Stand-In Bride's Seduction
And if all had gone as it was supposed to, Rina would have been not far from here on a Greek island for her honeymoon. She remembered going to the travel agency with Jacob and poring over the brochures, weighing and balancing the charms of each destination to find the perfect place to celebrate the start of their new life together.
Rina absently rubbed the ring finger of her left hand with her thumb. An old habit, and one she would train herself to stop as she became all too aware of the deficit there and the faint indentation in her skin.
She tilted her head back a little, and closed her eyes against the brightness of the sun. Funny how her eyes watered even behind her sunglasses.
So what if Jacob had wanted someone more spontaneous, someone who wasn’t afraid to spice things up? Rina bit back tears at the memory of the emotional hurt he’d inflicted. And here she’d thought she’d chosen a life partner who was stable and secure—someone the complete antithesis of her parents and their fiercely intense, competitive and oftentimes combative relationship. Just went to prove how wrong a girl could be. She’d have felt better if she and Jacob had fought—if he’d simply told her that she wasn’t what he wanted, rather than stringing her along for all that time, long after he’d stopped loving her.
Rina forced from her mind the memory of Jacob’s unrepentant and abrupt withdrawal from the relationship they’d developed over the past five years. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t shed another tear over him. And she wouldn’t. Not a single one.
She swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. Why were promises so darn hard to keep?
The crowd of travelers she’d arrived with had long since dispersed, and the sidewalks outside the terminal building were nearly empty. Worse, so were the taxi stands. Half an hour later Rina was beginning to wilt as the concentrated afternoon heat continued to build around her. Mindful of her fair skin—the curse of a natural redhead—she’d sought some shade near the side of the building.
A trickle of perspiration ran down Rina’s back, as she flicked another glance at her watch—a gift from Sara and her only really frivolous piece of jewelry with its crystal embedded bezel and bracelet-style strap. Finally, thankfully, a green-and-white taxi pulled up. Tucking her shoulder bag securely against her side, Rina tightened her grip on the extended handle of her practical black suitcase and rolled it to the curbside.
“The Governess’s Cottage, please,” Rina said through the open passenger window.
Was it her imagination or did the driver surreptitiously cross himself as he got out of the taxi and walked around to lift her suitcase into the trunk of his car? Either way, she was too tired to care right now. She could only focus on one thing. Sorting out this wretched mess her sister had left her in.
Rina watched the departing taxi speed down the road for a few minutes, more than a little startled by the haste with which the driver had taken off. Goodness only knew why he was in such a hurry.
She grabbed her suitcase handle for what she hoped would be the last time in the next four weeks and trudged wearily through the pretty iron gate set within a stone wall that surrounded the cottage. “Quaint” really was the only word to describe the ancient structure, Rina decided as she followed the path to the tiny front porch with its stone steps worn by the passage of years of foot traffic.
Pale ocher-plastered brick here and there, the plaster crumbling away, revealing the ancient brick beneath—and with a darker orange tiled roof, it looked like an old-fashioned watercolor. Deep-set mullioned windows, sashed with faded blue wooden trim, gave an insight into sparse, but adequate, furnishings inside. Not entirely Spanish in style, yet not entirely French either, the cottage was a delightfully eclectic mixture of both.
Inside, she thought she could hear a phone ring before the strident chime shut off abruptly for a few moments then started all over again.
Rina dug in her handbag for the envelope Sara had left her. The heavy old key fit neatly into the ancient black lock, and the door swung smoothly open. The telephone, coincidentally, fell silent once more as she stepped inside.
She didn’t take so much as a second to admire the exposed beam ceiling of the main rooms of the cottage, nor the pristine perfection of the charming blue and white tiled bathroom. And she didn’t allow herself more than a single longing glance at the all-too-tempting bed in the room where she’d stowed her suitcase. She was a woman on a single-minded mission. To tell Sara’s fiancé exactly what she’d done. Surely he’d be reasonable. After all, they’d met and become engaged in such a short space of time. They barely knew one another. A certain amount of second thought was bound to occur.