Remarried in Haste

by Sandra Field

  “You’ve changed.”

  “I would hope so.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a compliment! You never used to be so cold. So hard.”

  “Then you can congratulate yourself on what you’ve accomplished.”

  “You never used to be bitchy, either,” he retorted, his temper rising in direct proportion to his need to puncture her self-possession.

  “I’d call it a good dose of the truth rather than bitchiness. But there’s no reason we should agree on that, we never agreed on anything else.” Suddenly Rowan ran her fingers through her cropped hair, her pent-up breath escaping in a long sigh. “This is really stupid, standing here trading insults with each other. It’s been a long day and I’ve got to be up at five-thirty. So I’m just going to say one more thing, Brant, then I want you to leave. I made a mistake seven years ago when I married you. I’ve paid for that mistake—it cost me plenty. And now I’m moving on. For all kinds of obvious reasons I don’t need your help to do that. Get yourself on the first plane back to Toronto and kindly stay out of my hfe.”

  Her fists were clenched at her sides and she was very pale. The woman Brant had been married to would have been yelling at him by now, passion exuding from every pore, her words pouring out as clamorously as a waterfall tumbles over a cliff. Had she really changed that much? Even worse, was he, as she’d said, responsible for that change?

  Rowan picked up the receiver of the phone by her bed, knowing she had to end this. “I’ll give you ten seconds. Then I’m calling the front desk.”

  “Go right ahead,” he drawled. “I’ll make sure I tell them I’m your ex-husband. I’ll tell Natalie, too—she’ll spread the word to the group, I’m sure.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  He bared his teeth in a smile. “I’ve never been known for fighting fair. Had you forgotten?”

  She hadn’t. One of his weapons had always been his body, of course; his body and the searing sexual bond between the two of them. Suddenly frightened, Rowan said, “Brant, don’t do this. You’re only making things worse between us.”

  “According to you, that’s impossible.”

  She took another deep breath and said steadily, “I can only speak for myself here. I still have some good memories—some wonderful memories—of the time we spent together. But when you force your way into my room like this, and threaten to expose my private life to a group of strangers who happen to be my business clients, then I start to wonder if I’m kidding myself about those memories—I was deluded, I wasn’t seeing the real man, he never existed. Don’t do that to me, Brant. Please.”

  Some of the old intensity was back in her voice, and there was no doubting her sincerity. Shaken, in spite of himself, Brant blurted, “Is there someone else in your life, Rowan?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “But I want there to be.”

  Relief, rage and chagrin battled in his chest: he’d never meant to ask that question. Where the devil was his famous discretion, his ability to control a conversation and learn exactly what he wanted to know from someone who’d had no intention of revealing it? His boss would fire him if he could see him in action right now. Defeated by a woman? Brant Curtis?

  He said thickly, “One kiss. For old time’s sake.”

  Panic flared in her face. She grabbed the phone and cried, “You come one step nearer and I’ll tell everyone in Grenada that you’re the world-famous journalist, Michael Barton. So help me, I will.”

  Michael Barton was Brant’s pseudonym, and only a very small handful of people knew that Brant Curtis and Michael Barton were one and the same man; it was this closely guarded secret that enabled him as Brant Curtis, civil engineer and skilled negotiator, to enter with impunity whichever country he was investigating. He felt an ill-timed flare of admiration for Rowan; it was quite clear that she’d do it, she whom he’d trusted for years with his double identity. “You sure don’t want me to kiss you, do you?” he jeered. “Why not, Rowan? Afraid we’ll end up in bed?”

  “Look up divorce in the dictionary, why don’t you? We’re through, finished, kaput. I wouldn’t go to bed with you if you were the last man on earth.”

  “Bad cliché, my darling.”

  With a huge effort Rowan prevented herself from throwing the telephone at him, cord and all. Keep your cool, Rowan. Keep your cool. She said evenly, “It happens to be true.”

  “But why so adamant? Who are you trying to convince?”

  She said with a sudden, corrosive bitterness, “The one man in the world who never allowed himself to be convinced of anything I said.”

  She meant it. Brant thought blankly. Her bitterness was real, laden with a pain whose depths horrified him. He stood very still, at a total loss for words. He earned his living—an extraordinarily good living—by words. Yet right now he couldn’t find anything to say to the woman who had been his lover and his wife. She looked exhausted, he realized with a pang of what could only be compassion, her shoulders slumped, her cheeks pale as the stuccoed walls.

  As if she had read his mind, she said in a low voice, “Brant, I work fifteen-hour days for two weeks on this trip and I’ve got to get some sleep.”

  “Yeah...I’m sorry,” he muttered, and headed for the door. Sorry for what? For bursting into her room? Or for killing the fieriness in her spirit all those months ago?

  Was her accusation true? Had he never allowed her to change his mind about anything? If so, no wonder she wouldn’t give him the time of day.

  The door slid smoothly open and shut just as smoothly. He didn’t once look back. Instead of going to his own room, he tramped down the driveway and left the hotel grounds. He’d noticed a bar not that far down the road. He’d order a double rum and hope it would make him sleep. Or six of them in a row. And he wouldn’t allow his own good memories—of which there were many—to come to the surface.

  He’d be done in if he did.

  The patio door closed. As though she couldn’t help herself, Rowan peered through the gap in the curtain and watched Brant’s tall figure march down the driveway, until it blended with the darkness and disappeared. Shivering, she clicked the lock and pulled the curtain tightly shut. After dragging off the rest of her clothes, she pulled on silk pajamas and got into bed, yanking the covers over her head.

  What would have happened if Brant had kissed her? Would he be lying beside her now, igniting her body to passion as only he could?

  She slammed on her mental brakes, for to follow that thought was to invite disaster. She hadn’t let him kiss her. She’d kept some kind of control over herself and over him, in a way that was new. Dimly she felt rather proud of this.

  Perhaps, she thought with a flare of hope, something good would come out of Brant’s reappearance in her life. Perhaps there was a reason for it, after all. Inadvertently she’d been given an opportunity to lay the ghosts of the past to rest. If she could detach herself from him in the next two weeks, really detach herself, then when she went home she’d be free of him. Free to start over and find someone else.

  She wanted children, and a man with a normal job. She wanted stability and continuity and a house in the country. She wanted to love and be loved.

  By someone safe. Not by Brant with his restless spirit and his inexhaustible appetite for danger. Never again by a man like Brant.

  Freedom, she thought, and closed her eyes. Freedom...

  At the St. Vincent airport, while he was waiting to go through customs, Brant phoned three different airlines to see if he could get back to Toronto. It was nearing the end of the season, he was told; bookings were heavy. He could go standby. He could be rerouted in various complicated and extremely expensive ways. But he couldn’t get on a plane today and end up in Toronto by nightfall.

  He banged down the phone and took his passport out. When he rejoined the group he saw that he wasn’t the only one to have left it. Natalie and Steve were standing to one side. Natalie was, very nearly, screaming; Steve was, unquestionably, yelling. Their language made Br
ant wince, their mutual fury made him glance at Rowan. She was talking to May and Peg, a fixed smile on her face.

  Then Natalie stomped over to Rowan. Not bothering to lower her voice, her catlike beauty distorted by rage, she announced, “Get me a single room for the rest of this trip! I’m not going anywhere near that—” and here her language, once again, achieved gutter level.

  May said crisply, “Young woman, that’s enough!”

  Peg added, “This is a public place on a foreign island and you’re disgracing our country.”

  Natalie’s head swerved. “Who the hell do—”

  “Be quiet,” Peg ordered.

  “This minute,” her cohort seconded.

  As Natalie’s jaw dropped, Brant threw back his head and started to laugh, great bellows of laughter that released the tension in his chest and the ache in his belly that had been with him ever since he’d first seen Rowan in the airport at Grenada. Uncertainly Karen smiled and Sheldon joined her, a smile tugged at the corner of Rowan’s mouth and Steve said vengefully, “Shut up, Natalie.”

  For a moment it looked as though Natalie was about to launch into another tirade. But then the custom’s officer said, “Next, please,” and Rowan said briskly, “Your turn, Natalie.”

  As Natalie stepped over the painted line and fumbled for her passport, Steve said, “Two single rooms, Rowan, and it’s the last time I’ll travel anywhere with that b—” he caught sight of May’s clamped jaw and finished hastily “—broad.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Rowan said.

  “You’d better,” said Steve.

  “There’s a marvelous word in the English language, Steve, called please,” Brant interposed softly. “You might try it sometime. Because I don’t like it when you order Rowan around.”

  Steve took a step toward him, his fists bunched. Even more softly, Brant said, “Don’t do it. You’ll end up flat on the floor seeing a lot more than birds.”

  This whole trip was getting away from her, Rowan thought wildly. A screaming match in the airport and now the threat of a brawl. But, try as she might, she couldn’t take her eyes off Brant. Once, she remembered, she and he had been walking down Yonge Street and had been accosted by a couple of teenagers with knives; that evening Brant had had the same air of understated menace, of a lean and altogether dangerous confidence in his ability to defend both himself and her.

  It wasn’t his job to defend her. Not anymore. Besides which, dammit, it was time she asserted her own authority. “I’ve said I’ll do my best, Steve, that’s all I can do,” she announced. “And you’ll both have to pay extra money, you do realize that? Karen and Sheldon, why don’t you go through customs next?” That, at least, would keep Natalie and Steve apart. She’d have to get on the phone at the hotel in St. Vincent and rearrange all the other hotels. And if Steve and Natalie had a reconciliation before the end of the trip, they could darn well sleep apart. It would be good for them.

  Not entirely by coincidence, she glanced at Brant. He was watching her, laughter gleaming anew in his blue eyes. It’s not funny, she told herself, and winked at him, her lips twitching; then suddenly remembered she was supposed to be keeping her cool. What a joke! How could she possibly keep her cool with Natalie and Steve fighting like alley cats, Peg and May acting like the imperious headmistresses of the very snootiest of private schools, and Karen and Sheldon looking superior because they knew they’d never do anything so crude as to argue?

  Not to mention Brant. Handsome, sexy, irresistible Brant.

  She looked away, flustered and upset. Deep down she could admit to herself that she was extremely gratified Brant had sprung to her defense. And explain that one, Rowan Carter.

  The hotel in St. Vincent boasted enough bougainvillea and palm trees for any postcard, as well as a dining room open to a view of the beach and a bar with pleasant wicker furmture right at the edge of the beige-colored sand. Rowan was able to get Steve and Natalie single rooms in separate wings of the hotel, and suggested they all meet for an early lunch. She then had the baggage delivered to all the right rooms, got on the phone to the rest of the hotels, and did some groceries for the picnic lunch the next day. By which time she was supposed to be in the dining room.

  Steve sat down on one side of her, Brant on the other. Natalie, she saw with an unholy quiver of amusement, immediately seized the chair on Brant’s far side. Okay, Rowan, she told herself, this time you really are going to keep your cool, and said brightly, “This afternoon we’ll head up to the rain forest, where we should see St. Vincent parrots.”

  “Excellent,” said May.

  “Exciting,” said Peg.

  Steve nudged Rowan with something less than subtlety. “I’ll stand you a drink in the bar for every parrot we see.”

  Over my dead body, thought Brant.

  “I don’t think so,” Rowan responded. “We saw well over a dozen on our last trip here.”

  “Steve excels at drinking too much, it’s his only talent,” Natalie said sweetly. “I bet you can hold your liquor, Brant.”

  “So much so that I have no need to prove it,” Brant replied. “Rowan, how long a drive to the forest?”

  He was smiling at her, his irises the deep blue of the sea, his dark hair ruffled by the breeze that came from the sea. We’re divorced, Rowan thought frantically, we’re finished, we’re over and done with, and gulped, “Oh, about an hour, depending if we stop on the way.”

  “The St. Vincent parrots are the ones with yellow and blue on them.”

  “That’s right, although it’s more like gold and bronze, along with blue, green and white.”

  “You look tired,” he said quietly.

  She was tired. Her period was due soon, and she knew she’d have to dose herself with medication to get through the cramps on the first day. She said in a loud voice, “Because they’re such handsome birds, they’ve been poached a lot for the parrot trade.”

  This launched Peg and May into a discussion about the complexities of economics and environmentalism, and thankfully Rowan focused on her conch salad. When they’d all finished eating, she asked everyone to meet in the lobby in fifteen minutes, and scurried off to ask the kitchen if they’d cook some tortellini for the picnic lunch the next day.

  The others went to their rooms. Brant filled his canteen with water from the table, enjoying the breeze, remembering how the skin beneath Rowan’s dark eyes was shadowed blue. He’d never before considered how hard she worked; her job had always seemed like a piece of cake compared to his. Not really worth his attention.

  This wasn’t a particularly comfortable thought. His eyes fell to her chair; she’d left her haversack there. When he bent to pick it up so he could return it to her, he discovered that it was astonishingly heavy. Without stopping to think, he slid the zipper open and looked inside.

  What for? Photos of himself? That was a laugh. Photos of another man? That wouldn’t be one bit funny.

  She wasn’t dating anyone else. She’d told him so. And in all the years he’d known Rowan, she’d never tied to him.

  Brant was highly skilled at swift searches. The weight of the haversack was due to binoculars, a camera and a zoom lens. No photos turned up. But in a pocket deep in a back compartment he found something that made his pulses lurch, then thrum in his ears. His fingers were caressing the cool ceramic surface of the earrings he’d had designed for her, earrings fashioned like the berries of the rowan tree.

  “What are you doing?”

  Like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Brant looked up. He fumbled for the earrings and held them up. “These were the first present I ever gave you.”

  She whispered ferociously, “You’re on vacation, Brant—but you can’t give it a rest, can you? You’ve always got to be the perfect investigator, the one who invades and violates the privacy of others for your own ends. Why don’t you just lay off?”

  “Why were these earrings buried in your haversack?”

  “That’s none of your damned
business!”

  She was swearing at him, he thought in deep relief; the ice-cold, controlled woman of last night was gone. In her place was a woman whose eyes blazed, whose cheeks were stained red with rage and whose breasts—those delectable breasts—were heaving. He retorted, “Just answer the question.”

  “Oh, because I’m dying with love for you,” she stormed. “I’m obsessed with you, I think about you night and day, week in, week out. Hadn’t you guessed that? Or could it just possibly be because I’d planned to wear them on this trip since they’re kind of neat earrings and when you arrived I decided against it, in case I put any ideas in your head?” She snorted. “I don’t need to put any ideas in your head, you can come up with more than enough all by yourself.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I’m actually starting to be pleased that you’re here, Brant Curtis, and how do you feel about that? Do you know why?” She didn’t stop long enough for him to answer. “You’re confirming all the reasons I left you. Every last one of them. By the time you get on the plane in Antigua to go home, I’ll be free as a—as a bird, and don’t you dare tell me that’s another cliché. I’m going to get on with my life. Without you. And I’m beginning to think I’ll have you to thank for that.”

  So angry he was beyond thought, Brant closed the distance between them in two long strides. Taking her furious face in his hands, the earrings digging into her cheek, he planted a kiss full on her open mouth.

  Rowan kicked out at him; his tongue sought all the sweetness he’d missed so desperately for so long, and from behind them Peg gasped, “Oh, my goodness!”

  Brant dropped his hands as if they were clasping fire. Rowan, he noticed distantly, looked as though she might fall down. May said, “Well, this is a surprise.”

  Briefly Rowan closed her eyes in horror, wishing she could open them and find herself anywhere but in the dining room of the Beachside Hotel on the island of St. Vincent. Then she turned around. Peg and May were the only members of the group to be present, for which she thanked her lucky stars. Before she could think of what to say next, Brant said, “We—er, we knew each other. From before. Rowan and I.”