Remarried In Haste. Sandra Field
“You’re just another client to me.” About the Author Title Page PROLOGUE CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN EPILOGUE Copyright
“You’re just another client to me.”
“I haven’t said I want to be anything else,” Brant remarked.
“Good,” she said viciously. “You’re in room 9—here’s your key.”
She was holding it in her fingertips. To test his immunity to her, Brant deliberately closed his hand over hers, and as soon as he’d done so, knew he’d made a very bad mistake. Her skin was warm and smooth, with that supple strength he’d forgotten.
He snatched the key from her. Rowan hurried past him and unlocked the door to room 10, entered the room and shut the door with rather more force than was necessary.
Brant stood very still under the moon. He wanted Rowan—in his bed, in his arms, where she belonged—and to hell with the divorce. How was he going to get a minute’s sleep, knowing she was on the other side of the wall from him?
Although born in England, SANDRA FIELD has lived most of her life in Canada; she says the silence and emptiness of the north speaks to her particularly. While she enjoys traveling, and passing on her sense of a new place, she often chooses to write about the city that is now her home. Sandra says, “I write out of my experience. I have learned that love with its joys and its pains is all-important. I hope this knowledge enriches my writing, and touches a chord in you, the reader.”
Remarried in Haste
Sandra Field
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