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‘Yes,’ she said shortly, requiring all her breath to negotiate the last flight of stairs. They passed one of her neighbours, whose plucked brows almost vanished into her hairline when she saw Seb.
‘Moving on, are we?’
‘A holiday,’ Mari puffed.
‘I don’t think she believed you,’ Seb said in a voice that echoed spookily down the stairwell.
‘Shh, she’ll hear you,’ Mari hissed as she prepared to swap shoulders, resting her bag for a moment on the step long enough to give him ample opportunity to repeat his offer of help. She’d refuse, but it would be nice to have the option. When he didn’t, she gritted her teeth and wished she hadn’t packed the books or the pair of boots.
‘The reporters knocked on every door in the building. I think they offered money for—’
His lip curled. ‘Dirt.’
She turned her head; he was standing two steps behind her.
‘I was surprised,’ he admitted, stepping down one step and pausing just one above her.
Too close...too close... Struggling to pacify the panicky voice in her head, she took a jolting backward step.
‘Really? I thought knocking on doors and buying stories was par for the course?’
‘It is, which is why I was surprised when I didn’t get to read the lurid details, both fictional and true, of your love affairs in the tabloids. Anyone would think you have a blemish-free past.’ The humourless smile that tugged the corners of his mouth upwards faded as his hooded gaze slid covetously over the curves of her athletically slim body. She had an innate sensuality that had to make every man she met think about taking her to bed—he had.
Still was thinking, said the voice in his head.
The difference was he wasn’t going to act on it, despite the sizzle whenever they were in near proximity. This might be a long eighteen months.
It didn’t matter how hard they dug, she didn’t have a past, at least not the sort he was talking about, but Mari was not about to admit her embarrassing lack of lovers to him. She turned her head quickly. Trust issues aside, she had suspected for some time that she simply wasn’t very highly sexed. With Adrian she had been in love with the idea of it, the romance of it, which was why having her illusions shattered had been such a big deal.
She’d trusted him and he’d betrayed her and rejected her. She’d prefer to stay single than risk feeling that way again.
‘Some of us are discreet.’
‘Yeah, I had a grandstand view of your amazing discretion in the cathedral,’ he drawled, replaying the scene in his head and feeling the acrid aftertaste of anger and humiliation all over again.
Mari clamped her lips together. She was pretty sick of having her nose rubbed in it. It wasn’t as if she needed reminding she had set in motion the events that had led her to this place and this moment. ‘Are you going to bring that up often? Just so that I know.’
‘You’re right.’ Anger was a waste of energy and an indulgence; he needed to take a less negative approach. ‘I’m not in the best of moods.’
Astonished by the admission, Mari didn’t say anything.
‘After a long absence, my parents have made the news.’
The story dug up from years back by an enterprising hack told of another bride left standing at the altar. His father had been the groom, his mother the ‘other’ woman, and his father had jilted his new bride just as Seb had done.
The only downside to this story from a journalistic point of view had been that the woman left at the altar had not gone on to lead a tragic life, but instead had been inconveniently happy combining a career as a respected trauma doctor with marriage and four children.
‘Today might be better if you remind yourself that a marriage of convenience is a hell of a lot better than one of inconvenience, and there are a lot of those out there,’ he mused, fighting the impulse to grab the damned bag off her as she staggered awkwardly down a step. All she had to do was ask, but she didn’t, and with a bloody-minded stubbornness she made it to the poky communal hallway where she paused.
He correctly interpreted her hesitation. ‘There were no reporters outside when I arrived.’
Still she hesitated, raising herself up on tiptoe to peer through the dusty pane of glass high up on the door.
‘Are you sure?’ If she was seen leaving complete with luggage and Seb, she could only imagine how they would spin it. Ironically nothing could be as strange, or crazy, as the truth!
With a grunt of irritation he snatched the bag from her and strode out through the door.
Left with little choice Mari followed him, relieved that no one jumped out of the shadows wielding a camera. He walked straight to the car parked by the kerb. It was an enormous four-wheel drive with blacked-out windows.
‘You’re driving?’
‘I like driving, unless you want to?’
She shook her head.
‘So what did your brother think of our arrangement?’ Being a brother himself, his opinion of a man who allowed his sister to fight his battles was not positive.
‘I don’t ask my brother’s approval for my decisions.’
Neatly dodged, he thought, observing her neat, peachy behind as she bent, ignoring the passenger door and getting into the back seat.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me where we’re going?’
She had been about to, but she responded to a perverse impulse and said instead, ‘One register office is much the same as any other.’
She saw his eyes narrow in the rear-view mirror. ‘Life is going to be a lot easier if you lose the victim act,’ he drawled.
Not replying, she turned her head and looked out of the window.
‘The silent treatment works for me. It’s peaceful, but I’ve never known a woman who can keep it buttoned for more than five minutes.’
Mari clamped her lips over a retort and contented herself with slinging him a fulminating look of dislike in the rear-view mirror.
‘Fifteen, I’m impressed,’ Seb admitted as he drew up in front of a red-brick building.
She ignored him and looked up at the building. ‘So this is it, then?’
He glanced over his shoulder. ‘We’re five minutes early. I can drive around the block once more if you like?’ he suggested, fighting the impulse to apologise.
It was convenient, but had he realised that the office was situated on a road where most shop windows were either boarded up or smashed, he would have added a few miles to their journey.
Mari shook her head and took a deep breath. Not waiting for him to come around and open the door, she flung herself out, gasping, ‘No, I’m fine.’
She had actually never been this far from fine in her life!
Seb came to join her. ‘It’s probably better inside.’
It was actually much worse, but Mari barely noticed. It wasn’t the place that made her heart feel like a stone; it was exchanging words that were meant to mean something. She felt a hypocrite saying them—making a mockery of something that she considered sacred left a bad taste in her mouth.
Mari felt like a cheat.
As they walked through the swing doors, Seb pulled Mari out of the way of a boisterous crowd. At the centre of the laughing group was a bride whose white minidress did nothing to disguise her large pregnancy bump and a groom who didn’t look as if he had started shaving yet.
Mari turned her head for one last look as the loud group left the building.
‘They looked so happy.’
Seb didn’t know if it was the wistful look on her face when she said it, or the fact he had fully expected her to make some catty remark about the other woman giving birth before she got to exchange vows, but as they headed towards the ceremony room Seb found himself wishing he had bought her some flowers.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#u44e78751-169f-5476-9236-732847501399)
THE MOMENT MARI got out of the car, even though it was almost midnight, the Spanish summer heat hit her. She focused on the physical impressions and tried not to think beyond them to the lump of apprehension she was carrying around like a stone in her chest for the entire journey.
It was utterly still; the air was heavy and stickily oppressive. For the last mile or so they had driven through what seemed to be a pine forest, and warm air carried the green smell of the trees.
She got out her mobile and texted goodnight to her brother.
‘I imagine he is much as he was the past ten times you texted him.’ While Seb was exploiting the sisterly devotion, her inability to see that she was being used by her brother was really beginning to irritate him. So was her frigid, tight-lipped silence.
She had not said anything the entire journey; not to him anyway—she had been charm itself to the steward on the flight. The boy had been positively salivating. ‘And you’ve proved your point. Some women can keep quiet.’
He had hardly said a word the entire way, so now he broke his moody silence to criticise her!
‘If you’d spoken to me I’d have replied. And texting my brother, that’s called caring,’ she snapped back, choosing not to inform him that the texting exercise had been pretty one-sided.
He turned his head briefly to scan her profile in the darkness. ‘Would he be grateful if he knew what you’ve done for him?’
‘You’re the one who is paying for his treatment. This was my choice.’
‘So why didn’t you tell him?’
‘Mark has got enough on his plate without feeling responsible... What’s that meant to mean?’ she asked in response to his harsh laugh.
‘Is it a happy place, this little fantasy world you inhabit?’
Mari shot a look of simmering dislike at his patrician profile. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand.’
‘Try me.’
Taken unawares by the unexpected offer, Mari found herself answering, ‘I love him. He’s my brother.’ She could have left it there but for some reason she heard herself say, ‘I know he’s not perfect but he’s not had an easy life, rejected by his mother.’
‘Is that the way you feel about it—rejected?’
Too close to the truth. She ignored his interruption.
‘Two foster homes that didn’t work out, and the children’s home—’
‘Weren’t you in those same places?’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand—he was there because of me. He would have been adopted straight away when we were babies if they had allowed us to be split up, but they didn’t.’
‘Why him and not you?’
‘People want pretty babies. Mark had blond curls and dimples—he was adorable. I was not an attractive baby.’ It was a matter-of-fact statement with no self-pity he could detect, and all the more poignant because of it.
‘Aren’t all babies pretty?’
‘Not me. I was allergic to pretty much everything. I had asthma, that wasn’t so bad, but my skin was awful—eczema. It took hours every day putting on and washing off my treatments...and when it flared up...’ She gave a little shudder at the memory. ‘People do not want to push around a scabby baby, and not many want the responsibility of looking after a kid with a chronic skin condition.
‘Mark got left on the shelf with me, and when we did get fostered my red-headed temper—well, you’ve seen that—got us sent back both times. So, you see, without me Mark could have had a very different life.’
‘Is that how you think of yourself—left on the shelf...?’
‘Actually it was a doorstep.’ To abandon your own babies that way you had to be pretty desperate...but maybe if there had only been one...?
She heard him swear and then, anxious that he didn’t think she was playing for the sympathy vote, added quickly, ‘It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though, in our teens. We got fostered by Sukie and Jack, and they are the most inspirational couple you can imagine,’ she enthused, her voice filling with warmth.
‘Are you coming?’
He knew it was irrational of him to be angry with her for not being a person he could despise. It was a lot easier to take advantage of someone when you could say they were asking for it, they deserved it, than someone who literally didn’t ask for anything, and as far as he could see had never been given anything either! Mari had worked hard and...ah, hell, she was an adult. If she wanted to spend her life paying an imagined debt, that was her business, he told himself. The story changed nothing.
Mari began to follow and stopped. He didn’t even bother to turn around and see if she’d responded, just assumed she would.
And why wouldn’t he? She’d been responding like some meek little lamb from the moment she’d allowed herself to be bundled onto the private jet and, yes, there had been a certain amount of novelty value in the unaccustomed luxury, but it had worn off and now... What the hell are you doing, Mari?
Mari Rey-Defoe.
Mrs Rey-Defoe.
She pressed a hand to her lips but the giggle slipped past. She was married. She used both hands this time to muffle the hysteria that was locked in her throat.
From where he was standing, Seb, who had walked halfway across the gravel, heard it. There was irritation written in the lines of his lean face when he turned and saw her still standing near the car. All he could make out was the shadowy outline of her slim figure, then the moon came out from behind the heavy cloud cover.
He swore softly under his breath. Nothing, he thought savagely, was easy with this woman. She had set out to make his life as tough as possible, and when she couldn’t stage something large and dramatic she made do with little niggling details that added up to a massive and frustrating whole.
The logical thing to do would have been to put her out of his life and erect six walls to keep her out, and yet here he was dragging her in and effectively building walls to keep her there for eighteen long months. Eighteen excruciating months without sex, spent with a woman who could make a sneeze erotic.
At what point had this seemed like a logical next step?
It was a means to an end, he reminded himself. This was about saving several thousand jobs and a partnership that in the future could generate a lot more—a means to an end.
Sure it is, the voice in his head mocked, the end being your bed.
The illicit thought came with the accompanying image; he had undressed her in his head over the past few days so often that he felt he knew exactly what she would look like.
He ignored the voice and the desire that twisted inside him, and reminded himself this was a business deal. You let business get personal and it never ended well.
‘Come on.’ The idea of a shower and bed was appealing; the idea of a bed with Mari in it... He saw red hair spread out against the white sheet framing a face that... He clenched his jaw against the thought, but not before his body hardened. ‘It’s this way. Watch your step.’ He jerked his head towards the house.
