Merger By Matrimony (17 page)

‘I guess I might,' Destiny told him vaguely.

‘You
guess?
'

‘All right, then. I will.'

‘That's better.'

But when she sneaked a glance at his profile, it was grimly tight. She knew what was niggling him. He'd tossed his proposal to her, expecting her to not be able to resist. A marriage of good sex and good business, without the tricky business of love getting in the way. It made perfect sense, didn't it? And, into the bargain, she would have the pleasure of being wed to the most eligible bachelor in London and all the consequent advantages of limitless money. He must be thinking that the alternative was slinking back to Panama to continue working in a funless vacuum with enough money to fairly do what she wanted, but without the vital medical facilities the company would offer—because she knew that selling the company was virtually a foregone conclusion, despite the fact that so many people would prefer her not to go down that road.

Marriage would be of mutual benefit. He would get the company he had craved, a company that would establish a foothold in the huge, complex world of pharmaceuticals, and she in return would get the benefit of his considerable investments to make it work. Everyone would be happy.

‘How long are you planning on being out of the country?' she asked tentatively, and he relaxed fractionally.

‘Five days. Maybe a bit longer. Depends on how many problems I have to sort out. Why, will you miss me?'

‘Will
you
miss
me?
' She threw the question back at him and felt a treacherous sense of arousal as his mouth curved into a satisfied smile.

‘What do you think? Perhaps,' he drawled softly, ‘I should find a deserted back road somewhere and stop the car so that I can demonstrate exactly how much I'll be missing you…'

‘I don't think so,' Destiny said hurriedly, recognising the familiar road down which all her good intentions tended to go wildly astray.

‘No, maybe a little absence is good for the soul.'

A little absence?
He was so sure of getting what he wanted, the way he always had, all through his life.

She didn't dare contemplate his shock when he returned from his trip abroad.

‘Maybe it is,' she repeated sadly.

C
ALLUM
stared out of the window of his office which offered an uninspiring view of leaden skies pressing heavily above the grey, claustrophobic confines of the city. He had a meeting in under an hour and he was toying with the notion of delegating it to one of his directors, even though delegation was beginning to become something of a habit—and a habit that was not going unobserved by several of the people who worked for him.

Frankly, he didn't give a damn.

He spun round on his chair and buzzed through to his secretary, telling her to send Peters in his place to the Viceroy meeting at the Savoy.

‘But he's already scheduled to see someone,' Rosemary protested uselessly.

‘Then he'll just have to cancel, won't he?'

‘But…'

‘I'm leaving the office. I can't go. That's all there is to it. In case it's missed you, Rosemary, I pay these people to handle important meetings. They'll just have to start earning their keep.'

‘Of course, but…' She sighed. ‘Are you feeling all right, Mr Ross?'

‘Of course
I'm feeling all right.
Is there any reason why I shouldn't be? Do I sound ill to you?'

‘Not
ill,
no…' Rosemary's voice trailed significantly down the end of the line and he had to stop himself from clicking his tongue in annoyance. He'd seen enough looks and been privy to sufficient concerned remarks to
know what was coming next and he wasn't in the mood for it.

‘It's just that you never take time off work, and you have three meetings this afternoon…'

‘A simple request, Rosemary, that's all it was. A simple request to cancel my appointments for today so that I can leave the office. I fail to see what the problem is.'

‘You haven't been yourself recently, Mr Ross,' Rosemary said in a burst of courage. ‘Several of us have been…'

‘
Several of you?
I pay you people to work, not to gather into little covens discussing my welfare.'

‘How long do you intend to be out of the office, Mr Ross?' she said, returning to her normal brisk voice, and Callum sucked in his breath, realising that an apology was called for but temporarily incapable of dispensing one. Anyone would think that his employees had nothing better to do than shadow his every movement and watch his every expression.

‘I have no idea. One day, two days—maybe longer.'

‘So what shall I do about…?'

‘Rearrange everything in the foreseeable future. When I come back, you can schedule my time.' On which note, he disconnected the internal line and remained sitting for a few minutes longer, staring into space and brooding.

It was becoming an addiction.

Memory lane was now so well trodden that it was beginning to seem more real than what was happening in his life at the moment.

He fished into his trouser pocket, took out his wallet and extracted a crumpled piece of paper from one of the compartments.

It was a fairly pointless procedure, since he knew what was written on the paper by heart, but still he hung on
to it, compulsively reading and re-reading the handful of lines that had been waiting for him two months ago on his return from New York.

She had, regrettably, turned down his proposal, she'd written, though she'd appreciated the offer. Under the circumstances, she felt that nothing further would be gained by remaining in England, and was thereby handing over responsibility for the sale of the company to Derek.

He savagely scanned the note, his mouth tightening, as it always did, when he came to the bit about wishing him all the best for the future.

Enraged, as if reading it for the first time, he crumpled the paper, then reluctantly smoothed it out and replaced it in the wallet. Then he strode to the door, flinging on his jacket in the process, and out into the connecting room where Rosemary glanced up from her computer with long-suffering wariness.

‘Look,' he said awkwardly, ‘I'm sorry if I overreacted just then.'

‘That's all right,' Rosemary said quietly.

‘I've had a lot on my mind recently…'

‘Of course. I understand. Felt Pharmaceuticals has taken a lot of financial resources out of the company profits. Naturally, that would be on your mind…'

‘Naturally,' Callum said, going along with that piece of fiction. In truth, the temporary drain on his financial well-being had barely crossed his mind. Within a year things would have evened out, and within a couple of years Felt's would be more than paying for itself. Life would have been a piece of cake if his only worries centred around something as piddling and unimportant as money.

‘It would help if you could call me when you're about
to come back,' she said, absently flicking through the diary, which, standing above her, he could see was liberally speckled with entries. Important meetings with important people to discuss important things. Who cared?

‘I'll try,' he said slowly. ‘But I'm not sure how feasible that will be.' For the first time in a little over two months he managed something resembling a smile, and Rosemary offered a tentative one back in return. ‘Where I'm going, the phone lines might be a little bit erratic.' He felt a wild thrill soar through him as his decision was made. No more mindless, brooding introspection, spending every waking moment haunted by images of her while he outwardly attempted to control the reins of his life and convince himself that he was better off without her around. He would go, he would find her and, if nothing else, he would get her to explain how someone could strain in his arms and then hours later bid him farewell via a note and without a backward glance.

She'd gone and he hadn't even told her that he loved her. Pride and fear of being rejected had held him back, and he was willing to shed both even if it meant trekking back to England with nothing but his wounds to nurse in private.

He packed a suitcase like a man demented, remembering her descriptions of the stifling heat and her gentle amusement at Derek's garb when he'd shown up on their compound. He flung in tee-shirts and the only three pairs of shorts he could rustle up, and underwear, and then an assorted selection of other items which he hoped would tide him over.

Then he telephoned the airport and, after an aggressive approach, during which he didn't hesitate to mention every influential name he remotely knew working in the
airline industry, managed to secure a seat on the next plane out to Panama the following day.

 

Destiny eyed her class with a jaundiced and resigned expression. Today, only five children had shown up. The rains had come and the missing faces had caved in at the prospect of a walk in sodden undergrowth in pelting rainfall. Three were ill with the fever, which meant that she would probably have to do the trip with her father later in the evening to make sure that the fever was confinable and not something more rampant and sinister. It was a prospect that made her heart sink.

Ever since returning to Panama she'd found that the simple enthusiasm with which she'd greeted these physical and tiring duties had been difficult to muster. And there was no one in whom she could confide. Henri had taken extended leave and was currently in Paris at his mother's bedside, tending her through the final stages of a cancer about which he'd known nothing until he'd got to England, and to confess to her father that she missed England would break his heart. He needed her and she had to respond to that need, even though her heart was no longer in it. At least, not in the way it used to be. She still efficiently did what she had to do, but in the manner of an automaton, completing functions so that it could then shut down, leaving her private time to think back. Her desperate dash back to Panama, far from assuaging her wounded heart, had been a failure. The torment she'd sought to escape had dogged her right back to the jungle and showed no signs of letting up.

And the weather wasn't helping matters. The rains this time round were considerable, and she felt as though she was literally and figuratively drowning.

‘You'd better go home for the day,' she said at a little
after twelve, when the rain was threatening to turn into a storm. She could barely make herself heard above the crashing of the rain against the window panes. ‘And, Paolo, make sure that your brothers do some reading.' She managed a weak smile, ushering her little troop to the door and making them don plastic hoods which were fairly useless in a downpour of this nature and anyway would probably be merrily discarded the minute the compound was out of sight.

It was surreal to think that less than three months ago she had been in England, wearing clothes that looked like clothes and shoes that were ornamental rather than useful. She glanced across the open courtyard and through the driving rain saw her father beckoning to her.

‘An emergency!' he was yelling, although the noise swept away a good part of what he was saying, and Destiny sighed and nodded, hurrying along the corridors of the wooden building and emerging a few minutes later through the door to her father's office.

‘Apologise for disrupting your class, darling.' He ran his fingers through his sparse, greying hair and gave her a worried look. ‘I've been radioed from El Real that there's an emergency.'

‘What kind of emergency?'

‘Lone tourist has bumped into some of our mosquitoes and contracted some kind of parasitic infection. Or, at least, that's what Enrique seems to think, but he's no doctor.'

‘What about the medical services there?' Though ‘medical services' was something of an overstatement to describe the sole hard-working doctor with whom they had fairly regular communication.

‘Pablo's been called away for another emergency a few kilometres away and seems to have become stranded out
there by the rains. Dessie, I know you probably don't want to do this, but there's no one else. If Henri had been here I would have asked him, but, really, with me gone I'd need our own qualified doctor here just in case. We've had to deal with two snake bites already in the past couple of days, and Lord knows what's happening towards Cana. I've had reports of fevers.' He looked as weary as she had ever seen him.

‘Right. I'll get something packed.' She carried on discussing their method of transport, none too reliable in the current deluge, but she could feel her heart sinking fast. Her father was right. She didn't want to go. There was enough to do here and the trip, which would probably take hours and be a nightmare journey, filled her with sudden dismay.

All she wanted to do was huddle away in her room and let her mind travel back through time.

Within the hour they had told the various other members of the compound what was happening, and were climbing into their four-wheel drive.

The journey would be a combination of road and river and promised to be hellish. Despite the onslaught of rain the atmosphere was stifling and humid, and she knew that, given the muddy nature of the pathways linking all these small towns, they would spend at least a proportion of their time clearing morass from the roads in an attempt to get through. It was always the same during the rainy seasons, and this time it would be a thousand times worse because of the quantity of rainfall.

‘It's ridiculous,' Destiny told her father, as they progressed at a snail's pace, with the wipers going at a rate. ‘Why do tourists feel that they can travel unaided into this part of the world? What gives them the right to expect help when they get themselves into a muddle?'

‘This sounds a little worse than a lost tourist who's got into a muddle,' her father said, craning forward to make sure that he kept to the barely visible marked path.

‘We'll get there and he'll have nothing more than a few mosquito bites and a bad cold from getting soaked.'

‘Not from what Enrique says.'

‘Enrique runs the grocery store and a rooming house!' Destiny grumbled on insistently. ‘He's not likely to be much of a gem when it comes to diagnosing illnesses! Did he say what the symptoms were?'

‘Raging fever, apparently. The man's hallucinating.'

‘I feel like I'm about to hallucinate,' she said, wiping her face with the rag she had brought with her. ‘This car is going to self-combust in a minute.' The windows were rolled down, but only very slightly to allow for the rain and the heat inside the car was fierce. Even with the miniature fan affixed to the dashboard she could still feel beads of sweat rolling down her face and making her body feel like oil. She rolled her glass down a few more centimetres and was rewarded with a wash of water across her face. It was better, at any rate, than the humidity.

‘I never really asked you this, Destiny, but what exactly happened out there in England?' Her father wasn't looking at her, and she felt a little jolt of shock at his question. He was a reticent man when it came to conversations about feelings and emotions, and for him to encourage one right now showed how much the question had been nagging away at the back of his mind.

‘Nothing happened out there.'

‘The last time we spoke when you were there, you seemed to have settled in and you were enjoying yourself.'

‘I never said that I was
enjoying
myself,' she persisted
stubbornly, staring out of the window as the rain lashed the rainforest around them, making every bending tree and swirling leaf look dangerous. Men thought that they were so big and strong. Well, it only took one show of nature like this to silence them.

‘Darling, you don't actually
need
to spell everything out for me. I know I'm an old duffer—'

‘Dad! Don't!'

‘—but I can occasionally read between the lines, and you were enjoying yourself. Nothing like that time when you were in Mexico and you were so desperate to come back home.'

They both paused as the car was manoeuvred very slowly through a minor flood, densely brown and littered with fallen leaves.