Merger By Matrimony

‘What answers? I can’t predict the outcome of this any more than you can, Dad,’ Destiny said, deliberately misreading his question, even though she knew that it was no more than a temporary stalling exercise.

‘What’s the relationship between you and this young man?’

‘Relationship? Relationship?’

‘That’s right.’ He had an implacable glint in his eye which she met with a mutinous look.

‘I’m just looking after him the way I’d look after any idiot who managed to get themselves in this situation because they were too bull-headed to admit that they couldn’t cope with the rigours of a journey way beyond their experience.’

Her father didn’t say anything. He just continued to look at her patiently, while Callum lay inert on the bed between them.

‘Okay!’ she half-shouted, glaring at her father and that infernally mild expression of his which had always been more effective when it came to getting what he wanted than any Chinese water torture method. ‘So we may have seen one another now and again when I was in England! Is it my fault that the man’s pushy?’ She folded her arms and watched as her father slowly moved towards the bed so that they were now facing each other with only the width of the bed between them. ‘One minute there he was, using every trick in the book to get the company off me, and the next minute…the next minute he’s forcing himself on me so that I have no option but to have dinner with him!’

‘Ah.’

‘Okay! So I may have…may have found him attractive…’ She gave her father a weak, apologetic smile. ‘Not,’ she said, addressing the man on the bed because her situation was all thanks to him, ‘that you look very attractive at the moment, Callum Ross! But then whose idiot fault is that?’ Panic and worry made her want to strangle him and hold him tightly at the same time.

‘So my little girl went to England and grew up,’ her father mused slowly to himself.

‘If by growing up, you call falling in love with the least suitable man on the face of the earth!’ She tenderly stroked his forehead.

‘I suspected as much.’

‘It’s not going to come to anything!’ Destiny cried. ‘He doesn’t love me!’

‘But you love him.’

‘Life’s just not fair, is it, Dad? You and Mum just clicked, but me…I had to go halfway across the world and get myself embroiled with a hardheaded businessman who doesn’t know the meaning of love.’

‘How do you know that?’

She sighed in resignation. ‘Because he proposed to me, but not,’ she carried on quickly, seeing the interruption forming on her father’s lips, ‘because he loved me. He said that an alliance would make a good business proposition. He wanted my company, we got along, and to him it made sense that we should just tie the two things together and bingo, a marriage made in heaven.’ Now she was beginning to feel like a sixteen-year-old child again. Moreover, she didn’t want the compassion she could see in her father’s eyes. A little bit of shared hostility might have got her going on the right path, but compassion was just going to make her break down.

‘So there you go. That’s the relationship. I love him, and now you know I want you to promise not to mention it again.’

They stared at one another, and then, from the bed, Callum said, ‘But I was getting really interested in all of this. Please, carry on. Don’t mind me.’

CHAPTER TEN

‘ARE you sure it’s all right for you to be here? Anything could happen.’

‘Don’t be such a wimp.’ Destiny stepped out into the dense, inky blackness and reached out for the hand waiting for her, which slipped around her waist, pulling her against him.

‘Wimp? Me? That’s not what your father thinks.’ Callum buried his face against her hair and reached to cup the side of her head with his hand. ‘In fact,’ he murmured in a satisfied voice, tickling her ear with his breath, ‘if I recall, he told you how lucky you were to meet me.’

‘He may have been delusional.’ She was grinning as the hot night air wafted aromatically around them. In the compound, everyone was asleep, unlike outside, where the animals of the night had come out to play and could be heard calling from the trees and beyond into the depths of the forest.

They walked slowly and entwined, to one of the three benches which had been recently placed in a circular format under a spreading tree, making it a wonderful place for some of the women to do their craft-making during the day, protected from the full-frontal attack of the sun.