Merger By Matrimony

‘I want to show you some of the plans I have for the company, should you sell.’

‘Could you let me go, please?’

He obediently dropped her hand but remained strategically placed in front of the door, which he had quietly shut back.

‘Dinner tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up around seven thirty.’

‘I have no intent—’

‘It’s really a good idea to get all your facts in place before you make any kind of decision.’

‘Derek—’

‘—has no say whatsoever in your decision. He might want to puff himself out and hold your hand but there’s no need for you to stroke his ego by going along for the ride…’

‘I’m doing no such thing!’

‘No? Sure? No girlish, helpless giggles while he pontificates and throws his weight around?’

‘I am not a helpless, giggling girl,’ Destiny informed him hotly.

‘Then why are you so afraid of meeting me without him around as a chaperon?’

‘I am not afraid of meeting you,’ she said through gritted teeth.

‘Good. Then tomorrow at seven thirty.’

‘And what would Stephanie say to that?’

‘I’m proposing a meeting to discuss business,’ Callum interjected smoothly, gratified to see a tell-tale flush spread across her face. He savoured it for a few seconds, then continued, ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have any objections.’

‘My wardrobe is a bit scant,’ Destiny objected weakly. Had she just been bulldozed into something? It certainly felt like it although, when she recapped their conversation, she couldn’t pinpoint why.

‘You’re going shopping tomorrow, though.’

‘Oh, so I am. And how do you know that, anyway?’

‘You mentioned it to Stephanie over dinner.’

For someone who had not seemed highly riveted at the time, the man had a keen listening ear, she thought.

‘You should take her along with you. I know she’d be thrilled. There’s very little Steph appreciates more than several hours spent tramping in and out of stores and spending money like water.’

‘In which case, I’d better not.’ An involuntary smile flitted across her face. ‘If there’s one thing I don’t appreciate, it’s tramping in and out of stores. I wouldn’t know about the spending money like water, having never had any, but I suspect I probably wouldn’t much like that either.’

There was the sound of the car revving into action, which galvanised Callum into yanking open the door and, before his driver could say a word, she was mystified to see him spoken to in low undertones and then Callum was in the passenger seat and the car was gliding away into the night.

Leaving her, she thought the following morning, facing yet another stressful encounter with a man whose image was proving to have superglue properties when it came to lodging in her head.

Despite that, when, just as she was about to leave the house, her father called, she found herself reluctant to confide anything about Callum. It was the first time she had spoken to him since she’d arrived in England, and he’d had to go to the nearest town for use of a telephone. He told her everything that was happening on the compound, little titbits of gossip that made her smile, passed on a missing you message from Henri, and conjured up pictures of heat and jungle that seemed more than a lifetime away. In return, she told him what she had been up to, downplaying her own feelings of inadequacy at being thrown in at the deep end to cope with a situation for which nothing in her life had prepared her. She tried to make London sound exciting, because she knew that her father would worry himself sick if she did otherwise, but really when she thought about London the image became entangled with the image of Callum—whose presence she diluted, for her father’s benefit, into an annoying little man who wants me to sell the company.

‘Don’t be bullied into doing anything you don’t want to do,’ her father said anxiously.

‘Oh, I can take care of myself, Dad,’ Destiny said. ‘I’m not worried at all by Callum Ross.’ She conjured up a mental picture of his dark, powerful face, and said with a grin, ‘He’s really just a silly little chap who thinks he can get his own way.’

‘Sounds an unpleasant type, my darling. Why don’t you let that Derek man take care of him?’

‘Oh, I can handle the man myself,’ she said airily.

‘Eat him up and spit him out,’ her father said with a smile in his voice, which was a compliment, she knew, but managed to reignite those niggling little ideas that had taken root in her mind ever since she had met Callum Ross. Little ideas that being fiercely independent and being able to take care of herself was all very well in the depths of Panama, but somehow out of place in a city where the interaction between the opposite sexes called for an appealing helplessness that she found difficult to muster. In fact, impossible.