‘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.