A Prior Engagement

by Karina Bliss

  “But...”

  “But?” He could see her scrambling for excuses, which was exactly why he’d decided to spring this on her. So she didn’t have time to find any. Lee looked into her eyes, read her conflict. “You are with me, aren’t you, Jules?”

  “O-of course.”

  “Then let’s get this over with so we can get on with our lives.” He steered her toward the couch.

  “At least let me freshen up my makeup, brush my hair.”

  Lee maintained his grip on her elbow. “You look perfect.” He kissed her forehead. A camera flashed.

  “Actually, she is a little shiny through the lens,” a cameraman called.

  Guilt, Lee suspected. Jules shrugged away from his hold. “Won’t be a sec,” she said, and escaped.

  Lee returned to his seat in the bay window. The room was getting stuffy under the hot lights and he threw open the sash window to find a breeze. The faint buzz of a neighbor’s lawn mower carried across the street. Inhaling deeply won him the tantalizing scent of freshly cut grass.

  “I’m picking up background noise,” said one of the cameramen. “We’re going to have to close it, sorry.”

  Reluctantly Lee complied and turned to look into a sea of inquisitive faces. C’mon, Jules, I need you.

  “Let’s start with a few questions for you, Sergeant Davis,” said a middle-aged newscaster whose lipstick perfectly matched her nails.

  Wait, he needed Jules?

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “What’s the best thing about being in New Zealand, apart from seeing family and friends?”

  He didn’t even have to think about it. “Colors. The variety of hues and landscape, the moderate temperatures.”

  “Pretty hot over there.” The newscaster smiled, a pro putting him at ease.

  “And cold.” Lee returned her smile, appreciating her skill. “Afghanistan is a country of extremes.”

  “And extremists,” a male reporter interjected impatiently. Young, Lee noted, and probably keen to prove himself. “Did you form any kind or relationship with your captors?”

  He had a vision of Ajmal laughing, a gap in his front teeth like that of a seven-year-old’s, tears running down his cheeks, hands slapping skinny thighs. He’d just learned that Jules was a lawyer.

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss my captivity.” The SAS had prepped him for this. “Too much sensitive military information.” He glanced toward the hall. What was keeping Jules?

  A third journalist spoke, an older man with grizzled gray sideburns. “But you clearly lived in hardship under terrible conditions.”

  “And here I am thinking that I’d scrubbed up pretty well.”

  Everyone laughed. He resisted the urge to hide his hands. The freshly healed scars on his wrists itched.

  “Is there a food you’re particularly enjoying now you’re home?” asked the first newscaster.

  “Anything hot is a novelty.” Lee concentrated on her. “So is clean water. Electricity is good, moving around freely even better. Which is why we’re doing this interview.” He grinned. “So you guys go away and leave us in peace.”

  “The SAS is known as the elite military,” said the young gun. “Did your training keep you alive?”

  Hell, yeah. “It helped...but we’re not discussing my captivity,” he reminded him.

  “Will you receive a military decoration?” the old guy asked.

  “For what...? Staying alive? Not a lot of valor in that.”

  “Did you expect to be rescued?” The nice lady pro had moved on from breaking the ice.

  Every second, every minute. “The day the Americans raided was the happiest of my life. So moving on from the rescue—”

  Suddenly the bombardment came from every direction.

  “Did you ever attempt to escape?”

  “How often were you beaten?”

  “Why didn’t they kill you?”

  Lee tried to smile. “You guys are about as good at accepting ‘no comment’ for an answer as my captors.”

  “Excuse me.” Jules nudged a path through to him, her makeup perfect, her hair combed smooth and wearing her highest heels. She’d once told him that as a shortish person she found it disappointing that the ability to eyeball people often improved their manners.

  “So you were tortured?” persisted young gun, then yelped and grabbed his left foot.

  “I am so sorry,” Jules said. “It’s the heels.”

  Lee smothered a grin as she joined him on the window seat. Her hand sought his and tightened. He wished that simple gesture didn’t make him feel better.

  “Now here’s someone who deserves a medal,” he said. “Jules stood in for me with my late father, my siblings and my friends. She even tried to return my ring because she wanted to give me freedom of choice. As though I had a choice when I discovered all she’d done in my absence.” As he’d hoped, attention diverted to Jules.

  “Were you expecting the proposal?”

  “What was it like hearing he was alive?”

  “What did you think seeing each other again?”

  “What was the first thing he said to you?”

  “Hello,” Jules replied to the last, and everyone laughed. “I wasn’t expecting the proposal.... Lee hadn’t planned it, either. It just...happened, I guess.” It was her turn to look to him for support.

  He tried to resist the call. “Considering I’d settled on this woman within a few hours of meeting her it shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise,” he said drily.

  “Really?” Young gun smirked. “Are we talking love at first sight?”

  “For me, anyway.”

  Jules’s fingers twitched in his. Love at first sight, soul mates, she hated this stuff. Lee had thought he’d made her a believer until she refused to take that final leap of faith.

  Questions flew. He sketched in the blind date, the whirlwind courtship, his decision to buy the ring. Beside him, Jules squirmed. “It was an impulse buy before deployment,” he finished. “When it’s right, it’s right.”

  Dropping Jules’s hand, he pulled her closer. “I’m guessing that’s why she accepted the ring from my army buddies. Because it felt as if it was already hers.” Careful, you’re starting to sound cynical. “I will say one thing about my captivity.” Lee finished with a bitter truth. “Jules was my talisman, my reason to stay alive.”

  Under his arm, her shoulders tensed.

  Yeah, my feelings lasted, he thought wearily. The ones you doubted when you rejected my proposal. Nothing like long months of isolation and torture to put hurt pride into its proper perspective. And to crystallize what was important. Until he came home to another betrayal.

  “How does it feel hearing all this?” a reporter asked Jules.

  “Indescribable,” she croaked. She was practically wearing his encircling arm as earmuffs, her shoulders were so tight.

  “So when’s the wedding?”

  “We’re still getting used to being engaged,” she hedged.

  Lee stroked her upper arm, rubbing in the guilt with each tender caress. “Soon,” he said. “I’m pinning her down real soon.”

  From the interview they moved to photographs, using the overgrown back garden as a jungle-green backdrop.

  By then, Jules needed this over so badly that she let herself be moved into position like an animated puppet. Smiling, smiling, smiling.

  “Sit on his lap under the apple tree. Lean against his body—yes, t
hat’s it. Unfold your arms. Bring yours around to clasp her hands, Lee. Turn your head, Jules, and look up into his eyes.”

  The low sun blinded her. Lee adjusted his angle to shade her face. “Better?” His voice was hoarse, from talking, from tiredness. Nodding, Jules focused on the bridge of his nose, because otherwise she’d lose it.

  Jules was my talisman, my reason to stay alive.

  Maybe she’d lose it anyway. Her cheeks ached from smiling.

  Jules was my talisman, my reason to stay alive.

  “How about a kiss?” said the photographer. She thought, almost with relief, Well, this is it. This is where I fall on the ground crying and confessing and begging forgiveness.

  “I hardly know you,” Lee told him, and her moment of hysteria passed. Somehow she managed to chuckle with everyone else. “Anyway,” Lee added, “you got the kiss shot yesterday at the airport.”

  He lifted her ring finger instead, and the two of them admired every glittering facet of that diamond for the photographer.

  In the initial months after his death, she’d wished she’d said yes, with all her heart she’d wished she’d said yes. But when the initial shock lessened she accepted it wouldn’t have worked. And as it turned out, she’d been right to have concerns about his commitment.

  Lee had walked away at the first hurdle, severed their relationship with surgical precision. It was important to keep reminding herself of that.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “SO THAT’S IT,” Jules told her colleague Nick two days later. “I need cash to repay Lee and I want to know if you’re still interested in buying in. As a backup plan,” she stressed. “Only if the house doesn’t sell.

  With a silent whistle, Nick sat back in his swivel chair, stretched out his long legs and used them to spin the seat side to side. “I wasn’t expecting this.”

  He eyed her across his desk, his expression behind his fashion-forward glasses conflicted—the new normal for him since she’d bought into the firm. Affectionate, irritated, wary. Then he found the poker face that served him so well in court. “I assume you’ve run this by Ted?”

  “His only concern is that you might be carrying a grudge because they chose me.” She’d given him space these past couple months to deal with his disappointment privately. But they were good enough friends to be frank with each other. “Are you?”

  “I was gutted when the decision went your way,” he admitted. “I felt— Hell, I still think Ted’s choice wasn’t made solely on merit.”

  She’d suspected as much. “You think being a woman gave me an advantage.”

  “Positive discrimination, I believe it’s called.”

  “You really are resentful, aren’t you?”

  “I’m trying not to be, because you’re as good a lawyer as I am—”

  “Thank you,” she said drily.

  “But Oli and Ted chose you because a female partner makes them look liberal and progressive.” The firm was a Whangarei bastion, set up by Ted’s father sixty years earlier and built from banking, farming, golf and Rotary club contacts. His son had solidified the firm’s reputation as solid, reliable and conservative through partnering with another scion of a founder family.

  “No, they hired me five years ago to look liberal and progressive,” she corrected Nick. “And turning that into more than lip service was bloody hard work. I had to put on my big-girl pants and get over the fact that I had to work longer and harder than you did for the same respect. So if being a woman nudged their decision in my favor, well, I damn well earned that edge.”

  “Why did you bother?” he said curiously. “Other firms don’t live in the Dark Ages.”

  “Because I wanted to work with the best. Besides, Ted and Oli were just carrying some old boys’ baggage. They both travel much lighter now.”

  “So you’re suggesting it’s my turn to put on the big-girl pants and get over it?”

  “If the opportunity arises to buy me out, you won’t have to,” she pointed out.

  He picked up a paperweight, a crystal hexagon that reminded Jules of Lee’s diamond. Instinctively she twisted the ring on her finger—it was forever sliding sideways and digging into her pinkie because she’d never had it fitted properly—and glanced at her watch. Noon.

  Lee would have finished his morning workout and started preparing lunch for her return at one. Since he’d described cooking as a luxury, she’d learned to shut up and simply enjoy the feasts he prepared.

  Nor could she dissuade him from taming her overgrown garden, so they pruned and weeded together in the afternoon. By eight he was in bed, exhausted. It was downright scary how easily they were falling into a routine.

  Well,” she said abruptly, “are you interested in buying me out?”

  “I’ve been job hunting,” he said equally abruptly. “Successfully.”

  “Oh.” Jules hadn’t considered that possibility. “But you love working here as much as I do.”

  “I don’t want to be perceived as second choice, second-best.” She began to protest, but he raised a hand. “I don’t want to feel that way, either.” The chair creaked as he leaned forward. “I’ll accept the opportunity to buy you out and stay. I’ll even give you what you paid for it. But it’s unsettling for everyone if both of us remain here.”

  Jules sat stunned. So she wouldn’t just lose her shareholding, Nick was asking her to lose her job?

  “I don’t have to give the other firm an answer for two and a half weeks,” he said. “That gives you time to think about it. And like you said, I’m only Plan B if the house doesn’t sell. Hell, I hope it does.”

  She accepted his outstretched hand, manicured and soft, quite unlike Lee’s. “Me, too.”

  The moment she left Nick’s office Jules phoned her estate agent and authorized an auction. “A month’s lead-up might be customary but it won’t work for me,” she told Chloe when her friend protested the short notice. “Schedule one for two weeks from now. We already have open houses all weekend with Lee away.”

  Along with Nate and Ross he was visiting Dan and Jo’s farm down country—the location of Ross and Viv’s pending wedding reception—to finalize groomsman suits and nuptial planning. Jules had excused herself by pleading outstanding work commitments.

  At the farm she and Lee would be expected to share a bed.

  Her fiancé hadn’t protested; she suspected he was relieved. Which should have relieved her.

  “How about we also run a full-page ad in the local paper Saturday since Lee won’t be around to see it. And use that phrase estate agents have to signal a desperate vendor.”

  “Motivated seller,” said Chloe.

  “Highly motivated seller,” Jules amended.

  * * *

  AT NIGHT IT WAS hardest to fight memories of his captivity.

  In the dark space became infinite, stretching out in all directions to the past and to the future Lee couldn’t make solid. And that scared him.

  He’d learned to evade his nightmares by sleeping in brief snatches. Never too deeply. Occasionally, though, one caught him unawares. Which was how he found himself tumbling through a vast black void, his mouth open in a silent scream.

  He struggled awake and fumbled for the lamp switch, desperate for the familiar walls of Jules’s bedroom, her nightstand, her paintings and photographs.

  Pressing his nose into the linen pillowcase, he inhaled the violet-scented fabric conditioner she used and his panic subsided t
o a manageable level. This was why, even after four nights, he hadn’t suggested moving to the spare room.

  As his breathing calmed, he noticed he’d left his door ajar. Afraid the light would wake her, he crawled out of bed to close it.

  “Lee?” Her muffled voice prompted him to grab a T-shirt off the floor. As the door opened, he yanked it on over his boxers. Tousled, blinking against the light, Jules said sleepily, “Do you need something?”

  “Just thirsty.”

  She wore pajamas, a green tank over patterned cotton boxers, sensible, sporty, except they clung to the womanly curves of her breasts and hips. And she smelled like Jules, all sleepy and warm and soft—if soft had a smell, which it didn’t. He was going mad.

  “I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  “I can get it!”

  She hugged herself at his harsh tone, inadvertently accentuating her cleavage.

  “Sorry.” Lee raked a hand through his hair. “I mean, no, thank you.”

  A tentative smile curved her mouth. Such a luscious mouth. “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  She padded down the hall toward the spare bedroom and he tortured himself by watching her long, smooth legs, the sweet curve of her bottom and the rounded sway of her hips.

  Why was he doing this? And forget the bullshit about making her pay, because he was paying, too. Why did it matter so damn much that she tell him the truth? There was no justification for what she’d done. And yet he couldn’t, even now, douse the flame completely.

  He suspected he still had hope. The irrepressible spark that had kept him alive in captivity was now holding him in a torturous limbo with Jules.

  In the kitchen he filled a glass from the faucet, then cupped his hands and splashed his face. Cold water and lots of it suddenly seemed like a good idea. He dried off using the hem of his T-shirt. For a long moment he stood pressing the cotton against his eyelids.

  Nothing fit him anymore, least of all his old self. His unit had disbanded, his friends were invested in new lives, his house and possessions were gone, his father was dead and the love of his life was a fraud.