Marriage on the Rebound

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.