Marriage on the Rebound

I’ve told you more than I’ve told anyone else, Shaan thought. ‘I refuse to tempt providence by dissecting what we have,’ was all she actually said, then carefully turned the subject. ‘Tell me how the wedding plans are going.’

It was a brush-off in anyone’s books, and Jemma noted it as such, but was determined to have her final say anyway. ‘Well, I think you’re heading for a mighty fall if you don’t watch out,’ she predicted. But, having merely received one of those annoyingly enigmatic smiles back in return, she allowed the conversation to be turned to the less titillating subject of her own wedding day which was due to take place in a couple of months.

And maybe Shaan should have listened to that final warning. But as it was she was happy, and when you were happy you didn’t go and spoil it all by thinking unhappy thoughts, did you?

So she and Rafe continued to enjoy what they seemed to have found in each other, and for the next few weeks everything drifted along beautifully.

Shaan did not return to work for him. It was her own decision, because she felt it wouldn’t look good for Rate if his new wife still worked in his typing pool while he lorded it—as she teasingly called it—up there on the uppermost floor.

And she wasn’t a fool; she knew the people she used to work with would not feel comfortable having her around them now that she was the chairman’s wife.

Funny, really, because she hadn’t suffered the same qualms about continuing working there as Piers new wife. But then, Piers was not the big boss, only a little boss. He had headed the company sales team, which put him in daily contact with the Danvers’ lower echelons, which in turn made him more accessible.

And Piers liked to be liked, was always quick with the light joke and the easy smile which helped put people at their ease with him.

Rafe wasn’t the kind of man who cared if he was liked or not. He was the man at the top who everyone else looked up to. The big decision man. The man who could hire and fire the rest, promote their careers or ruin them if he felt so inclined.

And never in a million years could Shaan see Rafe strolling down to his own typing pool to blithely plonk himself on the corner of her desk for a light chat the way Piers had used to do without anyone else so much as batting an eyelid.

In other words, Rafe was a man to be in awe of—not to be comfortable with. So it therefore followed that no one was going to feel comfortable with Shaan working with them any more, knowing that she would be listening in on all their conversations, hearing their gripes and groans and perhaps reporting them to Rafe.

Like a spy in their midst.

And even though Shaan knew she wouldn’t dream of telling tales on any of them she in turn would feel like a spy.

Nor did she fancy having to face the kind of curious speculation that must be running rife around the building about the bizarre events leading up to her marriage. So, in the end, the decision not to go back to work there was easy. And the fact that Rafe didn’t try to change her mind had to mean that he, too, didn’t fancy the idea of having his wife working for him any more.

But neither was she prepared to sit in his house like some pampered doll, with nothing more to do than fill her days making herself desirable for him when he got in from work each night. So she joined up with a secretarial temping agency and, once she got used to moving around from place to place like a transient, found she rather enjoyed it.

She enjoyed the fact that it gave her a bit of anonymity, because she was never at one place long enough for anyone to grow curious enough to start asking her questions about her personal life, and therefore in

evitably put two and two together with the Danvers name and the sensational headlines which had appeared in the tabloids several weeks earlier.

And, to top all of that, it also gave her an interest and a sense of independence—and something to talk about in the evening with this passionate man she had married which didn’t revolve around bed and sex.

Bed and sex—the only two things they really had in common, if she’d only had the sense to take the foolish blinkers from her eyes. But she didn’t, so everything jogged along perfectly for those few more blissful weeks. And if Jemma’s caution did pop into her head once or twice, to try to warn her that this extended honeymoon could not go on for ever, she ignored it. Ignored, too, what the warm glow of pleasure she experienced every time Rafe walked into the room was trying to tell her.

Because to face it meant threatening the precarious little boat of contentment she was happily sailing in.

So fate did it for her. Fate, cruel fate, took the decision to reach out and rip the blinkers from her foolish eyes. And the fact that it happened in the middle of a busy London street was a further cruelty, because it left her so open and publicly exposed to what she was being forced to see.

Rafe was supposed to be away—a three-day business trip to the States, he had told her. It was the first time they had been separated since the day they had married, and Shaan missed him beside her in their bed every night—missed him dreadfully.

He rang her, though. Every night before she went to bed he would call to say goodnight, his voice warm and tender, huskily sincere when he said how much he was missing her. In fact, his whole manner towards her had become warm and tender over the last few weeks, the passion tempered to something which verged almost on loving.

Just another illusion fate decided to shatter.

So it was perhaps fortunate that Jemma was there to catch Shaan when she finally saw the full depths of her own delusions.

It was Wednesday, and she and Jemma were on their way to their regular Wednesday lunch together at their usual wine bar. Rafe was due back tonight, and Shaan was lost in her own thoughts as they walked along, thinking of his return and all the plans she had made to surprise him when he got home. It was Mrs Clough’s day off, so she was planning to a cook a very special dinner for them herself, and she had bought a new dress that was hardly more than a couple of scraps of chocolate-brown silk, the fabric so fine that it didn’t allow anything else to be worn beneath it.

In short, she planned to seduce him from the moment he walked in through the door. Her eyes glowed with a darkly luminous anticipation for the moment as she walked down that busy London street, hardly hearing a word Jemma was saying to her about table arrangements and flowers and all the other wedding details which were filling her best friend’s mind.

Then she saw them coming out of a hotel entrance on the other side of the street and everything—everything living inside her—slammed to a stark, shuddering stop.

It was Rafe with Madeleine.

They paused on the hotel steps. He turned towards her at the same moment that she turned towards him—a tiny creature who had to tilt her golden head right back so she could gaze into his lean dark face.