Marriage on the Rebound

by Michelle Reid

  ‘But I don’t speak Chinese!’ Shaan protested in alarm as he reached the bedroom door.

  Amazingly he was grinning when he turned back to face her. ‘You idiot,’ he chided. ‘This is Hong Kong—the most cosmopolitan city in the world! There isn’t a person on this crowded little rock worth their salt who can’t speak better English than we do ourselves!’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, feeling foolish.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he repeated, and was still laughing at her when he disappeared into the bedroom.

  When he came back, she was standing by the window gazing across the bay towards the less famous skyline of Kowloon.

  ‘No calls?’ he asked.

  She turned to find him standing there in a beautiful slate-grey suit and pale blue shirt, with a slim navy tie knotted at his throat. His hair was still slightly damp, his tanned jaw swept clean of the shadow that had darkened it before. He wasn’t looking at her but was concentrating on tugging his shirt-cuffs into a neat line around the cuffs of his jacket, and so missed the silent gasp she couldn’t hold back as her senses reacted to how unnervingly attractive he was.

  ‘No,’ she answered, feeling slightly breathless.

  He glanced up. Perhaps some of her agitation was showing in her voice. His eyes narrowed on her face, coolly assessing as they explored her pale, rather confused, expression. ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded.

  ‘I…nothing,’ she denied, looking quickly away from him. ‘W-will I need my jacket?’

  ‘Maybe not outside,’ he answered, after a short, sharp pause that said he did not believe her. ‘But the buildings are all air-conditioned and it can be quite cool inside them. And, anyway,’ he added as he strode past her to hook her jacket off the back of the chair she had draped it on, ‘despite the heat, people dress conservatively here. Without the jacket you look like a tourist. With it,’ he added, settling the silk-lined linen across her shoulders, ‘you look like the elegant wife of a businessman.’

  He came round to stand in front of her, the clean smell of him further disturbing her already disturbed and confused senses. He stood a full head taller than she did, putting her eyes on a level with his square, cleanly shaven chin.

  ‘Shaan…’ he murmured slowly, ‘…if you’re worrying about you and I sharing a bed tonight, then don’t.’

  ‘I’m not!’ she denied.

  ‘No?’ he mocked. ‘Well, something is certainly troubling you.’ He lifted a hand to her chin, his fingers gently urging her to look at him.

  ‘It—it just doesn’t feel right,’ she explained shakily.

  ‘All this—enforced intimacy with a man I hardly—’

  ‘Like?’ he inserted.

  ‘I never said that!’ she denied, lifting protesting eyes to his. His expression was disbelieving and she sighed, wishing he would just give her a little space so she could untangle the mess her emotions were in. ‘You’re difficult to—’

  To ignore, she had been going to say, but stopped herself because she knew he wouldn’t understand. But that was exactly the right way to describe the problems she was struggling with just now. She needed—wanted—to be able to ignore him as a living, breathing sexually attractive male, but she couldn’t, because with each passing minute she spent in his company she was becoming more and more aware of him.

  A man she could quite easily tumble headlong into love with.

  No! The way her brain flashed that frightened protest at her made her stiffen up like a board. ‘Can we just go now?’ Her eyes pleaded so anxiously that he grimaced, then sighed in exasperation.

  ‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘Why not?’ And he let go of her, leaving her very aware that she had just managed to offend him—again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS a trying afternoon, if only because Rafe was so determined to fill every second of it.

  He discarded the idea of using one of the hotel’s chauffeur-driven cars in favour of travelling on the underground.

  This was an experience in itself to Shaan, after being used to London’s aged underground system, but she would have appreciated it more if she hadn’t been so tired—and if that last little scene in their hotel suite hadn’t placed some stiffness between them.

  They left the underground at a place called Central, which brought them smack bang into the middle of corporate Hong Kong. And the moment they stepped outside it was like having that wet blanket slapped in her face again.

  ‘Two minutes and we’ll be out of it,’ Rafe assured her, and, with a hand on her arm, rushed them across a busy road and in through a pair of huge plate glass doors which led—thankfully—back into blissful coolness.

  His Hong Kong branch office was situated in a building that resembled a futuristic space rocket straight out of a Jules Verne novel. Shaan left her stomach behind when the lift rocketed them up thirty floors in half as many seconds. Then the doors opened, and she found herself staring at the most beautiful oriental woman she had ever seen.

  Smiling in welcome, her lovely sloe-shaped eyes were fixed directly on Rafe. She sent him a bow and said something in Chinese to him, which he replied to in the same language. Then she looked curiously at Shaan.

  ‘Shaan, meet Su Ling, our Far Eastern sales director. Su Ling,’ he smoothly concluded, ‘my new wife, Shaan.’

  The woman wasn’t surprised, and as she bowed politely to Shaan, Shaan ruefully presumed the news of their very public marriage had preceded them even this far. ‘I am happy to meet you, Mrs Danvers,’ she murmured in a beautifully accented, sensuously soft voice. ‘May I offer you both my sincere congratulations?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Shaan answered awkwardly, feeling like a fraud.

  Thankfully, Rafe started demanding attention, asking quick-fire, well informed questions as he guided Shaan across a gracious foyer of pale whites and greys and in through a door to an elegant room walled almost completely in glass.

  It was an office, sumptuous in its ultra-modern design, furnished almost entirely in grey. Grey carpet, grey walls, grey cabinets, grey leather sofas and chairs. A large grey desk took up almost the whole of one plate glass wall, and the standard office paraphernalia that was set neatly on top of it was simply a darker shade of the same nondescript grey.

  ‘Coffee would be nice,’ Rafe murmured, and, with a smile and a bow, Su Ling went off to organise it, leaving Rafe and Shaan alone. ‘This shouldn’t take long,’ he promised, guiding her over to one of the soft leather sofas and seating her on it.

  The moment she was seated, his attention left her, shifting over to the big desk where a neat pile of files drew his interest. Shaan sat quietly watching him as once again he immersed himself in work, sitting behind the desk on a high-backed grey leather office chair, his lean face sharpened by concentration.

  He wasn’t a handsome man, she decided as she studied him. Not in the true, classical sense of the word anyway. Piers was that—a truly handsome man with a classically perfect profile whereas Rafe’s attraction was due more to the irregularities of his features than their perfect symmetry.

  His nose, for instance, was long and thin, with a bump in the middle of it that suggested he must have broken it at some time in his life. As if to confirm that theory there was a scar to the side of the bump—just a tiny, thin white line. There was nothing sinister about it, but it prompted curiosity as to how it had got there, suggested that Rafe had not always been a man who relied exclusively on his mental strength, as he did these days. That maybe, in his past, he had been quite willing to use a bit of physical strength, too.

  But by no stretch of the imagination could Piers be called a physical man. Like the perfect contours of his face, his body was whip-cord lean, with no obvious muscle to spoil the line of his clothes, whereas Rafe’s clothes—expensive and beautifully tailored as they were—could not quite hide the expanse of hard muscle that made up his bigger frame.

  Both brothers were about the same height, but when they were standing side by side Rafe physically overpowered Piers in ever
y way, with his broader shoulders, wider chest and a definite angle to his torso where it narrowed down to lean, tight hips.

  The line of Piers’ body was smoother, sleeker, but it lacked that air of masculine power that Rafe exuded. Even their hair was different. The silky, straight fairness of Piers’ hair suited the kind of man he was, just as Rafe’s thick, dark, slightly wavy hair suited him.

  Piers smiled a lot, but she could count on the fingers of one hand how many times she had seen Rafe smile, and she had yet to see him smile with any real humour. Piers could find humour in just about anything—whether the moment deserved it or not.

  In fact, she realised suddenly, when she really thought about it Piers had a nasty habit of laughing at others’ misfortunes—like the time he’d laughed at Jack Mellor’s discomfort at being ordered to search her out and apologise.

  Younger, she reminded herself. Piers was ten years younger than Rafe and therefore looked at life from a different perspective. And, because he was younger, perhaps she was not being fair in trying to compare him with his older, far more sophisticated and wordly brother. Yet—

  She frowned, finding herself coming up against a solid wall which blocked out the answer to that ‘yet’. Yet what? she wanted to know, and found it frustrating to have no answer.

  ‘How good is your shorthand?’

  Shaan blinked, bringing her big eyes back into focus to find Rafe studying her narrowly.

  ‘I…’ She didn’t really know how to answer him. Her shorthand was good, very good, but by Rafe’s high standards that might not be good enough. ‘Adequate, I suppose,’ she compromised warily, wondering why he wanted to know.

  ‘Adequate enough to take down some notes for me while I’m running through these?’ He flapped a sheaf of papers at her, with an odd smile playing around his mouth that almost hinted at wry appeal.

  ‘I—suppose so,’ she answered uncertainly, getting nervously to her feet.

  ‘Good. Thanks.’ Dropping the papers, he reached down and opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a notebook and a couple of sharp pencils and slid them across to her. ‘Pull up that chair, then, and let’s give it a go,’ he invited, waving her towards a straight backed chair standing at right angles to his own.

  She did as he bade, moving nervously to get the chair then sitting down on it, before picking up the notepad and pencil. Rafe barely glanced at her, his attention seemingly fixed on the papers in front of him. There was a moment or two’s silence while he gathered his thoughts, and she had to stop herself chewing nervously on the tip of her pencil. Then he began, voicing remarks in clear, precise tones that she had no difficulty transcribing for him.

  In a matter of minutes her nervousness had gone, swept away by the quick-fire way he dealt with the information in front of him. It soon became clear that he was reading some kind of sales projection report, and she was deeply impressed by the way he coolly and shrewdly picked it to bits, asking questions and making pointed remarks that were going to make the poor person who had compiled it squirm in their seat. Because even in her small experience there was one thing she was sure about—and that was that by the time this report landed on Rafe’s desk it should have been absolutely question and comment-free.

  Su Ling appeared at one point, loaded down with a tray of coffee things. She paused, surprise showing in her lovely eyes when she realised what was going on, then Rafe waved her impatiently across the room, dismissing her with thanks that bordered on the brusque. She had barely closed the door behind her before he was back at work, his use of acid wit as he ripped the report apart drawing more reluctant appreciation from Shaan as she noted it down. It went on and on, pages of questions and comments that held her so engrossed she actually jumped when Rafe spoke to her directly.

  ‘Do you think you got all of that?’

  Her head came up, her dark brown eyes warmed by a light that hadn’t been in them for days now.

  ‘Yes!’ she said, then smiled a little wryly at the note of surprised pleasure in her voice. ‘I may be trained to take dictation…’ she shyly explained the surprise ‘…but since I joined your company I’ve had very little opportunity to use it. I work mainly for your army of salesmen, and they tend to dictate onto their mini-recorders then pass the cassettes on to be transcribed.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘I expected to be a lot rustier than I was.’

  In fact, she remembered silently, the only time she’d had cause to use her shorthand skills recently had been for Piers, and he had such an easy, laid-back attitude to dictation that it really had not been any kind of test of her abilities. Not like just now—not like Rafe, who—

  ‘Shaan?’

  She blinked, bringing her mind back to the man sitting at right angles to her. He was watching her narrowly and she realised that, once again, he had known the very moment when Piers’ name had popped into her head and was responding accordingly—snapping her out of her reverie before it took too tight a hold.

  ‘Do you think,’ he went on once he had her full attention, ‘you could transcribe that lot for me if I find you a word processor to use?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, feeling more comfortable with this bass-secretary relationship than their other, much too intimate one.

  ‘Good.’ He nodded, then bent down to open the large bottom drawer in his desk. To her surprise he came up with a lap-top computer which he put down on his desk in front of her. ‘Ever used one of these?’ he asked, and at her mute nod dumped a set of cables on her lap. ‘Then I can leave you to set it up while I pour us some coffee?’

  He got up, stretching out his lean frame in a long, lazy way which drew her reluctant gaze to the muscles flexing along the rigid walls of his stomach. Her mouth went dry and she looked quickly away, fingers suddenly all thumbs, because a strange kind of heaviness was attacking her own muscles.

  Jet lag, she decided firmly. The sensation had nothing to do with Rafe. After all, his constant closeness was something she had become more than familiar with over the last few days.

  Yet, when he moved away, she let go of the breath she had not realised she had been holding until that moment and frowned, not liking the suspicion that she was becoming more and more aware of him as a real flesh and blood man.

  By the time he brought two cups of coffee back to the desk, Shaan had the lap-top jumping into life. The machine was loaded with the same kind of software she was used to using, and she opened up a new file and set her mind to the task in hand while Rafe immersed himself in yet more paperwork.

  They worked in companionable silence for a while, he flicking through papers, picking up his pen to score the odd remark across a paragraph, or just lazing back in his chair to read.

  It was a strange kind of situation, Shaan mused at one point when she paused to sip at her cup of coffee. Here they were, strangers—enemies to a certain degree—but newly married and, as far as any outsider was concerned, supposedly here on their honeymoon. Yet at the first opportunity he got, Rafe kept on putting her to work!

  ‘What’s the smile for?’ His deep voice intruded.

  Did the man ever miss anything? she wondered ruefully as she glanced up to find that far from concentrating on his own work, as she’d thought him to be doing, he was sitting back in his chair, concentrating on her instead.

  ‘I was wondering what your staff must be thinking of you, putting me to work like this,’ she told him truthfully.

  ‘I would rather know what you think of me,’ he countered softly.

  Shaan lowered her eyes, cheeks suffusing with self-conscious colour. ‘I think you’re a slave-driver,’ she said lightly, deciding to put his potentially loaded remark in the context she had placed her own remark in.

  But the colour remained high in her cheeks for a long time afterwards, and every time she glanced up she found him still sitting there just watching her.

  It was disturbing. It was troubling. It made something deep down inside her coil up tightly, as though it was making ready to spring wide apart a
t the slightest provocation.

  Jet lag; she blamed it all on that once again—desperately. I’m going mad with the need for sleep, she told herself firmly. That’s all it is.

  An hour after that they were back in the lift. Then swiftly back to the futuristic foyer.

  ‘Where to now?’ she asked, hoping he was going to say back to the hotel for a rest.

  But he didn’t. ‘To get you fixed up with some clothes.’

  ‘Oh, Rafe!’ she groaned. ‘Please, no!’ She was so tired she was almost dropping. ‘You’ve just dumped a whole load of new clothes on me without my knowing it. I don’t want any more!’

  ‘There’s a shopping mall across the road from here,’ he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘You can buy anything from Chanel to Joe Bloggs there.’

  Two hours after that, he had her sitting in an Italian style café in the same mall, sipping strong black espresso to help keep her awake.

  ‘I think I hate you,’ she murmured when she caught him watching her with an annoyingly wry smile on his face. ‘Why are you doing all of this?’ By ‘this’ she meant the criminal array of exclusive designer bags stacked all around them both. ‘It’s not as if I’ll ever get around to wearing them all!’

  ‘I had to keep you awake somehow,’ he replied, seemingly indifferent to the amount of money it must have cost him to ‘keep her awake’. ‘No pills tonight, remember?’

  ‘Keep your silly pills,’ she told him. ‘Just find me a cushion, and I’ll fall asleep right now, with my head on this table. How long have we been awake now, anyway?’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Only twelve hours since you woke up on the plane,’ he said blandly.

  ‘It feels like a lifetime.’

  ‘Drink your coffee.’ He grinned.

  ‘And you can stop that, too,’ she snapped. ‘Ordering me around like a puppet.’

  His eyes narrowed, the silver behind them glinting as he studied her thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Do you still work for me?’ he asked curiously.