Marriage on the Rebound

‘Shaan, meet Su Ling, our Far Eastern sales director. Su Ling,’ he smoothly concluded, ‘my new wife, Shaan.’

The woman wasn’t surprised, and as she bowed politely to Shaan, Shaan ruefully presumed the news of their very public marriage had preceded them even this far. ‘I am happy to meet you, Mrs Danvers,’ she murmured in a beautifully accented, sensuously soft voice. ‘May I offer you both my sincere congratulations?’

‘Thank you,’ Shaan answered awkwardly, feeling like a fraud.

Thankfully, Rafe started demanding attention, asking quick-fire, well informed questions as he guided Shaan across a gracious foyer of pale whites and greys and in through a door to an elegant room walled almost completely in glass.

It was an office, sumptuous in its ultra-modern design, furnished almost entirely in grey. Grey carpet, grey walls, grey cabinets, grey leather sofas and chairs. A large grey desk took up almost the whole of one plate glass wall, and the standard office paraphernalia that was set neatly on top of it was simply a darker shade of the same nondescript grey.

‘Coffee would be nice,’ Rafe murmured, and, with a smile and a bow, Su Ling went off to organise it, leaving Rafe and Shaan alone. ‘This shouldn’t take long,’ he promised, guiding her over to one of the soft leather sofas and seating her on it.

The moment she was seated, his attention left her, shifting over to the big desk where a neat pile of files drew his interest. Shaan sat quietly watching him as once again he immersed himself in work, sitting behind the desk on a high-backed grey leather office chair, his lean face sharpened by concentration.

He wasn’t a handsome man, she decided as she studied him. Not in the true, classical sense of the word anyway. Piers was that—a truly handsome man with a classically perfect profile whereas Rafe’s attraction was due more to the irregularities of his features than their perfect symmetry.

His nose, for instance, was long and thin, with a bump in the middle of it that suggested he must have broken it at some time in his life. As if to confirm that theory there was a scar to the side of the bump—just a tiny, thin white line. There was nothing sinister about it, but it prompted curiosity as to how it had got there, suggested that Rafe had not always been a man who relied exclusively on his mental strength, as he did these days. That maybe, in his past, he had been quite willing to use a bit of physical strength, too.

But by no stretch of the imagination could Piers be called a physical man. Like the perfect contours of his face, his body was whip-cord lean, with no obvious muscle to spoil the line of his clothes, whereas Rafe’s clothes—expensive and beautifully tailored as they were—could not quite hide the expanse of hard muscle that made up his bigger frame.

Both brothers were about the same height, but when they were standing side by side Rafe physically overpowered Piers in ever

y way, with his broader shoulders, wider chest and a definite angle to his torso where it narrowed down to lean, tight hips.

The line of Piers’ body was smoother, sleeker, but it lacked that air of masculine power that Rafe exuded. Even their hair was different. The silky, straight fairness of Piers’ hair suited the kind of man he was, just as Rafe’s thick, dark, slightly wavy hair suited him.

Piers smiled a lot, but she could count on the fingers of one hand how many times she had seen Rafe smile, and she had yet to see him smile with any real humour. Piers could find humour in just about anything—whether the moment deserved it or not.

In fact, she realised suddenly, when she really thought about it Piers had a nasty habit of laughing at others’ misfortunes—like the time he’d laughed at Jack Mellor’s discomfort at being ordered to search her out and apologise.

Younger, she reminded herself. Piers was ten years younger than Rafe and therefore looked at life from a different perspective. And, because he was younger, perhaps she was not being fair in trying to compare him with his older, far more sophisticated and wordly brother. Yet—

She frowned, finding herself coming up against a solid wall which blocked out the answer to that ‘yet’. Yet what? she wanted to know, and found it frustrating to have no answer.

‘How good is your shorthand?’

Shaan blinked, bringing her big eyes back into focus to find Rafe studying her narrowly.

‘I…’ She didn’t really know how to answer him. Her shorthand was good, very good, but by Rafe’s high standards that might not be good enough. ‘Adequate, I suppose,’ she compromised warily, wondering why he wanted to know.

‘Adequate enough to take down some notes for me while I’m running through these?’ He flapped a sheaf of papers at her, with an odd smile playing around his mouth that almost hinted at wry appeal.

‘I—suppose so,’ she answered uncertainly, getting nervously to her feet.

‘Good. Thanks.’ Dropping the papers, he reached down and opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a notebook and a couple of sharp pencils and slid them across to her. ‘Pull up that chair, then, and let’s give it a go,’ he invited, waving her towards a straight backed chair standing at right angles to his own.

She did as he bade, moving nervously to get the chair then sitting down on it, before picking up the notepad and pencil. Rafe barely glanced at her, his attention seemingly fixed on the papers in front of him. There was a moment or two’s silence while he gathered his thoughts, and she had to stop herself chewing nervously on the tip of her pencil. Then he began, voicing remarks in clear, precise tones that she had no difficulty transcribing for him.

In a matter of minutes her nervousness had gone, swept away by the quick-fire way he dealt with the information in front of him. It soon became clear that he was reading some kind of sales projection report, and she was deeply impressed by the way he coolly and shrewdly picked it to bits, asking questions and making pointed remarks that were going to make the poor person who had compiled it squirm in their seat. Because even in her small experience there was one thing she was sure about—and that was that by the time this report landed on Rafe’s desk it should have been absolutely question and comment-free.

Su Ling appeared at one point, loaded down with a tray of coffee things. She paused, surprise showing in her lovely eyes when she realised what was going on, then Rafe waved her impatiently across the room, dismissing her with thanks that bordered on the brusque. She had barely closed the door behind her before he was back at work, his use of acid wit as he ripped the report apart drawing more reluctant appreciation from Shaan as she noted it down. It went on and on, pages of questions and comments that held her so engrossed she actually jumped when Rafe spoke to her directly.

‘Do you think you got all of that?’

Her head came up, her dark brown eyes warmed by a light that hadn’t been in them for days now.

‘Yes!’ she said, then smiled a little wryly at the note of surprised pleasure in her voice. ‘I may be trained to take dictation…’ she shyly explained the surprise ‘…but since I joined your company I’ve had very little opportunity to use it. I work mainly for your army of salesmen, and they tend to dictate onto their mini-recorders then pass the cassettes on to be transcribed.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘I expected to be a lot rustier than I was.’

In fact, she remembered silently, the only time she’d had cause to use her shorthand skills recently had been for Piers, and he had such an easy, laid-back attitude to dictation that it really had not been any kind of test of her abilities. Not like just now—not like Rafe, who—