Marriage on the Rebound
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She remembered the delicious tremor of anticipation she had experienced as she’d stood there looking at herself in the full-length mirror in the shop, seeing herself as Piers would see her—the white for purity, the silk for sensuality, its sheerness offering an enticing glimpse of her woman’s naked body waiting for him beneath. Breasts full and rounded, nipples duskily inviting. The flatness of her stomach and the narrowness of her waist. The seductive cling of the fabric around the swell of her hips and the hollow of her navel. And the velvety dark shadow at the juncture with her thighs which marked the embodiment of her womanhood.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll want me to wear that,’ she concluded, letting out another of those strained little laughs.
His frown blackened. ‘No, I don’t suppose I would,’ he agreed, and abruptly turned his back on her. ‘Ring Jemma,’ he commanded. ‘Get her to pick something suitable out for you to marry me in and bring it with her in the morning. God knows,’ he sighed, ‘neither you nor I dare step outside my blasted gates until this damned thing is over.’
Running a weary hand through his hair, he walked out of the room, leaving her to chew pensively on her bottom lip, because she had suddenly realised that this must be just as big an ordeal for him as it was for her.
Well, almost. He hadn’t lost someone he loved—he was just marrying someone he didn’t.
She rang Jemma as instructed, but reluctantly, because she still wasn’t ready to speak to anyone—Jemma perhaps least of all. Her friend was no fool. She’d been well aware of how blissfully and blindly in love Shaan had been with Piers.
‘What’s going on, Shaan?’ Jemma demanded the moment she knew who it was. ‘For God’s sake, love, what are you trying to do? You can’t replace one brother with the other! It’s a recipe for disaster!’
My life is a disaster, she thought tragically, and closed her eyes against the never far away threat of tears. ‘It’s what I want,’ she stated quietly. ‘It’s what we both want.’
‘But you don’t even like Rafe!’ Jemma cried, sounding angry and bewildered. ‘You even admitted to being a little afraid of him!’
‘I was afraid of the way he made me feel,’ she argued, thinking but it was close to the truth; she had always felt Rafe was a threat to her happiness.
‘Because you were falling in love with him?’
Love—what’s love? she wondered blankly. She was sure she didn’t know any more. ‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘And now you’re going to marry him instead of Piers,’ Jemma concluded.
‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘You should be relieved, not angry,’ she said, then added drily, ‘You always did hold Piers in contempt.’
‘He was devious.’ Jemma defended her opinion. ‘Someone who smiled as much as he did just had to be hiding something. But I never thought for one moment it would be another woman.’
That hurt, and Shaan flinched. ‘Which just goes to show what a lucky escape we all had, then, doesn’t it?’ she mocked rather bitterly, recalling—as no doubt Jemma was recalling—the headline on Mrs Clough’s daily newspaper which had said, DANVERS BROTHERS SWAP BRIDES IN SENSATIONAL LOVE TUSSLE!
What a joke, Shaan thought bitterly. And what a pack of lies for the sake of a catchy headline. Rafe didn’t love her, and Madeleine had never been his bride!
She was now Piers’ bride, though, Shann recalled dully. The article had said so: ‘Piers Danvers married Madeleine Steiner only an hour after he should have been marrying Shaan Saketa’.
Which meant that Piers must have been planning to let her down long before he bothered to tell her he no longer wanted her.
There had been more in the article, but Rafe had happened to walk into the kitchen then, and snatched the newspaper away from her. His black fury at Mrs Clough for bringing it into his house had been enough to turn the other woman white, while Shaan had just sat there shuddering in sick disgust at the depths of Piers’ deceit.
‘Do you think you’ll have time to pick something suitable out for me to wear tomorrow?’ she asked Jemma now, dragging her mind away from the only moment since this had all begun when she had been in real danger of breaking free from this numbing shock she was hiding behind.
Rafe had stopped her; he had bodily lifted her off the kitchen chair and marched her into his study, then dumped her down in front of a PC, switched it on and shoved a handwritten twenty-page document in front of her. ‘You can type, can’t you?’ He’d mocked her look of bewilderment. ‘So—type. I need it by lunchtime.’
‘Yes, of course I will.’ Jemma’s voice seemed to reach her from some totally alien place outside her muddled thought patterns. ‘But I wish you’d take a little time out to think about this before doing it,’ she added worriedly. ‘You could be jumping straight out of the frying pan into the fire—have you thought of that?’
Of course she had. When Rafe gave her the chance to think for herself, that was. And that had definitely not been yesterday, when he’d heaped piles of work on her, she recalled ruefully.
But thinking didn’t help. Nothing helped. She simply did not care what happened to her. So, ‘I love him,’ she claimed, the reality of the words meaning nothing to her any more. ‘He’s what I want. Don’t spoil it for me, Jemma.’
‘All right.’ Jemma’s sigh was long-suffering but her manner softened a little when she added, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Jemma’s choice was a Mondi suit in the severely tailored style that particular design house had made its own in recent years. The skirt was daringly short and needleslim, and the matching jacket moulded Shaan’s slender figure to low on her hips and was fastened with gold military buttons to match the military braiding around the sleeve-cuffs and the collar. There was no blouse. The fitted style of the jacket left no room for a blouse, and the shortness of the skirt seemed to add an alarming length to her slender legs, which were encased in the sheerest white silk.