Merger By Matrimony. Cathy Williams

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