Читать книгу Remarried In Haste - Sandra Field - Страница 6

PROLOGUE

“IT’s time you go and see your wife, Brant.”

The rounded beach stone Brant had been idly playing with slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. The noise it made seemed disproportionately loud, jarring his nerves. He bent to pick it up and said coolly, “I don’t have a wife.”

Equally coolly, Gabrielle said, “Her name’s Rowan.”

“We’re divorced. As well you know.”

Gabrielle Doucette was leaning back in her seat, her legs slung carelessly over one arm of the chair; her bundled black hair and deep blue eyes were very familiar to him, as was her ability to look totally relaxed in tense situations. “Sometimes,” she said, “a divorce is just a legal document, a piece of paper with printing on it. Nothing to do with the heart.”

“I was legally separated for a year, and I’ve been divorced for fourteen months,” Brant said tightly. “In all that time I’ve neither heard from Rowan nor seen her. Her lawyer sent back my first batch of support checks with a letter that told me, more or less politely, to get lost. The letter with the second batch was considerably less polite. All of which, to my mind, indicates something a little more significant than a mere legal document.”

Gabrielle stared thoughtfully into her glass of wine; they had eaten bouillabaisse, which was her specialty, and had moved from the table to sit by the window of her Toronto condominium, which overlooked the constant traffic of the 401. “On her part, maybe.”

“On mine, too.” Brant tipped back his glass, draining it. “When are you going to produce the delectable dessert I know you’ve got hidden away somewhere in the refrigerator?”

“When I’m ready.” She smiled at him, a smile of genuine affection. “You and I were thrown together for eight months under circumstances that were far from ordinary—”

“That’s the understatement of the year,” he said; the stinking cells, the oppressive heat, the inevitable illnesses to which they’d both succumbed had been quite extraordinarily unpleasant. Not to say life-threatening.

“—Yet you never fell in love with me.”

He opted for a partial truth; he had no intention of telling her certain of the reasons why he hadn’t fallen in love with her, they were entirely too personal. “I knew you weren’t available,” he said. “You still haven’t gotten over Daniel’s death.” Daniel had been her husband of seven years, who’d died in a car accident before Brant had met Gabrielle.

“True enough.”

He looked around the stark and ultramodern room. “Besides, I don’t like your taste in furniture.”

She chuckled. “That, also, is true. But I think there’s another reason. You didn’t fall in love with me because you still love Rowan.”

Brant had seen this coming. Keeping his hands loose on the stem of his glass, he said, “You’re missing out by being a labor negotiator, Gabrielle—you should be writing fiction.”

“And how would you feel if you heard Rowan was about to remarry?”

His whole body went rigid; for a split second he was twenty-six years old again, back in Angola that sultry evening when a live grenade had arched gracefully through the air toward him and his feet had felt like lumps of concrete. He rasped, “Is she? Who told you?”

Gabrielle smiled again, a rather smug smile. “So you do care. I thought you did.”

“Very clever,” Brant said, making no attempt to mask his anger; he and Gabrielle had long ago passed the point of being polite to each other for the sake of outward appearances.

“It’s bound to happen sooner or later,” Gabrielle continued placidly. “Rowan is a beautiful and talented young woman.”

“What she does with her life is nothing to do with me.”

Quite suddenly Gabrielle snapped her glass down on the chrome-edged table beside her. “All right—I’ll stop playing games. I’ve watched you the last two years. You’ve been acting like a man possessed. Like a man who couldn’t care less if he got himself killed. Any ordinary person would have been dead five times over with some of the things you’ve done, the situations you’ve exposed yourself to since you and Rowan split up.” Her voice broke very slightly. “I don’t want to pick up the paper one day and find myself reading your obituary.”

Brant said blankly, for it was a possibility that had never occurred to him before, “You’re not in love with me, are you?”

He looked so horrified that genuine amusement lightened her features. “Of course not. Someday I’m sure I’ll fall in love again, it would be an insult to Daniel’s.memory if I didn’t But it won’t be with you, Brant.”

“You had me worried for a moment.”

“And if you’re trying to change the subject,” Gabrielle went on with considerable determination, “it won’t work. I know you still love Rowan. After all, you and I virtually lived together for the eight months we were held for ransom, I had lots of opportunity to observe you. One of the things that kept you sane through that terrible time was the knowledge you’d be going home to Rowan. Your wife.”

Through gritted teeth Brant said, “Your imagination’s operating overtime.”

Imperturbably Gabrielle went on, “And then we were released unexpectedly. When you got home she was leading a tour in Greenland, and when she got back from there her lawyer made it all too clear that Rowan wanted nothing to do with you because she thought you and I were a number. You wouldn’t let me go and see her to try and explain—oh, no, you were much too proud for that. In fact, you made me swear I wouldn’t get in touch with her at all, stiffnecked idiot that you are. So you lost her. And you’ve never stopped grieving that loss. I know you haven’t. I’d swear it in court on a stack of Bibles as high as this building.”

“Dammit, I’m divorced! And that’s the way I like it.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

He surged to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this—I’m getting out of here.”

“Can’t take the heat? Afraid you might have to admit to emotions? You, Brant Curtis, feeling pain because a woman left you?” She swung her legs to the floor and stood up, too, with a touch of awkwardness that reminded him, sharply and painfully, of Rowan’s sudden, coltlike movements. “I know you have feelings,” Gabrielle announced, “even if I don’t know why you’ve repressed them so drastically they don’t have the slightest chance of escaping... sort of like us in that awful cell. You have them, though—and they’re killing you.”

“You’ve got a great touch with purple prose.”

“So you’re a coward,” she said flatly.

Her words bit deep into a place Brant rarely acknowledged to himself and certainly never would to anyone else. Of course he wasn’t a coward. If anything, he was the exact opposite, a man who continually took risks for the highs they gave him. He headed for the door, throwing the words over his shoulder. “Remind me the next time you invite me for dinner to say no.”

“You need to see Rowan!”

“I don’t know where she is and I’m not going looking for her!”

“I know where she is.” Gabrielle turned and from a wrought-iron shelf picked up a folded brochure, waving it in the air. “In three days she’ll be leading a small group of people through various islands in the West Indies looking for endemic birds. Which, in case you didn’t know, means birds native to the area. I had to look it up.”

In spite of himself, Brant’s eyes had flown to the folded piece of paper and his feet had glued themselves to the parquet floor. Conquering the urge to snatch the brochure from her, he rapped, “So what?”

“There’s a vacancy on that trip. My friend Sonia’s husband—Rick Williams—was to have gone, but he’s come down with a bad respiratory infection. You could take his place.”

His mouth dry, Brant sneered, “Me? Looking for endemic birds on those cute little Caribbean islands? That’s like telling a mercenary soldier he’s going back to kindergarten.”

“You’d be looking for your wife, Brant.” Gabrielle’s smile was ironic. “Looking for your life, Brant. You didn’t know I was a poet, did you?”

“You’ve been watching too many soap operas.”

“Kindly don’t insult me!”

His lashes flickered. Gabrielle almost never lost her temper, unlike Rowan, who lost it frequently.

Rowan. He’d always loved her name. His first gift to her had been a pair of earrings he’d had designed especially for her, little enameled bunches of the deep orange berries of the rowan tree, berries as fiery-colored as her tumbled, shoulder-length hair. Spread on the pillow, her hair had had the glow of fire....

With an exclamation of disgust, because many months ago he’d rigorously trained himself to forget everything that had happened between him and Rowan in their big bed, he held out his hand. Gabrielle passed him the brochure. Brant flattened it; from long years of hiding anything remotely like fear, his hands were as steady as if he were unfolding the daily newspaper. “‘Endemic Birds of the Eastern Caribbean,’” he read. “‘Guided by Rowan Carter.”’

She’d kept her own name even when they’d been married. For business reasons, she’d said. Although afterward, when she’d left him, he’d wondered if it had been for other, more hidden and more complicated reasons.

He cleared his throat. “You’re suggesting I phone the company Rowan works for and propose myself as a substitute for your friend’s husband? Rowan, as I recall, has a fair bit of say about the trips she runs—the last person in the world she’d allow to go on one of them would be me.”

“Don’t tell her. Just turn up.”

His jaw dropped. For the space of a full five seconds he looked at Gabrielle in silence. “Intrigue,” he said, “that’s what you should be writing.”

“Rick can cancel easily enough—he bought insurance and he’ll get his money back. Or you can pay him for the trip and go in his place. All you’d have to do is change the airline tickets to your name.”

“So I’d turn up at the airport in—” he ran his eyes down the page “—Grenada, and say, ‘Oh, by the way, Rowan, Rick couldn’t make it so I thought I’d come instead.’” He gave an unamused bark of laughter. “She’d throw me on the first plane back to Toronto.”

“Then it’ll be up to you to convince her otherwise.”

“You’ve never met her—you have no idea how stubborn she can be.”

“Like calls to like?” Gabrielle asked gently.

“Oh, do shut up,” he snapped. “Of course I’m not going, it’s a crazy idea.” Nevertheless, with a detached part of his brain, Brant noticed he hadn’t put the brochure back on the shelf. Or—more appropriately—thrown it to the floor and trampled on it.

“I made tiramisu for dessert. And I’ll put the coffee on.”

Gabrielle vanished into the kitchen. Like a man who couldn’t help himself, Brant started reading the description of the trip that would be leaving on Wednesday. Seven different islands, two nights on each except for the final island of Antigua, where a one-night stopover was scheduled. Hiking in rain forests and mangrove swamps, opportunities for swimming and snorkeling.

Opportunities for being with Rowan.

For two whole weeks.

He was mad to even consider it. Rowan didn’t want anything to do with him, she’d made that abundantly clear. So why set himself up for another rejection when he was doing just fine as he was?

Because he was doing fine. Gabrielle’s imagination was way out of line with all her talk of love and needs and repressions. He didn’t need Rowan any more than Rowan needed him.

He’d hated it when his checks had been returned by that smooth-tongued bastard of a lawyer. Hated not knowing where she was living. Hated it most of all that she’d never wanted to see him again.

But he’d gotten over that. Gotten over it and gone on with his life, the only kind of life he thrived on.

The last thing he needed was to see Rowan again.

What he needed was a cup of strong black coffee and a bowl of tiramisu laden with marscapone. Brant tossed the brochure onto the dining room table and followed Gabrielle into the kitchen.