city. And naturally we teach them the usual stuff.’

‘We?’

‘Yes. All of us. We work together. I’m a qualified doctor, but I’m also responsible for the formal classes. Of course, we have specialists on the compound as well. Not just the children need education; so do the adults. How to use their resources to their best advantage, how to rotate certain crops so that the land is never unused. How to take advantage of the rains when they come. Our agricultural expert is responsible for that side of things, but we all chip in.’

‘Like one big happy family.’

Destiny narrowed her eyes on him, but she couldn’t read his expression and his voice was mild.

‘Something like that.’

‘Cosy.’

‘Yes, it is. Why are you driving so slowly? I want to get back.’

Callum pressed his foot marginally harder on the accelerator and muttered something inconsequential about speed limits, fines and points on a driving licence.

‘What points?’

‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’ He felt his jaw begin to ache and realised that he was clenching his teeth. ‘So what do you do on those long, balmy evenings, anyway? On your compound?’

‘Long, balmy evenings? It’s not a seaside resort.’

‘No, of course not.’ Clenching again. He relaxed his jaw muscles and realised, with a twinge of disappointment, that her house was now within view. The guard barely glanced at them. He just waved them through and he pulled up very slowly in front of her house.

‘Thank you very much,’ Destiny said, fiddling with the seat belt and finally releasing it. ‘It was lovely to meet Stephanie. I’m sorry if you think that it’s my fault that you’re going to have dinner with some boring friends tomorr—’

‘Oh, forget it.’ He waved aside her apologies irritably and watched as she walked up to the front door. For a tall girl, she was surprisingly agile, graceful even. She’d never answered his question about what she spent her evenings doing, he realised. He waited, watching as various lights were turned on and switched off, tracing her progress through the house, even though he couldn’t see a thing because the curtains were all drawn. When the place was in darkness, he impulsively got out of his car, sprinted up to the front door and insistently buzzed the bell, keeping his finger on the button until he heard the sounds of shuffling behind the door.

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