Part-time Marriage. Jessica Steele

who was about the same age as herself and was another ‘gentle’ soul. No need to ask why her mother had wangled an invitation for him. Worse, Elexa saw Aunt Celia’s hand in this. Aunt Celia, one of her mother’s two sisters, was Joanna’s mother. Quite clearly Aunt Celia had been roped in to cajole Joanna into issuing the invitation. Which, in turn, Elexa suddenly realised, must mean that Joanna as well as Aunt Celia had joined in the ‘Let’s get Elexa married’ campaign.

      Feeling at her wits’ end, Elexa knew all too well that to try again to explain that she had not endured any painful experience would be like banging her head against a brick wall. Countless were the times she had tried to get through that she found her work far more interesting than any man she had come across. She had lost count of the times she had explained that she just did not want to be married, and that she had no desire to leave her well-paid career to set up home with some gentle soul like Tommy Fielding who, nice, sweet as he was—as they all were—would want her to play ‘wife’, and would be unbearably hurt to discover that she had a career she preferred to staying home and playing house.

      Suddenly, and as abruptly, Elexa all at once knew she had had enough. She was aware that her mother worried about her, but, feeling backed into a corner with no way out, Elexa just knew she could not take any more of it. She had tried, endlessly tried, explaining to her mother that she was not interested in ‘settling down’, and that her career had priority over everything. What had been the result? Even more pressure, and with back-up forces.

      Well, she wasn’t having it. Elexa pushed distraught fingers through her pale gold-lit blonde hair. But what could she do about it? All she craved was a year free of the relentless pressure—there was chance of promotion in the not-too-distant future. She just wanted time to concentrate all her spare energies on that.

      She sighed and stared unseeing across the room, and then—perhaps born of utter desperation, but entirely un-bidden—she was suddenly recalling again the conversation she had overheard about a month ago. It had been one lunchtime and she had been waiting for her friend Lois Crosby to join her. Lois was always late.

      She and Lois were meeting to have lunch at the Montgomery, and, as busy as Elexa always was, she had been first there. The head waiter had led her to a series of sectioned-off booths, designed so that business people could lunch in the smart restaurant and be able to converse in relative privacy to discuss their business.

      Elexa sometimes entertained clients at the Montgomery and, her name—or possibly her face—recognised, she had been left with a menu and the drink she had ordered to wait for her guest.

      She’d had her back to the adjoining booth, but whatever she had been thinking about—either work, or Lois and, it was not unlikely, family pressures—had gone from her head when she had become aware that the previous lone occupant of the booth behind had company.

      ‘Noah!’ greeted one.

      ‘Marcus,’ answered the other.

      She guessed they had shaken hands, and glanced to the large mirror facing her and saw reflected that a tallish fair-haired man had risen to greet a taller dark-haired man. They were both somewhere in their middle thirties, both immaculately suited, and businessmen. They exchanged a few comments with two distinct voices, one low and well modulated, the other lighter. Then they were sitting down out of her view—but not out of her hearing.

      ‘We don’t seem to have seen anything of you in the two years since you became international chairman.’ That was the lighter voice—Marcus’s voice, she thought.

      ‘I hear you’re doing well at Stanton’s.’ Noah? Noah obviously felt no need to boast about being international chairman, but was interested to hear how his lunch companion was getting on.

      ‘Not without cost,’ Marcus replied.

      Silence—maybe they were studying menus. ‘What cost would that be?’ Noah asked idly.

      ‘Family. I hardly ever see my children,’ Marcus stated.

      Elexa supposed she must have nipped out of their conversation to occupy herself with her own thoughts for a while, because when she had next become aware of their conversation she had been able to gather that they were obviously good friends who hadn’t seen each other in an age and were still catching up, with Marcus accusing Noah of being the same old workaholic.

      ‘Not without cost.’ She heard Noah bounce back the same phrase Marcus had used earlier.

      ‘How so?’

      She guessed at that point that Noah must have given a shrug or something of the sort. There had been a pause anyway for a few moments, before, ‘There’s a price you pay for everything, Marcus,’ he said. ‘With me it’s not having time to have a family.’

      ‘You want a family?’ Marcus sounded incredulous. ‘You want a wife and—’

      ‘I don’t particularly want a wife,’ Noah cut him off. ‘In fact, to be frank, a wife is an appendage I can well do without.’ A pause, then, ‘Though I have been wondering just lately what it is I’m striving for.’

      ‘You can’t get much higher than international chairman.’

      There was a second or two’s silence, and she visualised Noah giving another shrug. Then he was saying, ‘Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy my work, the challenges it brings day to day. But…’

      ‘But something’s lacking?’ Marcus put in.

      There was a short silence, then Noah was saying something about having been taking stock, something about more to life than being successful in business, and admitting, ‘A son. I’ve been thinking for a month or two now that I would quite like to have a son.’

      ‘You, with children?’ Marcus seemed surprised.

      ‘One would be sufficient.’

      ‘I thought you were a confirmed bachelor?’

      ‘I am, but I’d be prepared to give up that status—briefly,’ he qualified.

      This time it was Marcus who paused. ‘You never cease to amaze me, Noah! At university you were always able to think on a different planet from the rest of us.’ Elexa heard a smile in Marcus’s voice. ‘Now you want a part-time wife!’

      ‘I don’t want a wife at all!’ Noah put him straight without delay. ‘But to have a son I’d have to get temporarily tied to some woman.’ Marcus made some kind of ribbing statement, then Noah was proclaiming, ‘Find me a woman who’s willing to marry, produce and then divorce, and I might think about it.’

      ‘You’re serious?’ Marcus wanted to know. ‘You think she exists—this woman who’s going to produce your heir and then cheerfully disappear?’

      ‘I’ve neither space for emotional entanglements nor time to go hunting,’ Noah answered.

      ‘You’re still constantly on the move?’

      Elexa guessed Noah had given some affirmative kind of nod, for he was then going on, ‘According to my work schedule I land round about three years next Palm Sunday.’ There was the sound of male laughter.

      Then Marcus was suggesting, ‘Why not sort a temporary wife out from your own stable?’

      Like some brood mare! Elexa was not amused.

      But apparently the up-to-his-eyes-in-work Noah knew quite a number of willing females. He admitted as much when he answered, ‘You’ve met some of them. Can you honestly see any of them being content to present me with Peverelle junior and then, regardless of any financial settlement we agreed in advance, going quietly?’

      ‘Whooh! Very shaky ground,’ Marcus conceded, but at that point, glancing in the huge mirror in front, Elexa saw that her friend had arrived and was being directed her way.

      Elexa might not have given the overheard conversation another moment’s thought—after all she knew neither of the men. But her friend Lois had—at least she knew one of them.