Читать книгу Merger By Matrimony - Кэтти Уильямс, Cathy Williams - Страница 7

‘AH, MISS FELT. So we meet again. In the light of day.’

Destiny had spent the previous two and a half hours in Derek Wilson’s office, prey to stomach-cramping nerves at the prospect of seeing Callum Ross again, whilst trying to grapple with the complexities of her inheritance. His entrance had been preceded by only the most perfunctory of knocks, and now there he was, looming in the doorway like a dark predator in search of some easy prey. Her, in other words.

Derek had half-risen from his seat. ‘Mr Ross. Good of you to come.’ He looked at both their faces in consternation. ‘What do you mean by we meet again? Do you two know each other?’

‘Mr Ross saw fit to pay me an unexpected visit last night,’ Destiny said tightly.

‘That, Mr Ross, was quite unorthodox, as you must well know. I have all the relevant papers here and I object to you using intimidation to try and manipulate my client. This matter needs to be discussed in a rational, civilised—’

‘Intimidation?’ The dark eyebrows rose expressively as he said this and he made his way to the chair next to Destiny, settling into it without bothering to wait for an invitation to take a seat. ‘Whatever makes you think that I would resort to intimidation to get what I want, Derek?’

She could feel his presence next to her like a strong, electrical current, hot and lethal, radiating out towards her.

‘I didn’t intimidate you, Miss Felt, did I?’

‘Actually, it would take more than you to intimidate me, Mr Ross.’ She reluctantly glanced sideways to him and met his eyes with as flat an expression as she could muster.

‘Callum. Please. If we’re to do business together, we might as well be on a first-name basis. Destiny…’ The insolence was there again, softly underlining his slow, velvety pronunciation of her name. She’d dealt with all manner of danger in her life. Real danger. Danger from animals on the many occasions when she’d accompanied her father along the dark river in their piragua, to get deep into the heart of the forest to tend to someone. Danger from illnesses with the power to kill. She would not allow him to get under her skin now.

‘It has not yet been established that you will be doing business with my client, Mr Ross. Whilst I appreciate that your plans to take over Felt Pharmaceuticals were dashed by Abe’s untimely—’

‘Perhaps I could have some privacy with…Destiny, Derek?’ He tore his eyes away from the tall, striking blonde incongruously dressed in her multicoloured frock—if it could be called a frock—and briefly focused them on the man ineffectively glaring in his direction.

From the minute he’d heard about the existence of a woman who had landed her unexpected prize catch, the catch that he had worked ruthlessly to secure for himself only to see his efforts reduced to rubble, he’d been looking forward to meeting her. Looking forward to a seam-free, ludicrously easy deal. He’d had no doubts that a woman plucked from the wilds of a Panamanian forest would readily agree to the terms and conditions meticulously drawn up for the sale of the company. He had been curious, but not unduly worried by the temporary hitch in his plans.

Having met her the evening before, he was really still not unduly worried, but his curiosity, he’d discovered, now exceeded his original expectations.

Despite his resolve to talk business in as restrained a manner possible, he found that he was itching to be rid of Derek and his patter. Destiny Felt had unexpectedly stirred something inside his jaded soul and he wanted her to himself. Alone.

‘I don’t think that that’s a very good idea, Mr Ross.’ Valiant words, Destiny thought, but Derek was looking very twitchy. ‘My client needs protecting…’

‘Do you need protecting?’ Once more the blue eyes enveloped her.

‘I think what Derek means is that I’ve only skimmed the surface of the proposal you had in effect with my uncle. He doesn’t want to see me taken advantage of.’

‘I should think not!’ Derek sounded horrified.

‘Oh, nothing could be further from my mind.’ His low laugh was not reassuring. In fact, it just upped the tempo of her already skittering pulses. ‘So now we all understand each other. I’m not about to take advantage of your client, Derek, so you can leave us alone for a while to discuss matters in privacy.’ There was a hard edge to his voice now, although his body was still relaxed and his smile didn’t falter.

‘It’s all right, Derek,’ she said, releasing him from his state of nervous tension before he exploded all over his pristine mahogany desk. ‘I can take care of myself. If I need you, I can always give you a shout.’

‘This is all highly unorthodox,’ he faltered, fumbling with his tie and frowning disgruntledly but standing up anyway.

Callum shot him a soothing look from under his dark lashes. At least Destiny, watching him covertly, suspected that it was meant to be soothing. In reality, it just seemed to make Derek even more jittery. Or maybe that was the intention. She’d never had any opportunity to see first-hand how power, real power, worked. She was learning fast.

Her body was rigid with tension as the door closed behind her buffer and Callum slowly positioned his chair so that he was completely facing her now.

She looked at him steadily. For the second time in as few days, she felt utterly disadvantaged in what she was wearing. It had never really occurred to her that the highly coloured clothes she’d brought over with her would make her stand out like a sore thumb in a country where everyone—certainly everyone in the Wilson legal firm—seemed to be attired in shades of black, brown or navy blue. No wonder the man thought that she was a push-over.

‘What’s Derek told you about me?’ he drawled, linking his fingers together on his lap and stretching out his long legs in front of him, so that they were very nearly touching hers, which she had tucked protectively under her chair.

‘That you were on the verge of consolidating a bid for my uncle’s company. That it all fell apart when he died.’

‘That all?’ He cocked his head to one side, as though listening for something she couldn’t hear.

‘What more is there?’ she asked politely.

‘No character assassination?’

‘I’m not in the habit of repeating other people’s personal opinions,’ she said calmly.

‘No, I can understand that. It would be a disaster in a compound of only a handful of people.’

‘How do you know…?’

‘I made it my business to find out before you came over here. Forearmed is forewarned, as the saying goes.’ Actually, he had done nothing of the sort. His mention of a compound had been an inspired guess and he wasn’t quite sure what he’d been hoping to achieve with his distortion of the truth. He suspected, darkly, that it was a desire to provoke some sort of reaction from her. He was accustomed to people responding to him, focusing on every word he had to say. He could feel niggling irritation now at his staggering lack of success in that department. She looked back at him with those amazing sea-green, utterly unreadable eyes.

‘I hadn’t expected you to have such a good grasp of English,’ he said bluntly, veering away from the topic, watching as she tucked some hair behind her ears.

Destiny hesitated, uncertain at the abrupt ceasefire. ‘My parents certainly always spoke to me in English, wherever we happened to be. They always thought that it was important for me to have a good grasp of my mother tongue. Of course, I speak Spanish fluently as well. And French, although my German’s a bit rusty.’

‘Isn’t that always the case?’ he said drily, and she glanced at him, surprised at his sudden injection of humour. With a jolt of discomfort, she realised that, although he had not chosen to display it, there was humour lurking behind the sensual lines of his mouth and she hurriedly averted her eyes.

‘There are a number of French workers on the compound, but our German colleagues have been more sporadic so I haven’t had the same opportunity to practise what I’ve learnt.’

‘You’ve studied?’

That brought her back to her senses. Just when an unwelcome nudge of confusion was beginning to slip in. Did the man think that she was thick? Just because her lifestyle had been so extraordinary?

‘From the age of two,’ she said coolly. ‘My parents were obsessive about making sure that my education didn’t suffer because of the lifestyle they had chosen. Sorry to disappoint you. Now, getting back to business, I’m not qualified to agree to anything with you. I still have to see the company, meet the directors…’

‘Do you know why Felt Pharmaceuticals has been losing money over the past five years?’ he cut in, and when she shook her head he carried on, with no attempt to spare her the details. ‘Shocking mismanagement. Cavalier and ill-thought-out overinvestment in outside interests with profits that should have been ploughed back into the company, interests that have all taken a beating…’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I made it my business to know.’

‘Just like you made it your business to find out about me before I came over here?’

He didn’t like being reminded of that little white lie and he uncomfortably shifted in his chair. ‘Unless you’ve taken a degree course in business management, you might not be aware that taking over a company requires just a touch of inside knowledge on the company you’re planning to take over.’

‘That’s common sense, not business management know-how,’ Destiny informed him, riled by the impression she got that he was patronising her.

He swept aside her input. ‘For the past five years old Abe, miserable bastard that he was, was bedridden and had more or less been forced to hand over control to his directors—who are good enough men when being told what to do, but on their own wouldn’t be able to get hold of a pint of beer in a brewery.’

‘What was the matter with him?’

‘What was the matter with whom?’ One minute mouthing off at him with cutting efficiency, the next minute looking like a vulnerable child. What the hell was this woman all about? He had known enough women in his lifetime not to be disconcerted by anything they said, did or thought, for that matter, but Destiny Felt was succeeding in throwing him off balance. How could someone be forthright and secretive at the same time? He nearly grunted in frustration. ‘He had a stroke and never really recovered,’ Callum said. ‘Of course, he remained the figurehead for the company but his finger was no longer on the button, so to speak.’

‘At which point you decided to break into the scene, once you’d checked out where the weak spots were,’ she filled in, reading the situation with the same logical clarity of thought that she’d inherited from both her parents.

‘It’s called doing business.’

‘Business without a heart.’

‘The two, I might as well warn you, in case you’re foolhardy enough to stick around, don’t go hand in hand.’ He hadn’t felt so alive in the company of a woman for as long as he could remember. He sincerely hoped that she stuck around, just long enough for him to enjoy the peculiar sparring they were currently establishing that was so invigorating, but not long enough to thwart his plans. His eyes drifted from her face to the swell of her breasts jutting out against the thin dress and he drew his breath in sharply.

Dammit, he was engaged! He shouldn’t be looking at another woman’s breasts, far less registering their fullness, mentally stripping her of her bra. The thought felt almost like a betrayal and he glared at her with unvoiced accusation that she had somehow managed to lead his mind astray.

‘Why did you call him a miserable bastard?’

‘You won’t be able to revive the company, you know,’ he said conversationally, standing up and prowling through the office, casually inspecting the array of legal books carefully arranged in shelves along one wall, then moving behind the desk to the picture window and idly gazing through it. ‘You haven’t the experience or the funds. My offer is wildly generous, as Abe would have been the first to admit.’ He turned around to look at her, perching against the window ledge. ‘Wait much longer and you’ll end up having to sell anyway, for a song, so it’s in your interests to give it up sooner rather than later. And then you can get back to your jungle, where you belong. It’s a different kind of jungle here. One I don’t imagine you’ll have a taste for.’

‘This is more than just business profit for you, isn’t it?’ Destiny said slowly. ‘You speak as if you hated my uncle. Did you? Why? What was he like?’

‘Use your imagination. What sort of man wills his fortune to someone he’s never met?’

‘I was told that it was because I was his only blood relation. I gather he had no children of his own. He and my father weren’t close, but I was his niece.’ It had been a straightforward enough explanation from Derek, but Callum’s words had given her pause for thought. Abraham Felt, after all, had never met her. He and her father had maintained the most rudimentary of contact over the years. Surely in all that time he should have filled his life with people closer and dearer, to whom his huge legacy would have been more fitting?

‘He left it all to you because Abraham Felt was incapable of sustaining friendships.’

‘He had hundreds of wives, for goodness’s sake!’

‘Four, to be exact.’

‘Well, four, then. He must have shared something with them.’

‘Beds and the occasional conversation, I should imagine. Nothing too tricky, though. He was noted for his contempt for the opposite sex.’

‘How do you know that? No, don’t tell me, you made it your business to find out. I’m surprised you have time to do any work, Mr Ross, since you seem to spend most of it ferreting out information on my uncle and his company.’

For a split second, Callum found himself verbally stumped by her sarcasm. Oh, yes. He had to confess that he was enjoying himself. How on earth the depths of a Panamanian forest had managed to satisfy this woman, he had no idea. She was sharp. He wondered what life on this compound of hers really was like. Having spent his entire life in concrete jungles, he wondered whether a close community in the middle of nowhere might not be a hotbed of conversations stretching into the wee hours of the morning. Not to mention sizzling sex. After all, what else was there to do? For years and years on end? Cut off from civilisation and surrounded by hostile nature?

‘Actually, your dear uncle was always very vocal on most things, including his short-lived romances.’

‘He left some shares to Stephanie Felt, your fiancée,’ Destiny pointed out. ‘What about the rest of his step-children?’

‘There were none.’

She could feel unanswered questions flying around in her head like a swarm of bees. There was something more personal to his desire to gain control of her company. What? And was her stepcousin all part of his plan? A useful arrangement because she brought shares with her? Not enough to enable him to gain downright control of the company if he married her, but enough to ensure that he remained active in whatever was happening within it. Active and, through Stephanie, with a voice.

Or was her bond to the company simply a coincidence? Was he in love with her?

She realised that intrigue was something she had so rarely encountered it was a job grappling with it all now.

‘What is Stephanie like?’ she asked guilelessly.

‘You’ll meet her soon enough. This afternoon, in fact. With the rest of the fools.’

What kind of a non-answer was that? she wondered.

The door was pushed open and Derek’s face popped around it. ‘Had enough time, Mr Ross?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he walked in and quietly shut the door behind him.

Not nearly enough, Callum felt like saying, but in fact he was already running late. Stephanie would be at the restaurant in under fifteen minutes. He felt an irrational surge of irritation rise to his throat, but he swallowed it and smiled politely at Derek.

‘We’ll need to continue this conversation after you’ve met your people,’ he addressed Destiny, pushing himself away from the window and almost throwing the little Derek into shadow as he strolled past him towards the door. ‘My offer still stands, but, like I said, don’t leave it too late or you might find that I’m forced to reduce it.’

At which he saluted them both and left, not bothering to shut the door behind him and affording Destiny the sight of Derek’s personal assistant, a woman in her mid-fifties, hurriedly half-rising as Callum swept past her, the expression on her flushed face one of addled confusion.

By the time she arrived at the company, Destiny was feeling addled and confused herself. Over lunch—an intricately arranged fresh tuna salad, the sight of which had nearly made her burst out laughing, so remotely had it resembled anything edible—she had tried to find out a bit more about the much-maligned directors she was to meet. But Derek had not been a source of useful information. His friendship with her uncle stretched back a long way and there was a debt of gratitude to him which ensured his unswerving loyalty. Fighting hard not to be distracted by the comings and goings in the restaurant, she’d discovered that Abraham Felt had helped Derek when he had first struck out, decades previously, on his own. No wonder he was so protective of her and so unofficially antagonistic towards Callum Ross!

Walking into the glass monument to wealth further shredded her nerves.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Derek murmured staunchly at her side, as they got into the elevator and glided up to the third floor. Destiny doubted it.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you were in my shoes,’ she murmured back, thinking that in my sandals would have been a more appropriate description. Three months previously she and her father had made the nine-hour trek to Panama City and had spent two days shopping for essentials, but somehow London was a great deal more daunting than the country she had learnt to love. However, come hell or high water, she would buy some clothes in the morning. Derek had established a bank account for her and she had arrived in England with more money than she had seen in a lifetime at her immediate disposal. Whether she liked it or not, she would have to get rid of her ethnic garb and conform.

‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,’ Derek told her, as the elevator doors slid open. ‘Just get a feel for the people, for the company. You already know what the state of their profit and loss column looks like, so to speak, but you can put it all into real perspective once you’ve met the people in charge.’

Four hours later, Destiny thought that that was easier said than done. All the directors had been there, except the one she was most curious to meet, her stepcousin, and their reactions had run the gamut from suspicion, to relief that she had not summarily announced that she would be selling, to wheedling as they brought out their individual reports and regaled her with why she shouldn’t abandon the ship.

They were all men in their late fifties, on the verge of retirement, and she’d inappropriately recalled Callum’s scathing description of them as a pack of old fools when Tim Headley had patted her hand and attempted to excuse four years of misguided management under the heading of ‘going through a bad patch.’

‘I shall go home and read all this,’ she had said wearily, as three o’clock had rolled into four, then five, then six. It had been a further hour and a half before she had finally managed to leave and had been told by a beaming Derek that she had done really well. Buoyed them up. Given them that little injection of hope they needed.

Her head was throbbing when she at last made it back to her house, for which she felt an inordinate rush of fondness as it contained the two things she wanted most. A well-stocked fridge and a bed.

She’d not managed to attack the first when her telephone rang and she heard a breathless, girlish voice down the end of the line.

‘Who is this?’ she demanded, cradling the telephone between shoulder and head as she fumbled to undo the front fastening buttons of her dress.

‘Stephanie. I should have been at the meeting this afternoon, but…somehow my appointments overran…’

Destiny stopped what she was doing and held the telephone properly.

‘Anyway, I thought that perhaps we could meet for supper this evening? You could come to my apartment—actually, I only live about ten minutes’ drive away from you…?’

‘Well…’ The thought of slotting in one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle that had become her life was too enticing to resist. ‘If you tell me where you are…can I walk to you? No?… How do I get a taxi?… Yes, right… Well, give me about forty-five minutes and I’ll be there… Right, yes, that’s fine… Yes, I do know what Chinese food consists of… Okay, fine, bye.’

As she inspected her wardrobe, selecting the least colourful of her dresses, she wondered what her stepcousin would be like. Her gut feeling warned her that a disaster lay ahead. Callum Ross was made of steel and any fiancée of his would more than likely be made of similar stuff. She was fast developing a healthy streak of cynicism in this bewildering world where scheming seemed to be part of an acceptable game and exploitation was part and parcel of the same game. The healthy streak of cynicism was now telling her that Stephanie Felt had probably been primed by her lover to use every trick in the book to get what she wanted. Her healthy streak of cynicism was going one step further and warning her that the other woman had probably avoided the meeting on purpose, simply so that their first meeting could be on her own territory. Alone. Destiny stared back dejectedly at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and discovered that, despite her lifelong predilection for all things logical and scientific, her imagination was scrabbling frantically now to make up for lost time.

She left the townhouse nervous, but grimly resolved to face down yet one more enemy. The taxi carried her out of Knightsbridge and into the heart of Chelsea, and then stopped in front of a Victorian house, one in a row of many, all of which were as impeccably maintained as the one she had just left.

She sighed involuntarily as she rang the doorbell. Her nervous system couldn’t take much more. She longed with a physical ache for the simplicity of her compound, with its heat and wild beauty and unthreatening routines.

From Callum Ross to Stephanie Felt in the space of a few short hours. She wondered what else could hit her. There must be some evil, as yet undisclosed relation somewhere in the background, clutching a potion, a broomstick and a book of spells.

The woman who answered the door almost made her gasp in surprise.

‘Hiya.’ More of a girl than a woman, just out of her teens from the look of it, with wavy brown hair and huge blue eyes. Even in her heels, she was still small. Small and slender, her heartshaped face smoothly unlined by time.

‘Have I come to the right house?’ Destiny blustered, trying to peer at the plaque on the door to see whether she had made a mistake with the numbers. ‘I’m looking for Stephanie Felt.’

‘That’s me.’ When she smiled, her face dimpled and she stood back to let Destiny walk past. ‘I’ve been dying to meet you, you know. A stepcousin! I never even knew you existed until Callum told me! Can you believe it? Abraham never mentioned his family, not even to Mum!’ Her voice was light and excited as she led the way to the sitting room. ‘You’ll have to tell me all about where you lived. I’ve never been to your part of the world—never. Can you believe it? Callum says it’s really primitive where you come from. Gosh!’ She turned around and looked at Destiny with glowing curiosity and awe. ‘This must all seem very strange to you! I love your dress, by the way. Neat. All those swirly colours. Is that what the people over there wear? Is it, like, their native costume, so to speak?’

‘No, not really.’ Destiny smiled. For the first time since she had set foot on English shores, she felt unthreatened and relaxed. ‘Most of the women in the Indian tribes I come into contact with walk around bare-breasted…’

‘Which would never do,’ came a familiar drawling voice, ‘so I should practise that mode of dress only in the privacy of your own house.’

Sure enough, Callum was sprawled in a chair strategically positioned so that Destiny was afforded a full-frontal of the man at leisure. It was the first time she had seen him without the formality of a suit and she was taken aback to realise that he looked younger. Younger yet no less off-putting. His cream trousers made his legs seem longer and the short-sleeved shirt with the top two buttons undone revealed masculine forearms and a sneak preview of dark hair shadowing his chest.

Her mouth felt disconcertingly dry and she almost shrieked her, ‘Yes, please!’ when Stephanie offered her something to drink. ‘Beer, please.’

‘Beer?’ they both echoed in unison, with varying degrees of surprise on their faces.

‘Perhaps not.’ She faltered and looked to her stepcousin for support.

‘Perhaps some wine?’ Stephanie suggested, grinning. ‘It’s nice and cold.’

‘Yes, thank you, that sounds fine.’ She breathed a sigh of relief and sat down in the chair facing Callum, more because of its relative proximity than for any other reason, although the badly chosen seating arrangement now guaranteed an uninterrupted vision of him.

‘You were talking about your national costume—or, rather, the lack of it,’ he said, crossing his extended legs at the ankles and linking his fingers together on his lap.

‘What are you doing here?’ Destiny surprised herself by asking. This man, like it or not, made her say things and behave in ways that were alien to her. And her skin felt hot and itchy under the intensity of his blue eyes. Was that possible? Could someone make someone else feel hot and itchy just by looking at them? It had certainly never happened to her before.

His eyebrows shot up in exaggerated astonishment at her question. ‘Stephanie’s my fiancée. Naturally I wanted to be by her side when she met her stepcousin for the first time. She’s a very gentle soul.’ He lowered his eyes when he said this but there was a tell-tale smile tugging the corners of his mouth. ‘I didn’t want you to terrify her.’

‘Me? Terrify her?’ Her protesting voice was more of a furious splutter.

‘With your aggression.’

‘My aggression? How can you talk about my aggression?’

She reduced the volume of her voice at the sound of approaching footsteps, but the rankled feeling managed to stay with her for the remainder of the evening. Even more infuriating was the fact that her fulminating looks did very little more than provide him with a source of barely contained amusement.

Only Stephanie’s cheerful banter, as she dragged out details of Panama from her guest, besieging her with interested questions, squealing with delight when Destiny talked about the children she taught and gasping with little cries of horror at her stories of the jungle and what it contained, saved the evening. Destiny wondered if her stepcousin knew that she would be marrying someone who made the most ferocious jungle animal pale in comparison.

They had spoken not one word of business by the time eleven-thirty rolled around and she stood to leave, feeling woozy from the wine, to which she was in no way accustomed, and exhausted by her jet lag.

‘So, what did you make of the buffoons at the company?’ Callum asked, standing up as well and shoving his hands into his pockets. ‘I suppose they pulled out all the stops? Made you pore over cobwebbed reports of how great and good the firm used to be years ago? Played down what a shambles it’s in now?’ Despite consuming what had seemed, to Destiny, prodigious amounts of wine during the evening, the man still looked bright-eyed, alert and rearing to attack.

She threw him a wilted looked and stifled a yawn.

‘Mmm. That interesting, was it?’ A wicked glint of humour shone in his eyes.

‘I wasn’t trying to make a comment on what the meeting was like,’ Destiny said with lukewarm protest in her voice. ‘I’m tired.’

‘Leave her alone, Callum,’ Stephanie said sympathetically.

‘Business has to be discussed, Steph.’

‘Why now? It’s so boring.’

‘Boring for you perhaps, but you want to remember that your finances are tied up with what happens next in this little exciting scenario. I buy the company, play with it a bit until it’s running along smoothly, and your shares go up. Our Panamanian heiress keeps the company and—’

‘Do you mind not talking as if I wasn’t here?’

‘Have you ever been to London before, Destiny?’ Stephanie linked her arm through her stepcousin’s and ushered her to the front door, pointedly turning her back on her fiancée.

‘No. It’s all new and—’ she glanced over her shoulder and her eyes clashed with Callum’s ‘—a little scary.’

‘It would be. You’re just so brave to come all this way, on your own. I’d never dream of doing it!’

‘No.’ Callum’s voice behind them was silky. ‘It takes a certain type of woman to do that. Some might call it brave, darling; others might just call it—well, let’s just say that it’s a very masculine response.’

At which Stephanie flew around to face him with her hands on her hips and a simmering look in her baby-blue eyes. ‘Don’t be horrible!’

‘Me?’ He raised both his hands in innocent denial, but the blue eyes that locked with Destiny’s were unrepentant. ‘Horrible? It was meant to be a compliment! A glorious example of how far the women’s movement has got!’

‘What women’s movement?’ Destiny asked, her body language echoing Stephanie’s. ‘I’ve never been a part of any movement in my life before!’

‘No?’ He tried to stifle a grin and failed miserably. ‘Well, let’s just say that feminism has missed out there.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning that I’ll give you a lift back to your place.’ He bent over to give Stephanie a gentlemanly peck on the cheek and a pat on the back. ‘That all right with you, darling?’

‘Don’t badger her, Callum.’

‘I wish people wouldn’t constantly stereotype me.’ He pulled open the front door and gave Destiny an exaggeratedly wide berth to exit ahead of him into a clear night that was considerably more bracing than it had been earlier on in the evening.

‘What about tomorrow?’ Stephanie asked him, standing in the doorway to see them off, an angelic, diminutive shape that made Destiny feel like an Amazonian hulk in comparison. ‘The Holts have invited us to supper. Did you remember? Daisy and Clarence are going to be there as well. Oh, and Rupert.’

Callum paused and frowned, appearing to give the matter weighty thought, then he said with a shrug,

‘Meeting. Sorry, darling. You go, though. Don’t stay in because of me.’

‘You’re always at meetings,’ Stephanie said in a childish, sulky voice. ‘He’s always at meetings,’ she addressed Destiny in an appeal to sisterhood, which Destiny took up with sadistic relish.

‘If he loved you, he’d cancel, I’m sure.’

‘If you loved me, you’d cancel.’

There was a brief silence. ‘I’ll do my best.’ He sighed and Stephanie’s face radiated at this unexpected victory.

‘Oh, goody!’ She blew them both a delighted kiss and shut the front door on them.