The Marriage Merger

by Liz Fielding

  This was her vision and she should see it through, take the credit. It was a huge company now. They were partners and it was crazy to waste talent this way just because of some old feud. Obviously Jordan would have to step into the number one slot. It was his right…

  Right? Should a clause in a partnership agreement drawn up in a different age decide who ran Claibourne & Farraday? Surely they should be considering who was most qualified to make a success of the job? Flora had an instinctive feel for retailing. They could replace her in the boardroom but they’d have to pay someone else to take her place. Except no one could do quite what she did. No else would be so…involved.

  Good grief! She’d got him on her side! Ready to go up against Jordan and tell him to think again.

  What was it about these sisters?

  His cousin Niall—a man frozen in grief, to the despair of his family and friends—had apparently taken one look at the lovely Romana Claibourne and experienced instant meltdown. Even now they were honeymooning in some romantic hideaway.

  Not that there was any danger of such a thing happening to him.

  He skirted around the moment when he’d draped a length of rich cloth over Flora’s shoulders. Sidestepped his reaction to her in the confined space of the tailor’s shop when, as the old man had defined her figure with his tape, his attention had been caught, held by the feminine grace in her movements. Tried to shut out the hypnotic swing of the silver earrings brushing against the long curve of her neck, focusing his entire mind on those few square inches of pale skin.

  It had been all he could do to stop himself from reaching out to touch it, discover whether it could possibly be as silky smooth as it looked.

  It was as if the drabness of the clothes she wore acted as a backdrop against which small delights could shine for those with the wit to notice them—delights that would have been lost against the competition from designer clothes, a stylish haircut.

  He flung back the sheet and swung himself from the bed. Knowing that sleep wouldn’t come, he tugged on his shorts, opened the doors and stepped out into the darkness, seeking a breath of cool air from the sea.

  The glow of Flora’s lamp was spilling out through open doors, suggesting that she was finding sleep hard to come by too. The sight of her sitting at her dressing table, a blue silk robe trailing loosely about her, her hair a dark ripple of shining waves tumbling down her back, all barriers down, brought him to an abrupt halt. And all the images that had been safely in his head were suddenly there, in front of him.

  Then she turned and he saw the open laptop on her dressing table, heard the modem dialling up an internet connection, realised what she was doing. Not sleepless, but working. Reassuring her sister that her ‘shadow’ was being kept tightly to heel. Filling her in on all the gossip.

  ‘Bram? Do you want something? Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Wrong?’ He let his gaze drift over her for a moment. ‘There’s not a thing wrong that I can see.’ The only thing wrong was that he wasn’t back in his room updating Jordan. But then what could he tell him? That the woman was a mystery. An enigma. That her mouth was full and ripe and needed no enhancement. That when she wore long earrings her neck became a place a man wanted to touch. With his hands, his mouth. That he wanted to wrap himself in her hair. Even as he thought it she caught it up, twisting it onto her head and securing it with a couple of combs.

  ‘Don’t…’

  She remained poised with her hands raised, the loose sleeves of her gown sliding down to reveal the pale skin of her arms, waiting for him to finish what he’d started to say.

  ‘You should get rid of the combs,’ he said, more harshly than he’d intended.

  ‘Rid of them?’

  ‘Throw them away. Never wear them again.’

  ‘That’s your beauty tip for the week, is it?’

  He remembered the man who’d told her not to cut her hair. And knew without a doubt that he was the man who’d hurt her. ‘I’m sorry. Forget it. It’s none of my business.’ She shrugged, let it fall and he caught his breath. He had to admit, the bastard was right. It was her best feature. His cousin, however, was unlikely to be impressed with a list of the lady’s attributes. He wasn’t supposed to be founding a fan club. ‘I’m going down to the beach to cool off. I saw your light and wondered if there was a problem, but I can see you’re working.’

  ‘No. At least…’

  All evening Flora had been experiencing echoes of the past reverberating in her head. The tiny touches to her back, her arm, the concern as he’d taken her hand, the looks designed to make a woman feel beautiful, special, wanted. The opening moves of the mating game. She knew them all by heart. It didn’t make them any less potent. For a moment she’d thought he was moving on to the late-night chat. The part where he opened his heart, shared his pain. Recalling the picture in his wallet, she was sure it would be a heartbreaker. And she did want to know…

  ‘I was just going to send India a note to say we’d arrived safely,’ she said, resisting the emotional tug. ‘I should have done it earlier.’

  ‘Then don’t let me disturb you.’ His eyes were in the shadows, his expression unreadable. But his voice was cobweb-soft, stirring the down on her skin like a caress.

  ‘Let you?’ she snapped back, fighting the attraction every step of the way. ‘How can I stop you? You disturb me simply by breathing.’

  ‘Is that so? Then I’m sorry.’

  ‘I doubt that. Very much.’

  ‘I haven’t exactly cornered the market in disturbance. You’re about as restful as a wasp nest.’ Behind her the laptop pinged to inform her that she’d got an e-mail waiting to be read. ‘Your sister is impatient for all your news,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a lot to tell her.’

  Oh, no… He knew she’d seen the photograph in his wallet. She didn’t want him to think she was sending this juicy piece of gossip to her sister. Whatever his secret—and nowhere in India’s file had it mentioned that Bram Gifford had a son—she’d respect it. She wanted him to know that, and she turned back to close down the connection.

  ‘Wait, Bram. I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘This can wait.’ But when she turned back, he’d gone.

  ‘Bram?’ She crossed to the open door and saw him striding down the path towards the beach, his hair, his shoulders gleaming in the starlight as he walked away from her as fast as he could.

  She rubbed the thin film of sweat from her upper lip. He wasn’t the only one who needed to cool down. But it wasn’t just her body that was overheated. Her imagination was doing a pretty good impression of a pressure cooker about to blow.

  Cool down? She frowned. He wouldn’t, surely, go into the sea? Swim at night. Alone?

  Bram stood at the water’s edge, the cooling surf washing around his ankles, hands in his pockets, his thumb flicking against the teeth of Flora’s comb.

  He’d put the rest of them, with her hairpins, on her night table when he’d left a bottle of water for her. But this one had been in his pocket and he’d hung onto it, knowing somehow that it was a clue to her deepest secrets.

  She had secrets, or she wouldn’t need all that hair stuff, that touch-me-not force field to keep him at bay. Personal secrets. None of Jordan’s business. None of his business. He, more than anyone alive, knew that.

  And yet he sorely wanted to know what had driven her behind her armour-plating. Getting hurt was all part of growing up and she didn’t seem to be the kind of girl who’d say once was enough. She was stronger than that. It had to have been something shattering.

  Yes, well, he knew about that too, and he found himself wishing that he hadn’t walked away. That she were with him. Maybe in the still darkness she’d open up, talk to him. Or maybe not. What would it take to shatter that self-control?

  He suspected he’d have go deep inside himself, to his own walled-off cell of pain, for the answer. What would it take to make him open up and lay bare his own private grief?

  Rather than face the question, he s
hucked off his shorts and walked into the sea.

  Flora paused as she reached the beach, brought to a standstill by the sight of Bram momentarily bathed in the light of the rising moon as he walked into the sea.

  He was quite beautiful, she thought. And quite stupid. Swimming at night, alone, was completely idiotic.

  ‘Bram…’ Her voice, thick, husky, barely reached her own ears, let alone his. Her bare feet sank into the soft sand and she seemed to make no headway against it. ‘Bram!’ she called again, this time with sufficient volume, but too late. Even as the sound disturbed the still night he disappeared beneath the dark surface of the sea.

  She stood for a moment, her hand to her throat, her heart in her mouth. It was an eternity before he re-emerged, further out, his arms dripping phosphorescence as he cut through the still water.

  ‘Idiot,’ she whispered as she sank down onto the sand to keep watch, and she would have been hard put to it to choose which of them she was referring to. Bram for swimming alone in the dark. Or herself for wishing she was with him, the cool water lapping against her hot skin, Bram’s hand against her back, with nothing between her skin and his other than a cool film of water—rapidly heating up.

  It was like being seventeen again. Heart-poundingly in love with the most beautiful man in the world and with only one thing on her mind.

  She groaned and lay back on the sand, her arm over her eyes, before temptation got the better of her and she joined him.

  Bram’s private demons didn’t often get the better of him. He kept a lid on the pain, kept himself too busy to be caught out by quiet moments when thoughts could steal in and take him by surprise.

  For a while he swam hard and fast, concentrating on the physical, excluding everything else. But it didn’t help.

  Wondering about her secrets had stirred up the past, shaken loose his own, and after a while he turned over onto his back and kicked gently for the shore, standing up when he reached the shallows. Then he turned and saw Flora, stretched out on the sand, her arm over her eyes.

  For a moment he stood quite still, rooted to the spot by this unexpected revelation of the woman beneath the camouflage. He’d suspected the truth, but now the lightest breeze off the sea was moulding the thin silk of her robe to every contour. Like some ancient statue of a Greek goddess, she was clothed, but nothing was concealed, and she was more, much more than his imagination had suggested.

  He moved as quietly as he could in an effort to retrieve his shorts, but without moving her arm, she said, ‘That was a very stupid thing to do, Bram,’ and he was the one who jumped. ‘You could have been eaten by a shark and no one would ever have known what had happened to you.’

  ‘If I’d been eaten by a shark,’ he replied, pulling on his shorts, ‘your problems would be over.’ He fastened the button at the waist. ‘You can open your eyes now.’

  ‘They weren’t closed.’

  He understood, finally, why women blushed as his skin responded with a quick flush of heat. Not embarrassment in his case…

  ‘Oh, and in answer to the question you asked earlier—skinny-dipping is an arrest-able offence in Saraminda.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I read the guidebook from cover to cover while you were taking your siesta.’ She sat up, brushing the sand from her shoulders, then, after a moment’s hesitation, took the hand he offered to help her to her feet.

  For a moment he continued to hold it. For a moment she let him. Then she reclaimed it to finish shaking the sand from her hair, her robe, and before his eyes her lovely figure disappeared in a swirl of loose silk and the disguise was pretty much back in place.

  Too late. He knew it now for what it was.

  Only the reason for it still eluded him as, dignity personified, she turned to walk back to the bungalow. The effect was somewhat spoiled by a nocturnal crab, with eyes like red headlamps, hurtling straight towards her in a headlong dive for the ocean.

  She jumped about a foot in the air, venting an involuntary little scream, almost landing on the creature in her panic to avoid it, before flinging herself at him with the unrestrained abandon of any woman confronted by a creature with too many legs for comfort.

  ‘It’s just a crab, Flora,’ he said, absorbing her tremor into his own body, briefly taking full advantage of her momentary weakness, then letting her go before she found her voice and demanded that he did. He just held her arms to keep her steady.

  But her voice had apparently deserted her, and as he looked down into her startled face he discovered a dangerous desire to kiss a mouth that was, after all, quite tempting enough without the enhancement of lipstick. A dangerous desire to do a lot more than that. A rush of heat so intense that he was forced to take a step back to keep the fact to himself.

  ‘I take your point about you being more of a danger to the local wildlife than they are to you, though. You nearly crushed the poor thing.’

  ‘Poor nothing,’ she croaked. ‘It had a six-leg advantage over me.’ Then she frowned. ‘Or is that eight? How many legs does a crab have?’

  ‘As many as it needs to avoid big-footed bipeds. With blue toenails.’

  She pointedly removed her arms from his grasp, then staggered a little in the soft sand.

  He caught her hand. It was still trembling. ‘Okay, now?’

  ‘I’m just fine!’ she declared loudly, betraying her vexation at having made an exhibition of herself.

  ‘Of course you are,’ he said. You aren’t in the least afraid of…arthropoda. Just crabs.’

  ‘It made me jump, that’s all.’

  Her voice wasn’t as steady as it might be either. And, looking down at her flushed cheeks, her full, soft mouth, for a heartbeat he found himself wondering if it was entirely the fault of the crab.

  Taking a wilful decision to find out, he tightened his grip on her hand, hooked his arm around her waist and drew her towards him with a firm insistence that brought her back to him in a single step.

  He’d anticipated a little more resistance.

  Maybe he’d taken her by surprise, or maybe it was the scent of the sea and the frangipani mingling to fill the air with an undeniable sensuality that seeped into the mind. Now there was nothing but the luscious feel of the silk between his skin and hers. Between her full, sweet breasts and the hammering of his heart.

  ‘Bram…’ Her lips parted softly on his name. Warning or plea? He took the risk, holding her close, cupping her head in his palm as he lowered his mouth to hers. In that moment before his lips brushed over hers she sighed his name again, and he had his answer.

  Kissing Flora was like rain in the desert. Fresh, sweet, unexpected.

  She kissed him as if he were the first man on earth, as if she were the first woman—her lips trembling beneath his, hovering between flight and surrender. Questioning his motives.

  He felt her uncertainty. She expected him to lead, to take what he wanted. He was overwhelmed with an unexpected need for her to give freely, and he answered her doubt with his experience, kissing her as if she were truly a sleeping beauty…as if he were waking her after a hundred years…tenderly at first, a chaste salute, holding back the clamour of his body, making no move to touch her more intimately, to deepen his kiss, extend the delicate exploration of his tongue.

  Even when she opened her mouth, inviting more, he held back, inviting a response, not forcing it, knowing that she would beg with her lips as she opened up to the heat of her own desire. Knowing that the longer he made her wait, the stronger would become her need, until nothing would stop her from responding to his own surging arousal.

  For a moment they remained locked, still. Then, with a soft groan of frustration, her tongue sought out his, urgent, demanding, in a spectacular meltdown.

  He’d thought that she didn’t know what her body was for. He was wrong. Her mouth was liquid heat and her body melted against him. And the fact that this was a rare surrender made it all the sweeter.

  But all the time his brain was clam
ouring that he’d won, that he’d evened the score for Jordan, that all he had to do now was pick her up, take her to bed and claim the prize.

  His heart responded with disgust that he could be so cold, so calculating.

  Flora Claibourne was worth a lot more than that. He’d won nothing. She wasn’t playing games.

  She was battened down, afraid of being hurt, and only genuine desire would have evoked such a heated response in her. She wasn’t surrendering; she was offering him something special. Her heart, her trust.

  The notion was so startling, so unexpected that he lifted his head, needing to see, to know what she feeling.

  Her face was flushed with desire, but there was something else, something unreadable. Hidden. And just as quickly he found himself wondering whether she’d been truly startled when that crab ran at her. Whether she was just making use of a heavensent opportunity to get close to him. Had this been India Claibourne’s plan all along? Forget proving how good they were at running the store. Simple seduction was a lot faster. Niall had gone down like a ninepin.

  It would go a long way towards explaining Flora’s terrible clothes, the awful hair. If she’d made an effort to look stunning he’d have been on his guard—after what had happened with Niall. But then, when she’d appeared out of the night, swathed in silk, her hair about her shoulders, transformed—

  ‘I think you should go to bed Flora,’ he said abruptly.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath that might have been relief, or disappointment, or both. For a moment he wanted to sweep her back into his arms and let the rest of the world go hang. Instead he held her briefly, kissed her forehead, and said, ‘Thanks for looking out for me.’ Then he let her go and stepped back.

  For a moment she hesitated, torn between flight and a passion that threatened to set the heavens alight. Then she, too, backed off. ‘I’d have done the same for anyone,’ she said dismissively, but she rather spoiled the effect by adding, ‘You won’t go back out there, will you? By yourself?’